The real "feminization" problem

It's a lack of men in caring professions, not a surplus of women in law and academia

Teachers of the Year in Wilkes County, NC

I’ll be honest, I didn’t think the Compact essay by Helen Andrews, “The Great Feminization”, was worth the trouble of engaging with. I thought it was a bit silly. But it has certainly provoked lots of discussion and response. It clearly hit a nerve. Her basic thesis is captured in this snippet from the essay:

The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?

As well as academia and journalism, Andrews is most worried about the law, and how the shift towards a more female profession. As she writes: “All of us depend on a functioning legal system, and, to be blunt, the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female.”

Among the many responses, I’d recommend those from David French for the New York Times, Leonora Barclay for Persuasion, Megan McArdle for the Washington Post, and Matthew Yglesias for Slow Boring. One of the points Yglesias makes in passing struck me as one of the most important in this whole debate. He writes:

Progressives were (and are) the driving force behind the feminist revolution, but for ideological reasons, they’re often reluctant to openly discuss sex differences. As a result, the social consequences of women transforming workplaces are discussed almost exclusively on the right.

I agree. And I’ll draw on my own experience a bit. The chapter on sex differences in Of Boys and Men was one that many friends and reviewers urged me to drop. I’ve been accused of “biological determinism” for asserting that there are in fact some average differences between the dispositions and preferences of men and women that go beyond physiology and are not wholly the result of socialization.

I think I’ll have to come back to this in future posts. For now I’ll just quote the anthropologist Melvin Konner. As he writes in his excellent book, Women After All:

I want [my daughters and son] to understand that there are differences between the sexes that are not shaped by culture but are more fundamental, rooted in evolution and biology. I don’t want any of the four of them—or my hundreds of students a year, or any young people, or anyone at all—to live with the great disadvantage of missing that fact.

Yup.

The actual facts on “feminization”

I agree with Andrews that if an occupation skews very male or very female, this will have consequences for its prevailing norms and culture. This is a not a controversial point among feminists, who make it with regard to the cultures of occupations like tech, engineering or construction, for example.

But simply as an empirical matter, Andrews points in completely the wrong direction. Law, academia and journalism have not been feminized: they have been equalized. These professions have gone from being very male-dominated to being close to equal in terms of gender representation: a 60/40 male/female split in law and about 50/50 in academia and journalism.

It is true that the pipelines into these professions do now skew more female, so it is possible, even likely, that over time they will have more women than men in them. Here’s the breakdown of law students, for example:

If we think representation matters here, it would wise to address these pipeline issues sooner rather than later. But we’re a very, very long way from the “feminization” of the professions Andrews focuses on, even just in numerical terms, let alone with regard to any cultural implications.

My colleagues Alanna Williams and Ravan Hawrami write in a new brief for AIBM, “Occupations by gender: The facts”:

While recent discourse has focused on the “feminization” of professions, the broader trends are nuanced: many previously male-dominated fields have moved toward gender parity, while others remain predominantly male or female. Women remain scarce in many technical and manual fields, while men are largely absent from health and education roles.

I’d recommend the brief for anybody wanting to ground the discussion of gender and occupations in, you know, facts. As one of the visuals shows, the general trend has indeed been towards more balance:

Some occupations have remained stubbornly gendered however, for example construction (95% male) and healthcare support (85% female). But most importantly, there has been a massive decline in the share of men working in many fields that matter a good deal for social welfare, such as education (from 40% to 26% share), community and social services (71% to 29%).

Where are the men?

This reflects the general decline in the share of men in HEAL professions, even as the share of women in STEM fields and other male-dominated professions has risen. See our paper “The HEAL Economy” on this.

In the most recent brief, I was particularly struck by the map showing the most common occupation for women in each state":

In the majority of states, the modal job for a women is either as a nurse or as an elementary or middle school teacher. (For men it’s management, trucking and construction).

I’ve written a lot about the declining share of men in teaching and healthcare, especially mental health roles. I’ll share this chart again because I still find it shocking:

It seems obvious that a profession where men make up only one in five workers will both “code” as more female to those outside of it, including potential users or recruits, and will develop a more female-oriented culture. There’s are many reasons why young men don’t connect with the idea of “mental health” in the same way as young women, as work by Surgo Health shows. But one of them is surely that the profession is overwhelmingly staffed by women.

Andrews points to feminization in professions where we have seen equalization, and ignores those where there has in fact been a massive increase in the share of women.

And for all the lamentations about a lack of male role models, the policy response to the decline in the share of male teachers from 33% in the 1980s to just 23% today has been virtually non-existent.

For a trenchant, conservative critique of the way K-12 education has expunged men, see this Federalist article, “Why Male Teachers Left Elementary Schools And Won’t Go Back”, by Scott Yenor. I don’t agree with all that Scott says, by any means, but he’s pointing at the real problem, unlike Andrews. I do agree with him on this fundamental point though: “Elementary teaching is not coded female in the nature of things”.

That’s exactly right, and an important rejoinder to those who say that these jobs are just not suitable for men. As the father of a 5th-grade teacher, I take particular exception to that line of argument.

Now, there may be some professions where the stakes here are low. It may not matter that 99% of skincare specialists are women, or that 98% of smoke jumpers (the people who parachute into wildfires) are men.

But it really, really matters that the teachers at the front of our classrooms, the healthcare workers in our hospitals, and the therapists in treatment rooms represent the populations who they serve. Here, representation matters. Gender balance matters. The lack of men matters.

In that sense, occupational feminization is indeed a problem. Just not at all in the way Andrews suggests.