Yes, you have a point about there being sexism at work: we’ve already discussed that people prefer to employ women for childcare and lower schooling. See Velocity’s post above.
Don’t forget the convenience issue: when it comes to teachers in lower schools because the teacher is only at work when the children are at school. When school finishes, the teacher takes the children home and finishes their work (marking etc) when the children are abed. This is massively convenient for the teacher and means that the pay can be lower.
Speaking of pay, I don’t know about the USA but here in the UK childcare is often paid out of net income and the Tories have just stopped the childcare voucher scheme. Details here. So people in work cannot afford to pay much and there seems to be a benefits trap too. So wages for childcare are driven by the low incomes of those paying for it. Again, this is the UK, not the US.
Here’s a Forbes article about teacher pay. I agree with the poster who said that the higher pay may be explained by coaching. It’s not that significant.
Where I live, teachers are paid according to experience and education level, not by what grade they teach.
In the first place, all teachers are only “at work” when the children are at school, whether it’s grade school or high school. The average school day in the US, for grade school and secondary school alike, is nearly 7 hours long, which is not much shorter than a full 8-hour day. And then if teachers have grading and lesson prep to do at home on top of that, it really doesn’t end up being that “massively convenient”.
Nah, the chief reason that elementary school teachers in particular are so low-paid is, as other posters have pointed out, the residual “women’s work” effect. Any job traditionally done by women has traditionally been a low-paying job, irrespective of how difficult, responsible or time-consuming it is.
I teach English in Taiwan, with more than half of my hours in kindergarten and private after schools programs for lower elementary school kids.
There are many foreign men teaching English in kindergarten and lower elementary school levels. Could be more than half.
Interestly, teaching English to kindergartners actually pays more than teaching adult conversation because it’s far more difficult. There are a number of Taiwanese male English teachers as well.
However, for just regular teachers there are very few male kindergarten teachers. Again, probably for the same reasons.
Yes; my brother works with kids and it’s a serious worry. They have this whole elaborate set of rules set up to make sure that a woman is always watching him; not because they think he’s a pedophile but because they know how eager people are to make the accusation against any man.
I’m in the UK and talking about the UK, remember. School ends very early - 15:00 or 15:30 - here.
Which - over here - they do. I’ve been subjected to long sermons. There are all sorts of official reports to be completed, and I’m sure it’s got worse in the last 20 years.
Actually, yes it does. Again, I’m talking about the UK, not the US
As far as I know, doctors are very well paid and that high level of renumeration doesn’t seem to prevent the proportion of women medical students and new doctors being higher then men.
Is it not possible that, given a free choice and with equality of opportunity, the gender balance will find its own natural level. That in some cases it will be skewed one way or another is to be expected. i.e. more female doctors and more female early-years teachers, more male engineers and pilots.
Certainly if I saw a perfect 50/50 split of genders across all careers I’d suspect that it was artificially managed.
This is the pay scale for our district. Their is no distinction between high school pay and elementary pay. The only reason HS teachers might be paid more is they have a greater chance to do specials like coach a team or run a club. And by “coach” that can be a sport or an academic pursuit like debate or sponsoring the freshman class.
HEREis a link to the supplementary salary schedule. The way it works is go to the 2nd page. Each category is listed and then you can see the pay. for example a head football coach makes an extra $5021-$7021 per year. A jr. class sponsor makes an extra m$961 per year.
Also I feel, more elementary teachers drop out for a time when they have children.
In the UK the pay sales for teachers are the same, a similarly qualified elementary school teacher doesn’t get paid less than the comparable secondary school teacher in the same geographic region.
So your point doesn’t hold for England at least and yet the same gender bias is seen.
Just saying, “Pay is the reason,” is like saying, “Women prefer to be paid less, so they’re attracted to primary school positions.” It’s begging the question.
But the thing is they are NOT PAID LESS. As I showed in my previous post salary schedules are the SAME across the board for all teachers in a district. The only difference is HS teachers have a better chance of supplemental pay.
In many small towns across the USA these are still often the only jobs for either men or women. Teach at the local school, nurse at the local nursing home, or try and do some sort of office work.
Actually yes, women WILL work for less pay IF depending upon the job and how it works out with their family.
For example I am paid more than the women I work with but thats because I work nights and weekends and I get paid extra for that. Our base pay is the same but I make more in the long run. If a female coworker wants my pay they would just have to work the same hours.
