And not just for nursing. There are also shortages of teachers , another job for which few men apply; at the University of Iceland, 91 percent of teaching students are women. Experts say small steps like this may be a way to overcome the stubborn stereotypes that channel men into some roles and women into others. Another possible solution is the division by sex of some Icelandic preschools during part of the day in what is called the Hjalli model , to teach girls to be more assertive and boys to be more sensitive.
In fact, attitudes toward work have started changing — but more among women than men. At the University of Iceland, more women have begun to enter male-dominated disciplines such as electrical engineering.
Related: College students are increasingly forgoing summers off to save money, stay on track. This is a very slow process. To discourage dropouts, the length of high school was shortened from four years to three, though the effect of this has been mixed. Many students and some observers say that schools have simply crammed the same amount of teaching into less time, alienating already disaffected students.
They crunch all the studies into these three years. Guys have more energy at that age. Related: Already stretched grad students rebel against rising and often surreptitious fees. And fewer of them have ended up here, at this university that is mostly women. The student council president is a woman. So are the chairs of all nine of its committees. Some will simply be messaging.
This story about more women than men in college was produced by The Hechinger Report , a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers.
But that doesn't mean it's free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. A couple look like they might have spent a night or two on the streets, but the rest look like they work, or used to.
Now they have put down their sodas, and El-Scari has their attention, so he gets a little more philosophical.
Judging by the men I spoke with afterward, El-Scari seemed to have pegged his audience perfectly. And then he fell behind on his child-support payments.
The men in that room, almost without exception, were casualties of the end of the manufacturing era. Most of them had continued to work with their hands even as demand for manual labor was declining.
Since , manufacturing has lost almost 6 million jobs, more than a third of its total workforce, and has taken in few young workers. The housing bubble masked this new reality for a while, creating work in construction and related industries. Many of the men I spoke with had worked as electricians or builders; one had been a successful real-estate agent. Now those jobs are gone too. Henderson spent his days shuttling between unemployment offices and job interviews, wondering what his daughter might be doing at any given moment.
In , roughly one in 20 men of prime working age, like Henderson, was not working; today that ratio is about one in five, the highest ever recorded. Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation. But the steady accumulation of these jobs adds up to an economy that, for the working class, has become more amenable to women than to men.
The list of growing jobs is heavy on nurturing professions, in which women, ironically, seem to benefit from old stereotypes and habits. Theoretically, there is no reason men should not be qualified. But they have proved remarkably unable to adapt. Over the course of the past century, feminism has pushed women to do things once considered against their nature—first enter the workforce as singles, then continue to work while married, then work even with small children at home.
Many professions that started out as the province of men are now filled mostly with women—secretary and teacher come to mind. Nursing schools have tried hard to recruit men in the past few years, with minimal success.
Teaching schools, eager to recruit male role models, are having a similarly hard time. The range of acceptable masculine roles has changed comparatively little, and has perhaps even narrowed as men have shied away from some careers women have entered.
The economic and cultural power shift from men to women would be hugely significant even if it never extended beyond working-class America. But women are also starting to dominate middle management, and a surprising number of professional careers as well. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs.
A white-collar economy values raw intellectual horsepower, which men and women have in equal amounts. It also requires communication skills and social intelligence, areas in which women, according to many studies, have a slight edge.
Perhaps most important—for better or worse—it increasingly requires formal education credentials, which women are more prone to acquire, particularly early in adulthood. Just about the only professions in which women still make up a relatively small minority of newly minted workers are engineering and those calling on a hard-science background, and even in those areas, women have made strong gains since the s.
Office work has been steadily adapting to women—and in turn being reshaped by them—for 30 years or more. Joel Garreau picks up on this phenomenon in his book, Edge City , which explores the rise of suburbs that are home to giant swaths of office space along with the usual houses and malls.
When brawn was off the list of job requirements, women often measured up better than men. They were smart, dutiful, and, as long as employers could make the jobs more convenient for them, more reliable. The movie Office Space was maybe the first to capture how alien and dispiriting the office park can be for men. Disgusted by their jobs and their boss, Peter and his two friends embezzle money and start sleeping through their alarm clocks.
