I dunno.
Do a Google image search on ‘head of human resources’ or similar and it shows a lot of men.
“Ring girl” is the only term I’ve ever heard.
Thanks.
My daughter’s school has four third grade sections. 24 students in three sections and 14 in the fourth. Guess which one is the male teacher’s? Every year when the class assignments are made there is a push by parents to have their kids moved to one of the female teachers’ classes. The school instituted a blanket policy of not reassigning students at parents’ request.
By the second week in September, nine of his students had moved to private school. Some of them never showed up for the first day. It’s a pattern repeated every year. Fourth grade has fewer students than third or fifth.
He is the only male “home room” teacher. There is a male PE teacher and a male Art teacher. Somehow those are not controversial at all.
I admit that when my daughter goes to fourth grade, if she ends up in the male teachers’ class she will likely be in private school as well. My wife ardent feminist that she is, would yank her out.
Why? I’m really not trying to start a fight, I just don’t get it. My fourth grade teacher was a man. He was my first male teacher for anything, and while I didn’t really like him at the time, I respected him. He was really fantastic and firm, with high expectations. It was a real change from our fun, nurturing female teachers in K-3. I learned a lot. This year my daughter’s got a male teacher for fourth grade. She’s had a couple of men (including this one) in the lower grades, but this is her first man for homeroom. He’s, likewise, fantastic. He’s more easy going than my teacher was, but his enthusiasm is infectious, and he’s holding them to high standards and they’re meeting them. Fourth grade was the perfect time - for both her and me - to really buckle down a bit and have experience with a good male role model that wasn’t in our family.
Is it really a molestation fear? 
That’s so sad. To be honest, I’m more afraid of sexual attention from teachers in high school. Statistically, the chances that she’ll have a teacher who’s attracted to breasts and hips are far higher than having a pedophile for a teacher. Most men (and some women) are attracted, sexually, to teenaged girls. Very few are sexually attracted to children.
You should have said, 'stereotype of muslims I have
See AK, you are wrong.
some of anything exists in human practice, but it is not common islamic thinking and it is not a common issue in the islamic world, your stereotypes leaving aside.
You were wrong and conveyed wrong information.
Thank you - and this is the most common attitude.
I am sorry. Too often the immigrants come from the most backwards origins and they are often told wrong things when they encounter guidance in these communities.
The prohibition against touching doesn’t apply to doctors, nurses, PTs, chiropractors, etc., albeit, when it’s not an emergency, a chaperone should be there. I know, because I have lots of orthodox friends, and I worked with an Orthodox group, doing computer work for them, and would stay with a family many weekends when my husband was in Iraq (the social support for them kept me sane, because I was getting really depressed after he’d been gone for about four months). Anyway, I went to appointments a few times with a couple of women. A chaperone can be any woman (although, another Jewish woman is preferred, but sometimes the chaperone is someone who works in the office), or a male relative of the woman who is the patient, such as her husband, brother, adult son, soforth.
This isn’t part of pekuach nefesh (if a doctor were to proceed without a chaperone in a true life-saving emergency, that would be pekuach nefesh). The presumption is simply that the medical professional is doing something according to his training, and that doesn’t give him a thrill. And then, you have the chaperone, to make sure he stays with the script.
Pekuach nefesh does also allow a lay person to render emergency aid to someone, if the lay person had some training-- I have military training and Red Cross certification, so I could render aid.
I think it is, though none of the mothers will come out and say it. They just find it “weird” in some way. This is a very socially and politically liberal town, but also very upper-middle class conventional, if you know what I mean. Many of the mums are stay at home former lawyers, engineers, consultants, etc. I’m a rather involved dad. I’m sure if I volunteered to chaperone a third grade field trip the classroom parent would find a way to exclude me.
This thread is really eye-opening for me. I grew up in the '70’s, and I thought the old stereotypes of certain professions like teacher and nanny being closed to men were dying even back then. I would expect that men in certain professions would be statistically unusual, but it wouldn’t even register as strange to me to find out that a teacher or nurse or nanny was male.
I had a male teacher in fifth grade, and I can’t remember anyone thinking it was at all unusual. Certainly I was not aware of anyone being pulled from his class. He was just another teacher.
I also hear about male nannies all the time. They even have a name: mannies. Here’s an article that says that their numbers are on the rise, and that many parents are looking specifically for male nannies.
As for game show spokesmodels, The Price Is Right hired the ridiculously attractive Rob Wilson as its first male model in 2012.
Color me confused 
Is it something he is doing specifically or is it just because he is a male? If it is the former, the concern may be justified but, if it is the latter, there is a name for that type of thought process and it applies at least as well to the situation you described given the facts as any other.
My daughter had her first male teacher last year in 3rd grade and he was great. I never really thought anything of it and I don’t think she did either except as a nice change from earlier years. My father taught fourth grade for a few years and then all grades in a juvenile detention center. Nobody ever noted it even in the 70’s and we certainly did not live in a progressive area. Where I grew up, we all had male teachers starting in 7th grade at the latest because the sports coaches had to do teaching duty as well and the middle school grades were the ones that they could do most easily. That is the time when the young women are starting to go through puberty and most vulnerable developmentally but I don’t know of anything untoward ever happening.
