But it’s still a bit strange that women are more likely to spend money on ever-rising tuition when they’re not seeing the same financial upside as men.
She goes on to write,
The three fields in which women outnumbered men in the highest numbers are more traditionally utilitarian: health professions (125,000 more women than men), education (61,000) and psychology (60,000).
I am sorry, but psychology is not a utilitarian major. It is a self-indulgent major. There are approximately zero jobs seeking anyone with an undergraduate degree in psychology. Meanwhile, the number of jobs for people with advanced degrees in psychology is very small relative to the number of undergraduate psychology majors, so admission to graduate programs is quite selective.
As for education and allied health professions, I would note that these are occupations that are highly regulated. That is, people with less formal education could do many of these jobs, but they are not allowed to compete for them. They are also fields that strongly resist the concept of merit pay.
Rampell adds,
There are, at least for the time being, lots of decent, middle-class jobs predominantly held by men that don’t require higher education (such as construction and other trades); comparably paying jobs disparately held by less educated women are few and far between.
Females riding garbage trucks are like Black Swans–they may exist but I have never seen one.
A very crude version of evolutionary psychology is that women gather and men hunt. That is, women look for safe and reliable income while men seek income in ways that are more dangerous and can involve extremes of success and failure. I do not think that one should carry this idea too far, but Rampell’s column can be placed in that framework.
I saw a woman riding a garbage truck and emptying trash cans in Chicago last week, but it’s certainly not a common sight.
Another one of those topics that is pointless to discuss because the professional investigators refuse to look where the answers are.
“There are, at least for the time being, lots of decent, middle-class jobs predominantly held by men that don’t require higher education (such as construction and other trades); comparably paying jobs disparately held by less educated women are few and far between.”
One should contemplate here the difference between “predominately held by” and “open only to” and the implications of that distinction. Is Rampell suggesting that these jobs “predominately held by men” are not open to women? Or that women are, because of their sex, not qualified for them? Or, is it that women choose, for whatever reason, to shun them? Or, is it a combination of all the above? (The same observation could be made about the relative under-representation of women in engineering and computer and information sciences). It’s complicated, but it appears that Rampell wants us, without more, to somehow draw from her remarks the subtle implication that contemporary life is not fair to women. The fact is I don’t think that Rampell and many others who bemoan the state of women in the workplace want necessarily to go there to explore these issues any deeper.
And, for the record, Ms Rampell holds a highly utilitarian bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Princeton. But, it would be unfair to say that nobody is seeking someone with those degree qualifications, for it can be immediately parlayed into a job as expert and national pundit on economics for the New York Times. If you have the “right stuff” degrees are meaningless, even for women!
If we start with education signaling theory and work from there it would be a long way until we get to things like “a garbage man is viewed as someone doing honest work to take care of his family whereas a garbage woman would not be viewed in exactly the same way.” We’d have a long list before we got to anything like overt sexism is keeping women out of the building trades.
” for the record, Ms Rampell holds a highly utilitarian bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Princeton. ”
That probably included an extensive study of contemporary labor economics. Otherwise, why would the post hire her to comment on the subject?
For the record, in contrast to Vivian’s assertion that Ivy League students can obtain degrees in the most parochial of subjects and still find themselves in high demand in the labor market, I was trying to imply that her highly-photogenic facial features probably didn’t hurt her any, either.
Well, Jeff, your comment sounds kind of sexist, but it in no way contradicts my assertion that Ivy League graduates with “non-utilitarian” degrees (such as anthropology) can still find themselves in high demand in the labor market (at least certain sectors of the labor market) and, indeed, can be much more competitive in jobs requiring economic expertise than those who have degrees in economics. And, that personal experience does provide a bit of cred to Rampell’s argument—perhaps she was just trying to avoid poverty–and succeeded. Finally, I guess, and to make it all more complicated and interesting, there is such a thing as a “hunter-gatherer”, i.e., a person who enjoys both danger and security depending on the season.
Wasn’t my intention to contradict you; merely add a tangential point. And I don’t think its sexist to point out that attractive people get a leg up in life in any number of arenas. You don’t need to study Anthropology for four years to figure that out!
Well, Jeff, on second thought, I guess there is a difference between being a sexist and acknowledging the possibility that other people are.
This particular story may not be all that accurate, but clearly there are hardwired differences between male and female risk tolerances and strategies. There is also the Genghis Khan framework. Ancestral men faced the real possibility of having no offspring, while a few rock stars produced hundreds if not thousands. Women on the other hand maxed out below ten, and baring infertility were guaranteed at least one. It seems men were hardwired to play the lottery. Adapted behaviors do weird things in novel environments, such as the post industrial career world.
To be honest that article was a lot better than I thought it was going to be.
At times the O vs. O paradigm is a tautology when applied to women: everything about their outcomes happens because they are oppressed.
Everything mentioned in the article struck me as fair, except the comment about the dump truck stuff, since I’m pretty sure women COULD work in those professions if they really wanted to, and the fact that the reason those “middle class jobs” women like aren’t available to lesser educated people is due to occupational licensing restrictions, not something that’s inherently exclusionary about them.
Just as there are male teachers, nurses, dental assistants (I have never seen a single one of these), and librarians, but for some reason it is not seen as a social movement to even the numbers.
Agree that the O vs O lens is disproportionately used to describe women’s outcomes.
In Taiwan, the garbage truck attendants are often women.
This whole issue sounds to my ear very similar to the credit snobbery/predatory lending discussion. Now we need to feel sorry for women because teaching, nursing, and all the other conscientiousness careers require conscientious signaling degrees that have been dominated by women for a while. Whereas men are lucky because their lower-middle-class jobs requiring hard scrabble don’t often require signaling degrees. And we also need to wring our hands because women don’t like mechanical engineering, economics, math and physics.
They will never look close enough to understand that education and jobs aren’t homogeneous, so the aggregate result can always be spun to be sexist for a never-ending cause of social injustice concern trolling.
What about women as construction laborers in developing countries. Head-loading sand or cement on building sites without heavy machinery, for example.
It’s not like hunting, but it’s also not “pink collar ghetto” as the term is properly understood. Just general labor.
Are women better at head-loading wet cement? I feel like I saw this in Africa 20 years ago, but was not paying attention to gender components.
Off hand I also think of photos by Sebastiao Salgado showing women doing that kind of work.
I think many psychology degrees end up in social service but that isn’t as large and it is more generic like communications.
Let me call BS. I am a lawyer. Legal secretaries and paralegals are almost all women, and those jobs prove nice middle class salaries ($40,000 to $50,000 for secretaries and more for paras), and generally do not require college degrees (that is changing for paralegals).
And I think currently the majority of law school students are female, and they are there to make money. Likewise, I think the majority of students in accounting are female.
“A very crude version of evolutionary psychology is that women gather and men hunt. That is, women look for safe and reliable income while men seek income in ways that are more dangerous and can involve extremes of success and failure. I do not think that one should carry this idea too far, but Rampell’s column can be placed in that framework.”
Indeed, I wouldn’t carry that too far. I’m sure the only reason for the male over-representation in the construction and garbage collection industries and other “decent middle-class jobs” is that those males are not looking for steady income, but big payoffs, like finding some very valuable piece of discarded junk.
PS. Would looking for that very valuable piece of discarded junk make one a “hunter” or a “gatherer”? Social science is full of such interesting questions!