Washington - Many fields that are traditionally dominated
by women are set to expand in coming decades, while many jobs currently
dominated by men are not. That's the result of new research published Wednesday
by Jed Kolko, an economist at job search site Indeed, which shows that
less-educated men may especially face challenges in the job market of the
future.
Jobs in the United States are still strongly divided by
gender. A little more than one-third of men and a little less than one-third of
women work in fields that are at least 80 percent staffed by their gender,
according to US Census data analysed by Kolko.
In recent decades, fields that are dominated by men and
by women have not fared equally. Many men have fallen out of work as increasing
mechanization has allowed the US to produce more agricultural and
manufacturing goods than ever with fewer people than before.
Meanwhile, the US economy has shifted more to
service-sector jobs that are resilient to automation and tend to be more
dominated by women - like healthcare, one of the sectors that is forecast to
grow most in coming decades.
Jobs that are dominated by women are projected to grow
nearly twice as fast as jobs that are dominated by men, Kolko says, citing data
from the Bureau of Labour Statistics.
This dynamic is especially hurting less-educated men. As
Kolko points out, the least-educated men in the United States tend to work in
the most male-dominated jobs, with about half of all men with a high school
degree or less working in fields that are at least 80 percent male.
In contrast, only slightly more than 10 percent of men
with a graduate or professional degree work in fields that are 80 percent male.
"Therefore, fast-growing male jobs that require lots of education don't
really help men without a college degree who have been in traditionally male
jobs," Kolko writes.
Different trends
Fascinatingly, the trend isn't the same for women. Women
in the middle of the education spectrum - those with some college or an
associate's degree - are the most likely to work in more female occupations.
But both women with the least education (those with no more than a high school
degree or with no high school degree) and those with the most (those with a
bachelor's degree or with a graduate or professional degree) are less likely to
work in female-dominated fields.
Of course, the gender identity of a job can change quite
quickly, as history shows. Women once dominated computer programming, for
example, a field which is now heavily male.
The jobs that President Donald Trump campaigned on bringing
back to the United States - those of coal miners, steelworkers and farmers -
are all traditionally male industries that have shrunk in recent decades. The
White House has pledged to revive these industries, in part by encouraging
manufacturing and penalizing companies that decide to move jobs offshore.
However, many economists say that bringing back
once-high-paying jobs for less educated men will be difficult, if not
impossible.
While federal policies could help to give farmers and
manufacturers in the US an edge over competitors and save some jobs on the
margin, the sharp decline in agriculture and industrial employment is due to
bigger structural shifts in the economy, like automation and globalization.
Indeed, the percent of the population employed in manufacturing has fallen in
advanced economies around the world in past decades.
Kolko points out that automation has also put some
traditionally female jobs at risk. Telephone operators, textile workers and
travel agents are all female-dominated fields that are set to shrink in coming
decades.
Read also: #WEF2017: Gender inequality isn't helpful
Yet we don't often hear the same nostalgia for the
disappearance of these jobs as we do for manufacturing work. Part of the reason
is likely economic, but part also seems tied up in ideas about masculinity and
gender roles, as manufacturing jobs allowed less educated men to earn enough to
serve as breadwinners for an entire family.
As economist David Autor pointed out to me in a recent
conversation, few Americans are shedding tears for the loss of secretarial jobs
in the United States, yet that field has disappeared for women, just as surely
as factory work has declined for men. The difference is that many less educated
men have struggled to find good jobs to replace it, while many women have
generally moved to expanding and more lucrative fields, he said.
"We know in general as the labour market has become
more skill intensive, women have educated themselves and adapted by moving
quickly into other jobs," Autor told me. "Women have moved on and
up."
There are a few traditionally male jobs that are set to
grow in coming decades, including ambulance drivers, emergency medical
technicians, personal finance advisers, web developers, computer scientists and
actuaries, according to Kolko's research.
But given the broader trends in the US economy away from
manufacturing and toward services, other American men may need to move into
traditionally female roles in coming years if they want to thrive.