To throw some hard stats in here. according to the Us Census, it’s almost 70/30 split between women and men when it comes to waitstaff:
A small staff of 10 workers, it’s not really significant for all 10 to be women.
The reason you will see women in the trades but few men in the pink collar jobs is the pay. Women have to brave all the misogyny in working in traditionally male jobs but for many, it’s worth it to be paid so much more plus no obligation to be perky and subservient to male customers. Waitressing is hard work and although I’ve not done much of it and that long ago, waitresses I’ve known complained bitterly about how they had to behave in order to get the tips that made it possible to survive on that wage.
Which is odd to me. What I saw was that the ones directly interfacing with the customer, bringing the drinks to tables, were mostly good-looking young women - because men like to have pretty women smiling at them (we’re all pigs) and so they garner the best tips. However, the one behind the bar who made up the orders for the girls (like the kitchen staff for the restaurant did with meals) tended to be male, probably as much because a female offered the opportunity would take the more lucrative server job. They did, however, have a “tip pool” where the servers put a portion of their tips into a kitty for the bartender on the bar side and the kitchen staff on the diner side, plus the guys who went directly to the bar did tip. So the bartender did not lack for extra income.
When I was in college, once upon a time in a galaxy far far away - the competition to enter dental college was second only to the medical school for the demand and difficulty to get in. (Unless you were science challenged, in which case it was the law school). Guys would basically lock themselves in their room all year and study study study to get the marks. There was a cheating scandal in the Organic Chem course that they all had to take to get in. IMHO when things get super competitive, it tends to be the males who push their way to the front of the pack.
Then later the concern switched to using interviews and other criteria as well as marks, with the fear that the process was producing doctors who could get good marks but were mostly interested in the income level, had very poor bedside manners and lacked empathy and a well-rounded character (and the accusation it was done to weed out the Chinese foreign students who were really smart but had poor spoken English). I think it was about the late 90’s that the admissions to medical school changed to the point where females were more than half the students. Women are as smart as men, and probably tend to relate better - once it sank in that they could be doctors, not just nurses, that the college was not going to ignore them based on gender, far more tried to get in.
(One of my dorm mates at the time was in nursing. He said he was only one of two guys in the class of 80 or so, and the other guy was married. He did not understand why more guys did not choose nursing).
My experiences are from the UK, where bartending is usually a customer-facing role too.
And they weren’t meant to be exclusive…YMMV.
I am just saying, that based on my experiences when I worked in that industry, it was very common, and therefore doesn’t surprise me at all.
If I were to estimate, I’d say that of those service industry businesses with a male general manager, about 40% had a conscious bias (like lying about whether they are hiring, depending on who asks).
In my experience, the family style restaurants were 90% female waitstaff. However, if you moved up in price to the snooty places, the waitstaff was usually male.
Sit on your lap? I’ve only been to Hooters a few times, but I don’t remember the waitresses sitting on anyone’s lap. Are you sure you were in a Hooters?
How many dentist’s offices have you all seen? I’ve had two dentists in my life, and the second one was the son of the first and took over his practice when he retired. I’m sure there’s been some turnover in the staff, but I don’t think there have been more than three or four staffers total (and I think one of them was the wife of the elder dentist). It’d be impossible to draw any conclusions from a sample that small.
I was gonna say, ain’t no lap sitting at any Hooters I’ve been in from the 90s to maybe early 2010s. And the wings are pretty reasonable, actually. People like them enough that there’s a little take-out Hooters called “Hoots” that doesn’t even have the Hooters girls.
Eight that I can think of- and I probably forgot a couple.
My childhood-early adulthood dentist was male dentist 100% female techs for about 25+ years.
My adulthood - now dentist is a female dentist 100% female techs, that’s been about 17 years.
Guy who pulled my wisdom teeth 100% female techs.
The endodontic surgeon lady… 100% female techs.
Orthodontist, for me 40 years ago and my son today… female techs.
All in all, I have regularly visited the dentist roughly twice a year for 50 years, and I actually do not recall a single male dental tech ever working at the dentist when I was there, and there is a LOT of turnover in the dental tech field.
When I was a young man, I considered ‘dentist office receptionist’ as the best possible job because:
A) Every single coworker is a twenty something young woman.
B) I don’t have to look in people’s filthy mouths.
That observation is just as true today as when I first made it around 1990.
I think that this is question begging. If the 70/30 split is because of sex discrimination, and 10/10 would be a departure from that, then some lawyer might be comfortable in bringing a suit against a place that hired 10 for 10 women in those jobs. Again, not a slam dunk, but 10/10 seems pretty on point.
Not for the whole meal, and not a lap dance, but for a Polaroid (also dino technology)? Sure. I think I have a few of them still.
