The image of the stern yet loving,
young, single female schoolteacher was in place by the end of the
1800s. Industrialization, the availability of other jobs, and the perception
of education affected the degree to which teaching became feminized. The
industrial revolution created a wide variety of jobs for men; many of
these jobs paid more than teaching. In the 1900s, men re-entered teaching
as other occupations became acceptable for women, who were able to pursue
careers outside of teaching. The feminization of elementary and secondary
teaching coincided with educational and societal changes in the mid-1800s. Male teachers tended to come from lower-middle class backgrounds,
attaining higher social status than their parents due to teachers’ higher
educational achievements.
- Women’s younger average age and comparative lack of experience
also contributed to their low wages. - Whatever the reason, the split is a factor in the gender pay gap, since a lot of popular female-dominated careers pay less than jobs and industries dominated by men.
- Between 1923 and 1950, school districts generally
dropped the practices of banning married women from teaching. - This “care work force,” said Mignon Duffy, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who studies women and labor, “is part of the infrastructure of our whole society.
- The
cult of true womanhood and the Victorian society dictated that women
should be submissive and virtuous.
If that’s what you’re looking for, we pulled some of the most women-dominated jobs as of 2021 and what they pay, on average. In sum, those borrowers initially assigned to men go on to treat subsequent male loan managers with more authority. On the other hand, those who were initially assigned a female loan manager are less compliant and more likely to default on loan payments. Evidence shows that egalitarian attitudes, better working conditions, and lower rates of stigmatization have slowly increased the presence of males in high-status female-dominated occupations relative to low-status female-dominated ones. In contrast, low-status occupations continue to be highly segregated and suffer from cultural devaluation. Thus, only by revealing and eradicating the disincentives to work in female-dominated occupations—particularly in the less prestigious occupations—will it be possible to reduce gender inequalities in the labor market.
Sexism against women continues to influence scholarship about women in
teaching. Academic studies of teaching often assume that female teachers
are less committed to their jobs than male teachers. Even modern scholars
have blamed teaching’s low prestige on women’s supposedly low aspirations
and preferences for working with people via direct teaching rather than
wishing to move into educational management positions (Acker).
Findings: The nexus between gender and authority
By contrast, borrowers initially paired with a male loan manager have an 18.8 percent probability of default. This means that men who step into roles that were initially filled by women also experience a decrease in their workplace authority. In general, the social patterns measured in the 1950s continued through
today. Teachers’ unions continued to ensure job security and improve
working conditions.
However, because it is common for borrowers to be transferred to other loan managers (for example, to balance out caseloads, or because the initial manager resigns), the authors also track the gender of subsequent managers that a borrower is assigned to. This is done in https://accounting-services.net/the-rise-of-the-no-collar-job-what-schools-need-to/ order to assess whether the likelihood of defaulting on a loan varies by the gender of the loan manager. In addition to tracking gender, a host of other relevant factors are accounted for, such as the borrowers’ household income, debt, and previous borrowing experience.
- These improved conditions made teaching more
appealing to men and older women. - Scholars disagree on which variables contributed most to the
feminization of teaching during this period, and few data are available. - Still, dealing with people face to face is what drew her to her job in the first place.
- That millions of care workers are “driven by incentives other than purely economic incentives” is in part why this work has traditionally been so undervalued, said Gabriel Winant, a labor historian at the University of Chicago.
As other occupations became open to educated women in the 1980s,
women entered other professions and teaching became slightly less
feminized. “The work schedule of the modern teacher/mother is not nearly
as constrained by social pressures as that of her predecessors” (Sedlak
and Schlossman, p. 28). This study provides empirical evidence that the gender of the initial person filling an otherwise gender-neutral role, has lasting consequences for how that role is subsequently perceived.
On the other side, something that is often ignored is the “glass escalator”, in which a man enters a female-dominated workplace and is quickly promoted through the ranks. Several fields such as education, nursing, and social work demonstrate this phenomenon. Many factors affect this outcome, such as societal pressure on men and women alike to conform to gender roles, i.e., men seeking managerial positions and women seeking more domestic roles. Also, even within female-dominated professions, men are usually the ones making promotion decisions.
Stopgappers: Men who enter female-dominated fields but leave shortly thereafter
Surveys
show that women teachers may have less interest in becoming principals,
but it is not clear that this is due to women’s lower commitment to
teaching rather than societal conventions or principalships interfering
with childrearing. Modern scholars also attribute women’s lower salaries
to their focus on families, even though for most of teaching’s history,
female teachers have been banned from having children or even marrying. Little research has been done on female teachers’ views on their jobs and
how they view their subordinate status in the educational field. Teaching
is one of the highly feminized “semi-professions,” like nursing and
library-keeping.
Career Development
More than two-thirds of the workers at grocery store checkouts and fast food counters are women. “I wish I were a boy, so I could be a firefighter,” four-year-old Londoner Esme told her mother. Esme, who had only ever seen male firefighters in the books she had read, had assumed this career option was not open to her. The future for working women looks bright and the prospects reach far beyond the traditional jobs for women.
women-dominated careers and their salaries
As a result, a delighted Esme is now safe in the knowledge her dream can come true. While that report projects women making up 48 percent of the workforce in 2050, in 2016 we’re sitting at 46.9 percent. If women continue to progress at even the projected 0.7 percent rate, we will have topped that 48 percent by 2020, 30 years earlier than projected just 16 years prior. “Now we are apparently essential,” Ms. Williams said dryly, before describing the critical lack of protective gear where she works. Some N95 masks recently arrived, but she is limited to one a week, an uneasy regimen given that she spends each morning screening residents for the virus.
Therefore, while entering male-dominated fields is crucial for women’s economic and social advancement, men have few incentives to choose female-dominated jobs. After the Second World War, there was a renewed focus on the employment
of men in all professions and on the importance of children as America’s
future ability to compete with other nations. “The social composition of
the teaching population began to change once again, this time reflecting a
somewhat higher level of recognition of the teaching profession’s
importance in the life of the nation” (Rury, p. 41). Since society still
saw men as more important and influential, this renewed interest in
teaching brought men men, some who received college educations from the GI
Bill, into the teaching profession. Both women and men pursued teaching as
a lifelong career, though women tended to aspire to teaching while men
used it as a secondary career. “Recessions in the 1970s and 1980s, coupled
with enrollment declines due to lowering birth rates, led to cuts in
staffing which eliminated the jobs of many younger teachers. As a
consequence, the mean age of teachers rose nearly everywhere” (Rury, p.
41).
The “cult of true womanhood” encouraged women to
be self-sacrificing, moral, and to care for children. Society in the late
1800s both distanced mother from child and created the cult of motherhood. Women were isolated in kitchens and nurseries while their children were
sent to standardized public schools. “The ideal of the teacher was one who
could control the children and be controlled by her superiors” (Grumet, p.
43). Women and society saw teaching as an appropriate career for them
outside the home. Rural school districts, with typically fewer job opportunities for men,
mixed-age classrooms, and shorter school years, retained high proportions
of male teachers.
Teaching was a relatively
low-status profession early in America’s history, and young women’s
entrance into the profession secured its low prestige. In rural areas where men had few career options, many more men were
willing to teach for low salaries, and teaching feminized slowly. These also
tended to be areas in which education was not very widespread and
schooling took only a small portion of the year.