For the first time in years, women outnumber men in U.S. employment, but this isn’t a victory lap, it’s a structural warning sign. The fastest-growing sector is healthcare, where women hold the vast majority of jobs, while construction and manufacturing have gone flat or negative, and male employment actually dropped by 142,000 jobs over the past year.
Men are partly to blame for their own displacement: despite well-paying, in-demand roles like speech-language pathology, a six-figure career that is 95% female, men have been deeply reluctant to enter fields perceived as “women’s work.” Economist Richard Reeves calls these HEAL professions (health, education, and literacy-focused jobs), and argues that getting more men into them would address labor shortages, improve gender representation in vital fields, and, most importantly, rescue men from a job market they’re increasingly locked out of.
I agree it is a misdetermination. It takes technical skills to do what the male dominated industries need.
Part of this in other discussions boils down to bashing young men by older men.
The rest of this comes down to some retool and re education decisions.
We have a problem, we need to be retooling heavy industry. Again it means substantial tax hikes. Any writings aboutj going elsewhere are a disservice in the long run.
There is a problem with this advice particularly this year. Budget cuts will leave some medical professionals without jobs. Deeper cuts are in the offing.
It is hard to write columns and piece together things beyond a predetermination. Sending young men to get medical training might be a waste of the young men’s resources at this point. Depends if things get worse. The last thing those guys need is to take on debt for a reeducation.
I take it to mean Reeves is talking about jobs where strong reading, writing, speaking, listening, and interpretation skills are the core tools of the profession. Writers, authors, editors, those in the literary arts world, along with a lot of education and counseling workers that have literacy-heavy needs, because those jobs depend on communication, interpretation, and written or verbal instruction even if they are not literally about teaching reading.
Women are not responsible for making healthcare such a big business. Blame the Food Pyramid Bureaucrats and the compliant AgroFoodIndustrial Complex. That’s the Keys to the riddle.
Depends. I remember when my mom became a nurse back the in 70s. Maybe 1 male in her class. At the end of my career around 2020, it was close to a 50/50 split. But it was also dependent on the specialty. Obviously no men on the labor/delivery ward. The OR/ER tended to be more men (at least in my experience). On the flip side, knew a young man that was going into nursing because his mom was a nurse, good demand, good pay. Had to wait a semester before starting his clinical rotation (ward work) so he got a job working for a pipeline company. Went off to North Dakota making $$$ and never looked back. Also knew a nurse that was seriously considering going back to her old job as a waitress at the riverboat. Better pay and better hours.
Many fields in healthcare are in demand, but so are many of the traditional trades so I don’t see men being locked out of the job market. Maybe locking themselves out because they don’t want to get dirty/sweaty and are serving coffee at Starbucks while holding a useless college degree.
We have an intern at work who is ambitious enough to train as a nurse at the same time. She is doing it online and only reporting in person on Thursdays. But that is where the ambition runs out. She only wants to work in a nursing home. There are a lot of jobs there, but she does not want the upper-level training later on. She won’t become an OR nurse for instance. She is shy and won’t make the calls to get such a job.
Young people often think they can use AI to pump out resumes. The employers are fully up to speed and ignore those resumes. A phone call or two to HR and anyone else who will talk is far better. Getting under someone’s wing to get a job matters. I fear for a few of my younger, recently educated friends.