Why would someone go through the expense and hassle of yanking their daughter out of a public school to uproot them over some mysterious fear over having a male teach their daughter unless there are some other facts missing?
I went to a Jewish day school from preschool through 2nd grade. The preschool and kindergarten teachers were all women, but the grade school teachers were a mix, and the gym and Hebrew teachers were men. I had a man for a classroom teacher in the second grade.
When I switched to public school, there were no male teachers whatsoever, but then in intermediate school, it was about 1/2 & 1/2. My high school in Indiana was about 1/2 & 1/2 as well.
I’m not sure what kind of background you needed to teach at the Jewish school. It may not have required a degree in elementary ed., just a BA in a relevant subject, like math, one of the sciences, or English, or maybe they hired you first, then asked you to get a degree if they liked you, I don’t honestly know.
If I’d gone to the school where no one wanted the male teacher, and he had 14 kids in his class, my parents probably would have taken advantage of the situation by requesting his class, where I’d get more individual attention.
Several of you have posted that they or their kids had male teachers in elementary school, and no one considered it unusual. From the World Bank cite provided earlier, 13% of primary school teachers in the US are male (assuming this is a binary male-female classification). But when I look at the staff directory of our school system’s elementary schools there are 11 male sounding names out of 123 staff. Four are custodians, two are gym teachers, one each music and art, two are special ed assistants and one is a classroom teacher.
I looked at a couple of neighboring towns and found zero and one male classroom teacher (out of 75 and 77). So at least in these tonier suburbs, it’s a lot lower than 13% for classroom teachers in elementary schools. My sister used to teach in a much “tougher” school district (40% of kids on free or reduced lunches vs 2-3% in our area) and there seemed to be a lot more male teachers there.
I know two male teachers personally, both teach in inner city schools. I wonder if that is the disconnect. The “nicer” the area, the less acceptance of male teachers?
Another data point, our town was 99% white until the last decade or so. Now it’s about 3% Asian, and some folks aren’t happy about that “change to our town’s character” either. I’m on a couple of town committees, and I’ve noticed that conciously or unconsciously my nominally progressive neighbors are only slightly less prone to using what I consider coded language that reveals some prejudice against minorities. For example it seems to be completely lost on them that restricting access to affordable housing programs to people “with connections to the town” has a thoroughly discriminatory impact when applied to a town that was almost entirely white, and in fact even now has only a single non-white town employee out of several hundred).
Another data point, with a median household income of over 125k private school is not cost prohibitive for many families. Our own daughter was in private school for KG and first grade, and every year we decide whether she should continue in public school or go back to private.
I read about a guy who sold either Avon or MaryKay makeup . He was doing really well too.
Also at the local stores I normally see a few guys working at the MAC makeup counter , don’t think I’ve seen them at other brands .
I really think gender equality in a social sense has backslid since the 70s. Gender roles and fashions are more gender disparate, not less, especially when children are involved.
That may be to some degree, but it’s not a given. I went to a middle class suburban school; not a wealthy one, most of our parents couldn’t have easily afforded private school. Not a really poor one, either. Only a small percent of the students qualified for free or reduced price lunches, for example.
My daughter goes to one of the best of the Chicago Public Schools; more affluent students than most in the district, but the district average is rife with poverty. Many of them could afford private schools, but they’ve kind of turned this public school into a quasi-private school instead. It’s an odd duck. They’re technically a CPS magnet school, but many thousands of dollars are raised and donated by the parents each year to provide many more services and classes than the school district will pay for. It’s not “inner city”; it’s an area of the city that would be socially suburban if there was a little more room between the houses. “Outer city”, I guess.
So our two examples are middle of the road - neither rich nor poor. Solid middle class, one suburban, one urban, 40 years apart.
No cite offhand, but I seem to recall that women had better success rates as telemarketers–the disembodied voice trying to tell you things was considered more trustworthy when it was a woman or something like that.
The trope of computer voices being a female voice is probably a form of that as well.
Everyone keeps saying teacher, but at the high school level and up, science and technology teachers are usually men.
I can’t think of anything absolute here. Apart from “promoted because she is sleeping with her manager”.
I’ve been turned down for a job because I wasn’t female, but other similar factory work was available in other places at other times. You wouldn’t get work as a Receptionist, except you would at a Hotel, and some places have security guards instead of receptionists anyway. And you would get special handling in any child-care situation, particularly with babies – unless you were a registered nurse in a hospital.
Then there is “Women’s Officer”, which you definitely would not get – but you could get “student officer” or chaplain or lawyer or union-rep, which cover the same range of activities.
I’ve never heard of a male mammography technologist. I’m sure they must exist somewhere, but they must be very rare.
I remember a magazine article from the late 1980s about gender balance in different medical specialties. There were significant numbers of both male and female gynecologists and obstetricians, but at that time there were very few female urologists practicing, as in five or ten in the entire US. I’m sure that has changed by now, but there still can’t be very many female urologists.
I did, once. And no, I’m not gay. It was just a job in college.