I knew a woman who quit a good paying job because it required long hours and it was to the point where her kids were calling the daycare worker “Mom” and one time when again, she had to work late and picked her kids up at nearly 7 pm, her kids didnt want to come home with her.
Can’t add anything more pertinent or informative about the lack of men in an educational setting but I do have some insight to the daycare side of things. When I first got out of high school, a little over twenty years ago, I worked exclusively in daycare settings. I did this for years actually and almost made it my career. I was also in California at the time with tends to be a bit more progressive about things. But only once did I have a male co-worker who wasn’t either a bus driver or a maintenance man.
The impression I got from the ‘business’ side of things, was that the majority of parents do not feel comfortable leaving their young children in the care of a man. For whatever reasons of their own, they much preferred women. Also, another thing that was told to me by one of the site directors, was that men were a bigger liability. There was (and still is to a degree) so much fear about what strange men might do to your child, that the chances of a child saying something completely innocent and having the parent take it in a wildly wrong way (and possibly involving authorities), were much higher if there was a man involved.
The one man I do remember working with was a great guy who really loved kids. He was wonderful with them and you could tell he loved his job. But even he was never left alone with the children. He was used mostly as a ‘floater’, covering spots for the ladies who were going on lunch, break, whatever. And he was absolutely NOT allowed to change diapers or help a child use the restroom. That was something he had to go get a female coworker for.
Again, this was 20 years ago so I’m hoping things have changed, if even a little, for the better. But given the sort of treatment and unwarranted suspicions that poor guy endured, it doesn’t surprise me that more men don’t work in the field.
My spouse signed up to help out with childcare at his church (we have no kids) and worked with the 3-to-5-year-olds. They had tons of rules, especially for the male volunteers–they weren’t allowed to be alone with individual kids, weren’t allowed to change diapers or take a kid to the bathroom, and basically seemed to be treated like ticking time bombs. The spouse was fine with all these rules and was always very careful to follow them religiously (no pun intended). It’s pretty sad the way things are. I feel bad for men who genuinely enjoy being around kids and would like to do so without being under a constant cloud of suspicion, but I also see that the kids’ safety has to take priority.
There is certainly a historical component to it. My mother, born 1913, presumably started elementary school in 1919 at which time all elementary teachers were, by law, unmarried women. You got married, you were fired. When I was 9 we moved back to her old neighborhood and went to her old school for grades 5 through 8. Several of the teachers (in a small school with only one class per grade, although there were two grades in each year, an A and a B grade) were there who had taught my mother and were, by that time, bitter old maids (who hated little boys). Male teachers and married teachers were now permitted but only one teacher was male. He taught science, math, and woodshop (the latter while the girls had sewing and cooking). This was in the late 40s. When I went to my all-boys HS, nearly all the teachers were male (two exceptions as I recall, although one was a term-long substitute).
Somewhat surprisingly, my kids elementary school had no male teachers and I have not heard my grandchildren ever mention a male elementary teacher. There might be a prejudice because of the possibility of pedophilia, I don’t know. But I’ll bet the low pay has a lot to do with it.
I asked this question on another website that has a sub-forum for teachers, from nursery school through grad school. All of the public-school respondents said that in their districts, pay scales are the same regardless of what grade they teach, and agreed with me that a grade-school teacher’s salary may be lower because they are more likely to be women, who are more likely to take some time off when they have children or other personal reasons.
One of them said that the bonus for a teacher with a Ph.D. vs. a master’s is just $1,000 a year. S/he added that the people s/he knew of who had a terminal degree often got it in an unrelated field, or had tried teaching at the college level and didn’t like it, so they stepped back to teaching younger people and that suited them better.
I also know that education is a very common mid-life career choice, as is cosmetology, the clergy, and nursing - all very challenging jobs that don’t usually pay particularly well.
It’s great that he was able to swallow his pride. My reaction probably would have been, “Guess I’m not welcome here after all, ya’ll can get bent.” Now that you mentioned this, I might have to ask my friend if that had anything to do with him quitting his daycare job.
This article in the Telegraph may be paywalled, but one of the teachers’ unions is saying that schools are too quick to suspend teachers. This may benefit male teachers who have the difficulties mentioned upthread.
and
I’m surprised this isn’t already done; innocence is innocence. Then again, presumption of innocence and false accusations are two of my hobby-horses.
In the first place, all teachers are only “at work” when the children are at school, whether it’s grade school or high school. The average school day in the US, for grade school and secondary school alike, is 
There are all sorts of official reports to be completed, and I’m sure it’s got worse in the last 20 years.