Danny's Weblog

Feminized jobs and their effects on men

I like the word "feminized" but since I started thinking about this article I have realized that most people use "feminized jobs" in a rather different sense than I had understood it.

Most people think that classically high-female-ratio jobs like nursing or teaching are "feminized". But that "ize" ending suggests to me a more active form of planning than the historical evolution of those roles.

For more than thirty years business has been under tremendous pressure to "improve" its gender ratios and the gender gap in pay. But how could they actually do that? The feminists who pushed for this program seem to have assumed, or at least given the impression, that business managements only needed to remove unfairness and the gender issues would magically disappear. But actually there are many qualifications for jobs: not just in education and experience, but also in social and psychological parameters.

As a result managements actually had to *change the jobs*. Feminists whiffled about tangential aspects of this, like maternity leave, but they chose not to talk about the effects on the *men* of job changes.

You see, managements have stopped rewarding men for the things they used to be good at. Men used to grow up knowing that they would need to support a family, so they would study hard, and undergo a lengthy appreniceship, all of which, combined with experience, would make them valuable and even irreplaceable to management.

But for decades now management has need to create the kind of jobs that women like: interchangeable, with heavy social interaction, requiring only superficial study, like web page design.

And these jobs have slowly eliminated real jobs, so that slowly men have been discouraged from investing their time and energy in training and skills. And now their earning potential has fallen to that of women – rather than women's rising to meet men's. Women must have some dim feeling that the good men, the good "catches" have been disappearing: the ones who could support them and their children. Instead, the women find themselves too busy and tired with meetings and planning conferences to be able to take advantage of the (still inadequate) maternity leave. And anyway, their genes tell them it's dumb to bear the child of a man who can hardly earn as much as they do, and whose job is a woman's job.

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