Men Are Working More Traditionally "Female" Jobs
By Jillian Kramer. Photos: Stocksy.
Women are slowly but surely moving into male-dominated fields such as medicine, law, and business. But at the same time, men are moving into traditionally "female" jobs—think: working as store clerks or in customer service, a new study has found.
As the New York Times reports, researchers at Rutgers University examined 15 years of census data and tracked 448 occupations. They classified occupations as male- or female-dominated if they employed more than 60 percent of one sex in 2000. Then, the researchers looked at those same fields in 2014 and considered them masculinized or feminized if their gender composition changed by at least four percent.
The researchers found that 27 percent of the occupations had masculinized or feminized over the years, the newspaper reports. In good news, the jobs that have become feminized—in other words, that have at least four percent more females in 2014 than in 2000—are mostly professional or managerial jobs. "Some examples of high-paying, high-status jobs done mostly by men in 2000 that had an increased share of women by 2014: supervisors of scientists, which had 19 percent more women, podiatrists with eight percent more and chief executives with five percent more," the newspaper writes.
On the flip side, jobs that are becoming masculinized are lower-status jobs. "The share of women who work in stores selling products and answering customer questions fell 10 percent; the share for crossing guards and counter clerks each fell seven percent, and for textile workers it fell five percent," according to the New York Times. Men are less likely to move into higher-status, traditionally female jobs—think: nursing and teaching—now than they were in 2000.
The men working lower-status, traditionally female jobs are "already disadvantaged in the labor market: black, Hispanic, less educated, poor, and immigrant," the newspaper says. As the availability of middle-skill fields such as clerical and manufacturing work fizzled out in recent years, more men moved into low-skill, low-paying jobs. Women, on the other hand, moved into more high-skill work.
The study has yet to be published, but more details on the findings can be read here.
This story originally appeared on Glamour.
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