Yeah, it’s hard for me to understand, too. DH and I were standing in an unemployment line as professional engineers when I was 28 and he was 34. It took us months to find any work at all. I never had a job with benefits after that. It’s hard for me to bite my tongue when my kids tell me how rough it is these days.
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When my wife and I came out of college we both had jobs with Big 6 accounting firms 1994. It was big 6 back then. Our starting salaries were $30,000. Put that in an inflation calculator and that comes back to $63.8K. Which is not that far off the starting salary for a Big 4 accountant starts with now. We both lived with her parents for 1 year saving up for our wedding and to purchase a 1320 sq ft duplex with one car garage. That cost us $104,000 with no A/C or deck/patio. That same place is on zillow for $245K. $104K in 1995 goes to $215K now. So really not that far off.
Combined when we graduated we had $63K in student loans. Needless to say we lived like we were poor for about 4-5 years. Paying off the debt in 6-7 years. Our honeymoon was a driving one. Didn’t take a big vacation until 2000. Delayed cable for 8 months. Only had a 19 inch TV for the first 2 years of marriage. We could do a dinner or a movie never both.
Oh and I was downsized out my job after 11 months and had to find a new one quick. They overhired and lost some clients at the same time.
I will say we did anything and everything so we wouldn’t have to live at home.
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Interesting piece on men devaluing and rejecting women-dominated professions, with college now falling into the same category. This runs directly counter to many of the solutions suggested earlier in this thread:
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That piece was very interesting reading, @Twoin18. Reading about male flight was really very mind-opening and raises a few questions for me:
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If male flight, similar to white flight, occurs when too many of the “wrong” people move in (to the neighborhood or the field/school), what can be done? Although there are people who give lip service to diverse neighborhoods, the U.S. still remains astonishingly segregated in its residential spaces, particularly once people have school-age children. Considering the lack of movement on the white flight issue, it’s a bit of a downer if the author is correct about male flight.
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If needing to be in an environment that is preferably 50/50 or more male and definitely no less than 40%, why are there so few men’s colleges remaining? Apart from Catholic seminaries and some rabbinical schools, these are the only all-male schools I’m seeing (undergrad enrollment taken from College Navigator):
- Hampden-Sydney (VA): 876 undergrads
- Morehouse (GA): 2,738 undergrads
- Saint John’s (MN): 1,481 undergrads
- Wabash (IN): 845 undergrads
- I can’t recall for sure, but is the males struggling phenomenon global or just an American thing? I will say that I am very glad that my son had numerous male teachers in elementary school while attending an immersion school. The male teachers were from Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa, and I’m hopeful that it will help maintain a reduced disdain for education and the field of teaching.
I guess we women are just ruining everything, eh? If it is actually true that men would avoid something simply because women outnumber men, that’s a very sad commentary on men. I don’t know that I believe it. I do, however believe that careers that have more women than men in them are devalued & have lower pay than those dominated by men. This seems to be a separate issue, though, IMO.
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I posted in a past thread about strange target college/university requirements for our kids that my son only wanted to go to schools with more women than men. LOL!
I don’t buy that men are avoiding institutions that have more women.
College is expensive, and there are relatively lucrative alternatives for men. Why don’t more women skip college for the trades? Additionally, many of the more female specific jobs listed in the piece don’t pay that well. I don’t believe they are “devalued” because they skew female, they simply just pay less. If teachers suddenly skewed more male the salaries wouldn’t rise.
@kelsmom, “female” careers were definitely happened. There were the traditional female professions (nursing, teaching, librarians, etc.). But, as women enter new fields in volume, I sense that the new fields are also being devalued. As more women go into primary care or become veterinarians, the more things become devalued.
I suspect that the issues of devaluation and the labeling of a path as feminine are related more than separate. One of my mentors wrote a brilliant paper on tipping points in a book called Micromotives and Macrobehaviors. He was thinking about segregation in housing but also applied it in other ways. What you can see is that even a tiny preference to be with your group leads to mostly segregated groups. So, if men have only a modest preference to be in a career with other men (e.g., I want to do things where 50.1% of the others are also men), it can lead to exactly the male flight that the author was describing. Once a field hits a certain level, it is then labeled as “feminine.” Heterosexual males learn early on that the worse thing one can be is feminine. One of the people quoted said the experience of colleges is that when a school hits 60/40 female, young males abandon the school.
