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Comment by endominus | Hacker News Reader

It's frustrating that the only suggestion the experts interviewed have here is essentially blue-washing woman-dominated jobs. "For instance, many health care jobs could be framed as roles requiring the strength to lift people. Preschools could highlight the need for teachers who serve as positive male role models." Just reads as that one SMBC comic - "how can we make math pink?" As if the only way they can understand people is through the most shallow stereotypes.

Yeah, you can totally fix the imbalance in the nursing sector by showing ads with a bunch of male nurses driving monster trucks into the ICU and crushing energy drink cans on patients' foreheads! Or have a cowboy ride his horse into the preschool, smoking a cigarette that he lights by dragging a match across his own thick stubble! This isn't a structural problem, it's just a question of marketing!

Insulting.

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Isn't it only a question of marketing?

There's only so many lumberjacks needed in an economy. Sure you can depress the wages for awhile but there's still a limit.

So you need Men do to something else and the way you do that is with marketing (and also with Men being unemployed until they accept a nursing job).

Well yeah but the real problem is a lot of jobs that go to women are not considered high status jobs. That’s the source of all of the gendering and gender imbalance of those jobs. Even computer programming was low status, which coincided with it being women-dominated once upon a time. We could fix the whole problem if we just convinced people to treat the people holding nursing, teaching, and childcare positions as if they we’re important members of society. And I mean this would fix the pay gap too.

There have been some studies that show once female participation in a field/career gets past about 40%, males tend to leave (or at a minimum, fail to enter) that field/career. Historically, school teachers and secretaries were male fields. Then in WW1, there weren't enough men available, so women were encouraged to enter those jobs. After WW1, those same jobs weren't seen as "manly" enough and male participation never recovered.

It's not a question of marketing, it's a question of progressivism.

We expanded job opportunities for women by telling them they can do anything, be anything, and he just as good as men at it. That they're built for anything, and that they aren't naturally forced to do anything one thing.

There are infinite ways to be a woman. There is one way to be a man. That's the problem. We should not be trying to convince men that nursing fits into that one way. Rather, we should be telling men that it's okay to have traditionally feminine jobs.

We've never had a progressive movement for men. We really require that if we're gonna get men, as a whole, to take these jobs seriously.

Psychiatric wards certainly benefit from burly guy nurses with good social skills and nerves of steel.

One of my relatives used to be a psychologist who did work in psychiatric facilities. He told me about a woman who was rather petite with multiple personalities. One of her personalities was a bug & burly type with anger management issues. When this personality got physical, it took several orderlies of notable size to restrain her.

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