I think you completely misunderstood what I was trying to say and am sorry you have chosen to respond this way.
That is very possible and if so I apologize. I did try to read the context but might have missed some earlier points. The selected quote made me quite unhappy which I guess is what happens if you read stuff out of context.
…Actually I just read it all again and am not sure what to make of what you are saying. Any chance at a clarification?
Thank you. I did not mean that there are no women in IT or no male nurses or no places where its 50/50. However, people generally tend not to go into fields heavily biased to the other gender. Some do, most don’t. Not a lot of women are encouraged (purposely or socially) to go into hard sciences and engineering for example. Its getting better, but its still there. AND a lot of female-dominated jobs didn’t really exist 40 years ago before Womens Lib or whatever (like home health aides and a lot of other service jobs that have arisen from the decline in manufacturing). The better educated you are, the more likely it will be a more gender-neutral workplace, but low-level jobs can still be very polarized.
It lead to having women in the workforce be a social norm.
Well, I can only show corrolation, not causation, so we’ll have to leave it there.
Most middle-management type jobs.
Yeah, I guess that counts for something, though with the number of children I see with bachelor’s degrees, I am not sure it counts for all that much. The only real full-time corporate job I ever had I was getting paid far more than the average college grad at the company, working a lot less hard, and I got the job saying I could ‘learn’ how to do it, rather than already knowing. When I left they asked me if they could induce me to stay. I found myself teaching people their jobs a lot of the time, with them in awe of my basic skills with QuarkXPress and Photoshop. I just got out of school and hooked up some internships. Knowing how to use a computer in 1996 certainly helped my prospects.
Nicely said, and for the most part, I agree (except for one parenthetical). But try telling that to a teenager.
My step-daughters think it’s so cool when their friends get pregnant and have babies, because they’re so cute and cuddly and all that attention… And because the girls are here at our house some or all of the time, they know that cute little babies are often smelly and soggy and crying and not so much fun.
I make it a point that I earned my college degrees, established my career, and then chose to have babies and stay home with them. I could get a decent job if I needed to do so. We keep telling them, a college degree gives you more options, more choices. I hope it sticks.
Look, just forget college vs. high school for a second. Babies. Are. Expensive. Your first step into adulthood should not place you deeply in debt. Imagine buying a Viper at 17.
Not only are they expensive, they’re kinda gross. I’m just sayin’.
What scares me is when regional economies that have traditionally had employees of both genders go down the tubes at a rapid rate, and in most cases this has nothing to do with the fact that the job market was more competitive (due to gender/racial equalization) than it was in the past. Theoretically, when you look at a specific area - a town, a county, a state, what have you - there may be increased competition for jobs if more types of people enter the workforce, but if the number of people employed stays the same, then the amount of income in the area should stay the same. However, where you see the most drastic downward trends in wealth seem to be where you have either mass lay-offs or during periods of high inflation. Lay-offs or plant closings in particular can be very hurtful to certain groups, such as those without higher education who find that they cannot obtain a new job with comparable wages with the current level of education that they have. And even if some of them DO eventually pursue degrees for the sake of finding a better job, this in itself increases competition for the remaining decent-paying jobs.
It really burns me when people like Bush respond to criticism about rampant outsourcing with, “we have to prepare people for the jobs of the future”. Well, in many cases it isn’t that simple. With fewer and fewer options for decent straight-out-of-high-school jobs (these ARE decreasing, regardless of whether men or women are hired to them…the industrial/manufacturing sector of America has been in a widely evident decline for decades), higher education is becoming the bottleneck through which EVERYONE pretty much has to be squeezed if they want to stand half a chance at making a living. For young people, it’s less difficult in many cases to prepare for such career paths, but for older workers the situation can be hell. Going back to school AFTER having started a family and taking on the responsibilities of supporting them can be incredibly difficult.
This may be yet another reason why housewifery is not seen as so attractive today: there is a significant proportion of the population (mostly among lower-class Black families) where the importance of self-sufficiency and work skills for BOTH genders has been stressed for generations. In my dad’s half of the family, which is Black, nearly every female from the grandmothers and great-grandmothers on down, has had to work out of the house at some point in their lives. This was just seen as logical and a necessity for supporting the family, especially during the era when wages among different races were not as equitable as they are today. However, it was also a boon to women whose husbands/partners either died or were otherwise separated from them, as the women already had the skills and abilities with which to find their own sources of income in the absence of male providers. It would be irresponsible of schools, or society in general, to discuss the housewife path without stressing at the same time that acquiring useful job skills is very important no matter what path one should choose. Girls shouldn’t be led to believe that sole-provider households are necessarily as stable or easy to maintain as dual-provider ones - in fact, in most cases they aren’t. Not that it’s impossible to support a family with one income, but this takes a level of maturity and financial savvy that, unfortunately, many girls don’t even consider the importance of.
Or even if your husband loses his job. Working at the same company for life is a thing of the past now, too, just like the stigma that used to be attached to divorce.
It makes you more attractive as a potential mate, too, whether you’re a man or a woman. There just aren’t that many people out there who want a mate who has never lived on their own or pulled their own weight economically.
Absolutely. I know couples who are not even close to equal in earning power. I often wonder what she would do if he died suddenly or lost his job. She’d better hope he’s insured to the teeth or she’ll lose everything. She works part time for just over minimum wage. That ain’t gonna pay the mortgage.