My dentist is female. Her staff of about 10 people is 100% female and despite about 70% turnover in 8 years has been 100% female the whole time. She does have an associated male orthodontist who’s got a practice of his own elsewhere, but who works some of her ortho cases at her office too.
My PCP is female. Her receptionist is male, but the rest of the staff is female. And has been throughout 8 years of fairly consistent turnover.
My dermatologist (a specialist everyone visits every 6 months here in sunny FL, just like the dentist) is male. His staff of a dozen helpers is 100% female and always has been despite a monster turnover rate. He’s had a few PAs, and they were all female too.
In all the years my now-deceased first wife visited the cancer clinic ~weekly, the oncologists & radiologists were about 70% male / 30% female with the percentage of women nil at the elder end and near 50/50 at the beginning-of-career end. Meanwhile, the NPs, PAs, and all the other folks whether medical or administrative of whatever age were 100% female. That’s 100% of a corps of about 120 people I got to know pretty well. ETA: I recall now there was one guy who was a radiation therapy tech who was male. Carl. But he was the one and only.
Seems that nearly 1/4th of the way into the 21st Century, the pernicious idea of “women’s work” is alive and well.
There are jobs that, for whatever reason, are dominated by women. Blame culture or schooling or upbringing or whatever, but I wouldn’t blame the employer for hiring what is available.
The dentists I’ve frequented over the years - maybe 5 - have all been male, but I can’t remember anything but female attendant staff - receptionist, assistant, or hygienist. OTOH the dentist I went to a few times - who specialized in root canals - was female, also with all-female support staff.
I worked for a large manufacturing corporation at one time, where they posted internally all the job openings both in the plant and the office - and I don’t recall hearing of any of the men applying for the secretarial-clerk level positions. In the sampling lab, the mix of analytical lab techs was about 50-50. In First Aid, the mix was about 60-40 women. There was a smattering of women in the front-line industrial jobs, that could required some hard work and were very dirty.
I suspect the self-sorting is more alive in men than in women.
No, I’m addressing the underlying assumption that “It’s so weird to have an all female staff that it must be discrimination.” It’s not out of the ordinary at all.
It’s really hard to say how much of that is related to the idea of “women’s work”. My experience is a little different than yours , in that I have seen males PAs and NPs and xray/sonogram technicians. But the receptionists and the medical assistants who take my temperature and draw blood are always women. It might be that those jobs are someone’s idea of “women’s work” - but it also might be just that women prefer those jobs to other jobs with similar educational requirements that are preferred by men. For example, in my state, there is no license/certification requirement for medical assistants. A medical assistant might be hired right out of high school and trained on the job or they may have taken a six month course. There are other jobs with similar requirements dominated by men - for example, delivery drivers don’t always need a CDL . But I have never seen a woman drive a UPS/FedEx/DHL truck - and I know women who work in doctor/dentist offices who absolutely would not take that sort of job, not even if it paid $10/hr more that the job in the doctor’s office.
Agree completely. It’s just a bit surprising to me that the upstream individual career selection process has remained so resistant to change.
We’re now in the era when the girls raised in the heyday of the original Women’s Lib movement are mostly collecting Social Security while most of their mothers, the Rosie-the-Riveter set, have already died of old age.
It’s taking longer than we (or at least I) thought.
Women driving delivery for FedEx, UPS, or now Amazon are pretty common around here. Admittedly it might be 10%, certainly not 20% much less 50%. But nobody’s eyes bug out in surprise when a female UPS driver drops off a package.
Interestingly, lots of USPS letter carriers are female. The last two at my prior building and the one at my current building are all female.
There are a few long-haul truckers who’re women, but it’s a tiny percentage.
Right, but what makes it “ordinary”? Is the cycle just self perpetuating? Only women work there because only women apply because only women work there?
It may not be malicious discrimination, but there would definitely be some self selection.
In my industry, there just isn’t that much interest from men. It’s probably
around 50/1 female to male ratio of applicants. I do occasionally hire men, but they generally don’t work out long term.
Honestly, I think it’s the nature of “unskilled” work. When it comes to skilled work, men and women are pretty much the same. When it comes to unskilled, men are going to gravitate towards the jobs that require more physicality, and women are going to go towards the ones that require less.
There are certainly exceptions to the trend, but I’d be surprised to not see a large disparity.
If the employer doesn’t discriminate against the people who apply to the job, then what fault can you actually assign to them when there is a disparity in people who apply to the job?
There’s definitely self-selection - but that’s not always a bad thing and it’s not the employer’s fault if men with similar education and skills choose to work elsewhere , perhaps earning more while women are willing to take less money in exchange for the other perceived advantages. Because the predominantly female jobs are almost always less money, but they often have other advantages - maybe they are located close to a residential area or have more flexible schedules or are physically easier or are less likely to involve overtime.