Thursday, January 04, 2007

Welcome to the Pink Collar Ghetto, Have a Nice Day

This article, 10 Industries Women Rule posted on MSN and CareerBuilder only served to depress me more the other day.

What industries do women rule you may ask? Health care, education, social services, daycare, and the hospitality industries of course! Care giving and service professions that women have been pigeonholed into for a long time.

The article regals us with statistics on the projected growth of these industries, and only gives casual mention to the dismal pay in these fields. Child daycare services are expected to have a 34 % growth, but the annual pay is only $18,400. Which is barely above the federal poverty level for a family of one person.

Amidst all this bluster about how great these fields are for women, two tiny sentences stick out:

"Farr and Shatkin acknowledge that while women are making strides in the job market, they are still underpaid in comparison to men. In fields with an above-average percentage of women, the average earnings for the fields were $27,278, compared to $37,962 in fields with an above-average percentage of men."

It's a term some social scientists call "femminzation". Once an industry starts to attract a larger parentage of women, wages in the field tend to take a nose dive. Add that to the fact women are STILL only making 75 cents per every male dollar, a ratio that hasn't changed in DECADES, the wage outlook for working women looks less rosy. Especially when you factor in the rising costs of education, housing, and (somewhat ironically) childcare.

The one dark horse on the list is the Pharamceutical and Medical Manufacturing which is not a traditionally "feminine" industry. Interestingly enough, it also has the highest pay coming in at about 44,000 a year.

The message of this almost has a reverse effect. If you want a good job, these are the top 10 industries to avoid.

1 Comments:

At 9:48 PM , Blogger Andrew Spark said...

Maybe men are, on average, just better at doing most jobs. After all, I've never seen a male blogger or journalist spell feminization as "femminzation", percentage as "parentage", or pharmaceutical as "Pharamceutical"

 

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