[QUOTE=burundi]
Elementary education. There are so many boys and girls who desperately need positive male role models, since they don’t have them at home.
[/QUOTE]
Couldn’t agree more, though I’d say even higher grades need more male teachers. The gender gap in lower-level education resulted in a system tailored to allow girls to succeed at the expense of boys (less competition and activity, greater focus on quiet and sitting still), as demonstrated by the growing gap in academic achievement. many female teachers are ignorant of how boys work, resulting, in the most extreme cases, in such inanities as suspending a kid for pointing sticks at people and saying “bam” or drawing pictures of armed soldiers.
My guess is that many of the women who would have become nurses 50 years ago now become MDs instead. It’s also less socially stigmatizing for women to enter high-paying, high-status, traditionally male professions than for men to enter low-paying, low-status, traditionally female professions. (Not that nursing is necessarily low-paid, but I think it’s still perceived to be so by many.)
Car sales. Cause if a woman can shill tupperware/partylite/whatever and scam her friends and family into crap smalltime, she can do it on a grander scale.
[QUOTE=VCO3]
What are some fields or sectors that tend to be dominated by one sex, but would be greatly improved by a huge influx of the other sex? Why?
My first vote is library science - it’s a ridiculously woman-dominated field, and the result is the namby-pamby, outdated state of modern libraries and the state of the library in society.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know if I’d say libraries are all in an namby-pamby, outdated state. Sure, there are never enough funds to do everything that one would like to do, but I’d say that academic libraries, at least, have the IT thing down very well. As evidence for this I offer the fact that from what I’ve seen on visits to UCLA, most students do their studying online and hardly ever actually come to the library. Someone’s doing some good systems design there.
There are probably more male librarians than you think, but you’re right, it is heavily skewed to the female.
[QUOTE=Nava]
Looking at gender distribution in different jobs makes me think of some sort of huge transitory, with the pendulum swinging this way and that but less and less violently every time… “secretary” used to be 100% a male job, later it became 100% female in much of the world. Nurses used to be mostly (male) monks in much of Europe; the profession became heavily feminized at about the same time it got separated from religious roots; my GP’s nurse is called Juan (but the sign on his door still says “enfermera”, she-nurse; the government has been changing the signs to “enfermería”, nursing, whenever they renovate different locations).
[/QUOTE]
Fun fact: in Russian, the word for ‘nurse’ is “медицинская сестра”, literally “medical sister.” Men can work with a feminine title, but nobody is going to call the 250lb combat medic ‘sister’.
[QUOTE=Sarahfeena]
Please please please tell me you are not serious.
[/QUOTE]
He’s got a point. I went to library school, and was one of about four guys in my class of 60 or so. As for his other assertions, see my other post, supra.
[QUOTE=Haunted]
Gaming. Sometimes when I am playing a PC or video game or reading a gaming mag or visiting a gaming website/message board, I feel like I stepped back in time to about 1962.
It’s like the last bastion of sexism. Seriously, if I think about it too much, it ruins the hobby for me.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Crescend]
Fun fact: in Russian, the word for ‘nurse’ is “медицинская сестра”, literally “medical sister.” Men can work with a feminine title, but nobody is going to call the 250lb combat medic ‘sister’.
So they get called “medical brothers” instead.
[/QUOTE]
German also used Krankenschwester (literally, sister-to-the-sick). I’m not sure what the title is for males who belong to that profession.
I’ve notice also in UK English, nurses may be addressed as “Sister”.
[QUOTE=Spectre of Pithecanthropus]
He’s got a point. I went to library school, and was one of about four guys in my class of 60 or so. As for his other assertions, see my other post, supra.
[/QUOTE]
Librarian in library school checking in again. Out of the classes I’ve taken so far, I’d say men make up about 25-30%.
What shocked me was that most of them are on the “school librarian” track.
We definitely need more female poker players. The tables would be a lot more pleasant. Also, on balance, women players tend to be less aggressive and more predictable than the men. Sorry.
[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
My current ambition is to add an AIM Reference Desk to our homepage. Slow going so far.
[/QUOTE]
We have something similar, Ask a Librarian, a chat-based virtual reference service that covers most Florida public and academic libraries. I’m on duty with them right now!
I’d like to see more women in my building, period. So, that would currently include engineers, Public works crew (streets and sewers and big trucks!) and Parks Maintenance. How about more women running the huge, fun toys that build roads and destroy things?
(Maybe it is time for another career change for me… I’m lusting after life-size Tonka Trucks again!)
