The occupations that are growing, like health aide, employ mostly women. One solution is for the men who have lost jobs in factories to become health aides. But while more than a fifth of American men aren’t working, they aren’t running to these new service-sector jobs. Why? They require very different skills, and pay a lot less.
But telling working-class men to take feminine jobs plays to their anxieties and comes off as condescending, said Joan Williams, a law professor at U.C. Hastings and author of “Reshaping the Work-Family Debate: Why Men and Class Matter.”
Many unemployed men who did manual labor say they can’t take the time and make the effort to train for a new career because they have bills to pay. And they say they chose their original careers because they wanted to build things, not take care of people.
Yet when men, especially white men, enter female-dominated fields, they are paid more and promoted faster than women, a phenomenon known as the glass escalator. Much of men’s resistance to pink-collar jobs is tied up in the culture of masculinity, say people who study the issue.
Over 25 percent of the National Recovery Administration’s wage codes set lower wages for women, according to T.H. Watkin’s The Great Depression: America in the 1930s. And jobs created under the Works Progress Administration confined women to fields like sewing and nursing that paid less than roles reserved for men.
The main reason for women’s higher employment rates was the fact that the jobs available to women—so called “women’s work”— were in industries that were less impacted by the stock market.
But the Great Depression drove women to find work with a renewed sense of urgency as thousands of men who were once family breadwinners lost their jobs.
By 1940, only 15 percent of married women were employed vs. nearly 50 percent of single women. But the stigma around married women taking jobs from men was set aside as America hurtled toward World War II. As men were deployed overseas, women were called to take their places in manufacturing roles on the home front.
Mexican-American Women and the Great Depression. Some 400,000 Mexican-Americans moved out of the United States to Mexico in the 1930s, many against their will, according to Kennedy. pinterest-pin-it. Mexican women in California, 1933. Photo12/UIG/Getty Images.
Women during the Great Depression had a strong advocate in First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. She lobbied her husband, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for more women in office—like Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first woman to ever hold a cabinet position and the driving force behind the Social Security Act.
Black families had virtually never been able to survive on a single wage.”. pinterest-pin-it. Cleaning woman Ella Watson standing with broom and mop in front of American flag, photographed by Gordon Parks as part of a Depression-era survey for the Farm Security Administration. Gordon Parks/Getty Images.
Men in the lowest-rung health jobs, like the nursing assistants who change patients’ sheets and help them bathe, earned 10 percent less than men in blue-collar jobs. But they were less likely to be laid off and their wages rose over time, while blue-collar wages were stagnant.
If more men do pink-collar jobs, they could erase the stigma and turn them into men’s jobs , said Janette Dill, a sociologist at the University of Akron, at least for jobs that require less hands-on caregiving.
White men were more likely to take the higher-status technical jobs. For men without college degrees, more technical training that equips them for those jobs could help. And if health aide jobs paid more and offered better benefits , they’d probably attract more men.
The job, which is growing much faster than average, requires short training but no college degree, and pays an average of $12.90 an hour. Credit...
They are 96 percent and 98 percent male. Of the fastest-growing jobs, many are various types of health aides, which are about 90 percent female. When men take these so-called pink-collar jobs, they have more job security and wage growth than in blue-collar work, according to recent research.
Take Tracy Dawson, 53, a welder in St. Clair, Mo. He lost several jobs, some because his employers took the work to China and Mexico and others because the workers were replaced by robots. He has heard the promises of fast-growing jobs in the health care field: His daughter trained to be a medical technician.
It hasn’t been a great time to be a man without a job. The jobs that have been disappearing, like machine operator, are predominantly those that men do. The occupations that are growing, like health aide, employ mostly women. One solution is for the men who have lost jobs in factories to become health aides.