Comment by jki275 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jki275 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I would take strong exception your comment that teaching and nursing are "lower status" careers. My mother, grandmother, and grandfather all taught their entire lives and contributed greatly to society over the course of their lifetimes, and a college professor is a high status position by any objective measure. It's a position I would like to attain but never will because I simply don't have the time to put into it, and even though I have a good career in tech I wish I could follow in their footsteps at times.

Nursing also pays quite well -- perhaps not quite the level of FAANG salaries, but six figure salaries in nursing are not at all uncommon, and relative to the education required to get into that career it is a very good return on investment. Also, nursing is absolutely not a low status career by any metric I know of either.

You're trying to make a point, I get that -- and perhaps you could use other career fields to make it more legitimately, but the previous poster has a very good point as well. People gravitate towards careers that interest them -- my mother was never going to write software because she has no interest in that field, but she loved to teach and chose to do so her entire life. I love to teach as well, but I don't have the aptitude for dealing with an academic career.

To be clear, by lower status (and I said "lower", not "low", very specifically) I was not saying anything negative about those professions or the people who work in them. I was only referring to their status within society at the moment, in that they are not accorded great power or influence, or feted in the same way as e.g. tech entrepreneurs, doctors, or lawyers are. I think that nursing and teaching should be much higher status jobs than they currently are and I think their importance is undervalued, which frequently tends to be the case for professions dominated by women.

You mention college professor as a high status position, which I think supports the point I was making, as whilst the majority of school teachers are women, the majority of professors are men.

As to people gravitating towards careers that interest them, I think that is begging the question a bit, as it avoids considering why people gravitate towards the positions that they do. Are women more likely to go into nursing than into tech because of some intrinsic preference, or because nursing is much more frequently presented as an appropriate career path for them than tech, and they can currently see a lot more women doing that than applying to YC or whatever? I would suspect the latter.

Depends on the field. Many fields have more women as professors than men -- just anecdotally in my (admittedly small sample size) family more women have been professors than men.

Nursing, to me, is a relatively high status field that offers a good salary and a great deal of flexibility.

Maybe in the 50's we were telling women they could only be nurses or teachers, but that's really not been an issue for a lot of years. There are plenty of women entrepreneurs, and I know plenty of women engineers -- I've worked with them and for them, and they've worked for me over the years. While this doesn't fit the new narrative, I haven't seen anybody telling women they can't be engineers or whatever else they want to be for a long time now.

Low status isn't the same thing as low value. One of our big problems as a society is that educators don't get half the respect their position deserves.

I agree with you completely on that -- but even to call them low status is in my opinion simply inaccurate. Even teachers who aren't paid well are still not "low status" like a bartender or custodian or something that would more commonly (not saying I agree because I'm not a fan of such labels..) be considered a "low status" occupation.

One of the things I appreciate about Japanese society is the fact that pretty much anyone who has a profession is proud of their profession, is paid well for it, and it's generally not considered proper to look down on someone for their position. Everyone contributes to society and that's how it should be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com