Why are there no or almost no all-male schools, @AustenNut? I think largely the all male schools were “integrated,” sometimes over the vociferous objection of alumni. This was intended to ensure that women were not excluded from opportunities because they were women. I was in the second class at my school that admitted women (330 women and 880 men). I can tell you that my male classmates wished there were more women and not none. Now the school is virtually exactly 50/50 every year.
I was at a conference over New Year’s that focuses a fair bit of attention on the current and future state of the world and thus many of the sessions were about AI. One speaker said something that ShawSon told us when he was in tech grad school. AI will automate most white collar work bit by bit. So, you have three choices: 1) be the one who does the automation; 2) be automated away; or 3) become an artisan as there will be a premium on hand-made goods. What was left out of his trichotomy was non-artisanal work done by hand: the trades and nursing. We will still need people to do/fix plumbing and wiring and HVAC. We will still need people to put on / remove bandages. If males were to choose the trades (and nursing), this would probably better for their incomes over time than easily automated white collar jobs.
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Our son preferred all-female dorms, but alas.
As @kelmon stated, they pay less because they skew female, not vice versa:
The article addressed this. Historically, teaching was a male profession and when it was male-dominated, it paid more (to men). When the gender balance tipped toward women, pay/prestige decreased. We won’t have an opportunity to see if teacher salaries would rise due to re-balancing because that’s the problem – men are not attracted to professions dominated by women.
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I was in the first class of girls at my boarding school, 12 girls, 92 boys in my year. Honestly it was great but quite an experience. Our alumni were very unhappy as were many of the faculty and some of the older boys. The school made the mistake of allowing the seniors to remain boys only and that resulted in a weird dynamic. In our case the school went coed because of money, I think that’s often the case. Boys didn’t want to attend schools with just other boys anymore.
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The U.K. has retained a large number of single sex selective public and private high schools (although many are now mixed for the last two years age 16-18). I went to a single sex school as have all of my nephews and nieces. It’s generally seen as a good thing and in many cases the boys schools are more prestigious and (even now) harder to get into than the girls schools. It means that there’s no stigma in whatever academic classes you choose, and teachers don’t need to worry about issues like boys dominating the discussion and girls being excluded.
I think one cause of the integration is precisely because of this difference in prestige (which led to a push to allow girls to gain the same advantages) combined with a lack of interest amongst boys in attending traditionally female institutions. So at my university (which has ~30 individual colleges), all the men’s colleges were integrated, while the women’s colleges (which are poorer, newer, and less prestigious) have remained single sex. But in high school, because there’s a change at 16 (you do public GCSE exams then and spend two more years doing A-levels before university), it was an easy compromise to allow integration just for those last two years.
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In this day and age, becoming a teacher involves college. Again, men(and women) can make more money in trades that require a high school diploma and no debt. Men(and women) can also go into the military, or become law enforcement officers with a high school diploma.
Why aren’t women participating in the trades, the military, or law enforcement at a rate that would even the ratio out?
To @shawbridge’s point, AI isn’t likely to replace the trades, military or law enforcement.
Please check out man v bear thread.
Those aren’t fields that are particularly welcoming to women, and have had more than their fair share of harrowing stories regarding women who are interested in those fields.
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Thank you for that information.
Not sure how the above screenshot gives any indication about the man v bear thread explaining why many women might not want to enter male dominated fields, or the well documented issues women have faced in those prodominately male fields.
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The bear thread has nothing to do with struggling males. The screen shot is an example of misandry on CC, in my opinion, of course.
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You asked about why women don’t go into traditionally male fields. I was answering what perhaps was just a rhetorical question on your part?
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There are no bears in the trades, military or law enforcement either.
Thank you for that information.
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Please move the conversation about trades, military, etc here: Should more young women consider the trades, the military, law enforcement, or firefighting?
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