[QUOTE=Big Bad Voodoo Lou]
We have something similar, Ask a Librarian, a chat-based virtual reference service that covers most Florida public and academic libraries. I’m on duty with them right now!
–Lou, also a librarian in library school
[/QUOTE]
At FPOW, I did statewide chat service through OhioLINK. But then I added MeeboMe Widgets to my subject guide pages so those students could chat with me from within the web pages.
Also, I developed podcasts for the class I taught regularly. I’m trying to figure a way that Twitter might be useful for reference services - I can’t see that the direct message function would be much more useful than a direct text message, but I’m considering the idea of reference (to the students in my subject areas) through texting.
[QUOTE=Justin_Bailey]
I have never understood the “loss of the books” argument. The books are still there and the books still dominate the materials budget and all shelving considerations.
[/QUOTE]
Likewise, the Grande Bibliothèque du Québec, the central location of Quebec’s deposit library, opened two years ago, integrating both the deposit library and the main collection of Montreal’s central civic library, as well as a couple of historical collections and thousands of new works in a huge building comprising both deposit and circulating collections.
It’s a fully modern library with fully featured multimedia collections and equipment, including audio, audiovisual, and software works – a collection of some 100,000 multimedia documents.
Oh, and 3.9 *million *books, magazines, microfilmed documents, and other printed works. The death of the printed word has been somewhat prematurely announced.
Elementary education. And I am doing something about it. I am a 40-year-old male who just got his teaching certificate! And one of the reasons I became a teacher was to help provide a positive male role model (I was teaching at a low-performing school on the West Bank here in the New Orleans area).
And one anecdote: when I was at a reading seminar (actually two weeks before Katrina hit), I was the only male in a group of 210 elementary school teachers. One of the ice breakers for the seminar that one of the speakers had devised involved posters with the various Disney princesses on them. You had to go and choose which one you most identified with and stand in that corner by that particular one and then the speaker would tell you the characteristics of that choice. I wound up standing by the Belle one. Anyway, once that was over, it was fun being singled out by all the speakers: “Ladies and Shawn.”
For some reason, most of the men I ran into during my recent stint in education courses at UNO did not want to teach below Middle School. And usually, when I run into guys now and tell them I teach elementary school, they’ll say something like “Oh, I’d like to teach, but I would want to teach high school or middle school.” I get the impression that they are thinking something to themselves like “I’m too smart to teach elementary school,” but I don’t know. Any guys posting here have that feeling?
[QUOTE=Shawn1767]
Elementary education. And I am doing something about it. I am a 40-year-old male who just got his teaching certificate! And one of the reasons I became a teacher was to help provide a positive male role model (I was teaching at a low-performing school on the West Bank here in the New Orleans area).
And one anecdote: when I was at a reading seminar (actually two weeks before Katrina hit), I was the only male in a group of 210 elementary school teachers. One of the ice breakers for the seminar that one of the speakers had devised involved posters with the various Disney princesses on them. You had to go and choose which one you most identified with and stand in that corner by that particular one and then the speaker would tell you the characteristics of that choice. I wound up standing by the Belle one. Anyway, once that was over, it was fun being singled out by all the speakers: “Ladies and Shawn.”
For some reason, most of the men I ran into during my recent stint in education courses at UNO did not want to teach below Middle School. And usually, when I run into guys now and tell them I teach elementary school, they’ll say something like “Oh, I’d like to teach, but I would want to teach high school or middle school.” I get the impression that they are thinking something to themselves like “I’m too smart to teach elementary school,” but I don’t know. Any guys posting here have that feeling?
[/QUOTE]
I’m going into my third year for a B.Ed and a Bachelor of General Sciences. I’ve always imagined myself as the quirky science teacher that got their kids curiosity revved up. I reckon it’s the interaction and (relative) complexity of a highschool mind that draws me. To be honest, anything much below grade four has been more like babysitting that teaching in my opinion. However I thoroughly enjoyed a couple semesters I spent assistant teaching some grade fives.
Mind you, before I began my studies I had myself convinced junior high or lower wasn’t my turf, so who knows where I’ll be when I’m placed.
[QUOTE=Big Bad Voodoo Lou]
We have something similar, Ask a Librarian, a chat-based virtual reference service that covers most Florida public and academic libraries. I’m on duty with them right now!
–Lou, also a librarian in library school
[/QUOTE]
My system used to use a similar program to Ask A Librarian a few years ago (it may have even been the same program), but it was dropped because no one wanted to use strange chat software to talk to a librarian.
I think centering it around AIM (nearly every Internet user at least has an AIM name) could bring in a lot of curious people and (librarian’s love this) teens.