Near the top of the jobs pyramid, of course, the upward march of women stalls. Prominent female CEOs, past and present, are so rare that they count as minor celebrities, and most of us can tick off their names just from occasionally reading the business pages: Meg Whitman at eBay, Carly Fiorina at Hewlett-Packard, Anne Mulcahy and Ursula Burns at Xerox, Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo; the accomplishment is considered so extraordinary that Whitman and Fiorina are using it as the basis for political campaigns.
Only 3 percent of Fortune CEOs are women, and the number has never risen much above that. Even around the delicate question of working mothers, the terms of the conversation are shifting. Last year, in a story about breast-feeding, I complained about how the early years of child rearing keep women out of power positions. But the term mommy track is slowly morphing into the gender-neutral flex time , reflecting changes in the workforce. For recent college graduates of both sexes, flexible arrangements are at the top of the list of workplace demands, according to a study published last year in the Harvard Business Review.
And companies eager to attract and retain talented workers and managers are responding. What are these talents? Once it was thought that leaders should be aggressive and competitive, and that men are naturally more of both. But psychological research has complicated this picture. In lab studies that simulate negotiations, men and women are just about equally assertive and competitive, with slight variations. Men tend to assert themselves in a controlling manner, while women tend to take into account the rights of others, but both styles are equally effective, write the psychologists Alice Eagly and Linda Carli, in their book, Through the Labyrinth.
Over the years, researchers have sometimes exaggerated these differences and described the particular talents of women in crude gender stereotypes: women as more empathetic, as better consensus-seekers and better lateral thinkers; women as bringing a superior moral sensibility to bear on a cutthroat business world. But after the latest financial crisis, these ideas have more resonance. Researchers have started looking into the relationship between testosterone and excessive risk, and wondering if groups of men, in some basic hormonal way, spur each other to make reckless decisions.
The picture emerging is a mirror image of the traditional gender map: men and markets on the side of the irrational and overemotional, and women on the side of the cool and levelheaded. But the perception of the ideal business leader is starting to shift.
The old model of command and control, with one leader holding all the decision-making power, is considered hidebound. The aim is to behave like a good coach, and channel your charisma to motivate others to be hardworking and creative.
The model is not explicitly defined as feminist, but it echoes literature about male-female differences. A program at Columbia Business School, for example, teaches sensitive leadership and social intelligence, including better reading of facial expressions and body language.
A study attempted to quantify the effect of this more-feminine management style. It could be that women boost corporate performance, or it could be that better-performing firms have the luxury of recruiting and keeping high-potential women. But the association is clear: innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women.
If you really want to see where the world is headed, of course, looking at the current workforce can get you only so far. More than ever, college is the gateway to economic success, a necessary precondition for moving into the upper-middle class—and increasingly even the middle class. And demographically, we can see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.
Why is it women fail to capitalise on their higher-level educational attainment relative to men? The reasons are complex but solvable. One includes self-selecting segregation half of all female commencements each year are in feminised, lower-paid sectors such as teaching nursing, childcare and humanities while men outnumber women in two fields only — engineering and IT. And this is too late for most to accrue independent wealth to see them through their retirement years should their marriage go bust.
What that also means is there is a significant percentage of older women who are part-time, unemployed, or underemployed. Whether this an intentional form of policy bias to improve higher education participation among men is unlikely.
However, it brings us back to the question of whether men should be considered an equity group. The answer for the time being at least is a robust no. Firstly, men are not being squeezed out of university places just because there are more women — they are making choices based on the opportunities available to them. For instance, women now make up And with a tight labor market that includes more employers being hungry for talent, Pollak says many industries are widening their net and creating flexible opportunities that allow women who left the workforce for motherhood to re-enter.
So in addition to seeing more women entering the workforce, Pollak says that the latest jobs report could also point to more men being willing to stay at home. Though the tight labor market is showing signs of continued opportunity for women, Pollak points out that not everyone is being positively impacted by the economy.
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