I’ve mentioned that I disagree with Helen Andrews’ Great Feminization treatise, just as I disagreed with her Boomers Fucked the World Up book. I like Helen Andrews in much the way I like Rick Hess—we see the world the same but then they state their conclusions and I’m like, huh? No. I am Valentin to their Peter, for Ender’s Game nerds.1 Like Megan McArdle, I readily acknowledge the existence of “toxic feminism”, which I personally find much worse than toxic masculinity. Like Matt Yglesias, I think it’s completely obvious that mandating female equal representation by civil rights law has not led to the equal representation in many fields, although he argues that’s evidence of sexism and I disagree.
I actually started this article to correct something Matt Yglesias said but I’ll do that in my next piece and instead will write instead of tweet some other thoughts.
First, I think Andrews’ point about HR being female is off-base. HR is not a field invented by women. It is a field invented by lawyers. HR is not your friend. It’s not your buddy. It’s not there to represent women or make the workplace more comfortable for women. HR exists to avoid lawsuits. However. HR is a field that doesn’t require specialization and does require organization and conflict-avoidance thinking. Unsurprisingly, women find that job description appealing, whereas men would be expected to prefer to actually do something rather than nag. But a female-dominated HR becomes a place that isn’t your friend in a very different way than a male dominated one would be and some of what Andrews observes is a result not of the civil rights law but of a preference set encouraged by the preponderance of women that might be different if men were more represented in HR workers and management.
My other comment is anecdotal. I spent 20 years in a very male dominated profession—tech—and have now spent 17 years in a very female dominated profession. Granted, it’s been 20 years since I was in tech, but my experience spans from corporate IT (the most female of tech worlds) to startups (the most male) and I was both an employee and a consultant in large and small firms in many states. My sample size for tech is pretty solid. On the other hand, I teach the subject with the highest percentage of males (math) in teaching communities with the highest percentage of males (high school), so my sample size there is more limited. But I know a lot about the legal settings for teachers, so there’s that.
Many, many jobs in tech require far more “female” traits (cooperation, conformity, conflict avoidance) than teaching does. Back in the day, I had to learn how to eat with chopsticks just to be included in the lunch meetings and not because anyone on the team was Asian. But in the 80s and 90s, teambuilding was premised on the fact that everyone on that team knew the difference between Szechuan and Cantonese. Group work is definitely a thing in tech. Bitching about team members is not a good plan, nor is confronting them directly. I never went into management, thank god, but every manager I knew (most of them male) said they spent a lot more time soothing group dynamics than they expected. But this demand for what would be described as female-dominant traits has done little to make the career more attractive for women technologists.
Teaching is the most independent of jobs. We have tremendous security, and it’s very hard to tell us what to do. A principal isn’t really a teacher’s boss. Admin has some domains, teachers have others. This is, in fact, something that reformers finally noticed after 30 years of passing laws that teachers were legally allowed to ignore. . Any time you hear a teacher say “Other teachers make me do [some bullshit thing]” laugh at them. Other teachers can’t make their colleagues do fuck all. Principals have limited ability to make demands, but colleagues have none. Similarly, whenever you hear a teacher talk about how great their “team” is, snicker quietly. No teacher has to be part of their team. Even if they’re on the team, they can just ignore it and any close inspection of “teacher teams” leads to the conclusion that they are temporary and voluntary and often filled with non-compliers that no one mentions. And so, the job of teaching is comprised primarily of abilities and attributes and power that men find attractive, but this has done nothing to make the job more attractive to men.
Teaching is still dominated by women because it’s a flexible, secure job that doesn’t require advancement and men who become teachers are much more likely to become administrators for the higher pay. Technology jobs are dominated by men because…well, frankly, I’ve never figured that one out. But I do think that men’s preference for advancement and pay is a preference factor that plays into fewer male teachers.
By the way: It’s very common to complain that boys are squelched and thwarted from their natural boyness by an overwhelmingly female teacher pool and forgive me, but that’s 97% bullshit. My male high school students are not a feminized, beaten population whose natural spirit was thwarted by evil elementary teachers. But even if the occasional elementary school teacher is a sexist shit who thinks boys are noisy and dirty, her ability to impose these mandates is not one granted by her co-workers. She doesn’t have to give a shit about her co-workers.
It would be a very bad idea to actively solicit more male teachers into elementary school. Leave the job for those women and minority of men who are naturally drawn to elementary without encouragement. Because an effort to make teaching little kids a more male-oriented profession would remind us of another male-dominated trait: sex offenders.
OK, on to my next piece on correcting Matt Yglesias.
Comment Contest: predict what the correction will be.
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