More Men Infiltrating Professions Historically Dominated by Women

As the women’s movement grows in America, men too are being freed from traditional roles. Today you see more and more men in the delivery room when their children are being born. You see American men changing diapers, takingpaternity leaves, and gaining custody of their children in divorces.

Another change in men’s roles has occurred in the types of professions available to them. Traditional “female” jobs such as kindergarten teacher, nurse, and secretary are now opening up to men.

When Donald Olayer enrolled in nursing school nine years ago, his father took it hard. “Here’s my father, a steelworker, hearing about other steelworkers’ sons who were becoming welders or getting football scholarships,” Mr. Olayer recalls. “The thought of his son becoming a nurse was too much.” Today, Mr. Olayer, a registered nurse trained as an anesthetist, earns about $30,000 a year. His father, he says, “now tells the guys he works with that their sons, who can’t find jobs even after four years of college, should have become nurses.”

That’s not an unusual turnabout nowadays. Just as women have gained a footing in nearly every occupation once reserved for men, men can be found today working routinely in a wide variety of jobs once held nearly exclusively by women. The men are working as receptionists and flight attendants, servants, and even secretaries.

For one thing, tightness in the job market seems to have given men an additional incentive to take jobs where they can find them. Although female-dominated office and service jobs for the most part rank lower in pay and status, “they are still there” while traditionally male blue-collar jobs “aren’t increasing at all.” At the same time the outlooks of young people are different. Younger men, with less rigid views on what constitutes male or female work, may not feel there is such a stigma to working in a female-dominated field.

Although views have softened men who cross the sexual segregation line in the job market may still face discrimination and ridicule. David Anderson, a 36-year-old former high school teacher, says he found secretarial work “a way out of teaching and into the business world.” He had applied for work at 23 employment agencies for “management training jobs that didn’t exist,” and he discovered that “the best skill I had was being able to type 70 words a minute.” He took a job as a secretary to the marketing director of a New York publishing company. But he says he could “feel a lot of people wondering what I was doing there and if something was wrong with me.”

In fact, the men in traditional female jobs often move up the ladder fast. Mr. Anderson actually worked only seven months as a secretary. Then he got a higher level, better-payingjob as a placement counselor at an employment agency. Experts say, for example, that while men make up only a small fraction of elementary school teachers, a disproportionate number of elementary principals are men. Barbara Bergmann, an economist at the University of Maryland who has studied sex segregation at work, believes that’s partly because men have been raised to assert themselves and to assume responsibility. Men may also feel more compelled than women to advance, she suspects.