To think this is a poor excuse for men not wanting to enter these jobs?

@JHound if you can get your hands on a copy of ‘Of Marriage and the Market’ I think you would appreciate the case studies! I’ve witnessed it in my own field of law. Formerly mostly women, low status, lower wages. Some significant regulatory changes then occurred that in turn made the field higher profile, and one that companies suddenly needed more expertise in. There was a massive upwards trend in wages for a while as companies
competed for the relatively few people with experience, and suddenly we started getting way more men trying to enter the field. In less than a decade we’ve gone from majority female applicants to my team, to mostly men. I knew it was likely to happen once I knew wages and status were on the increase, but it has been fascinating to observe it in action!

As far as primary school teaching is concerned I expect that in Scotland at least,where the job situation is terrible,that this will not encourage men to enter that profession

DD is on a primary school teaching degree, there are about 80 in her year. She reports there are 4 young men, and three of them are gay.

Probably why that PP thinks 20% women in an industry is “female doninated”.

Research?

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2016/04/the-simple-reason-for-the-gender-pay-gap-work-done-by-women-is-still-valued-less/#:~:text=She's%20not%20just%20saying%20this,the%20New%20York%20Times%20writes.

What can possibly explain this persistent pay gap?
Paula England, a professor at New York University and an authority on the gender pay gap, thinks it’s obvious: “It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance. It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less,” she explained in a different New York Times piece.
She’s not just saying this based on a hunch: along with Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania and Asaf Levanon of the University of Haifa, England has carried out one of the most exhaustive studies on the issue. Their findings suggest that women are not necessarily kept out of or choose not to enter high-paying and prestigious professions. Instead, when a job is dominated by women, it’s just not seen as important, and therefore pays less, even if it requires the same skills and education. The New York Times uses the example of janitors versus maids, jobs that are identical in every aspect except gender composition – and pay.

And as women start moving into traditionally male-dominated positions, the pay falls: “A 10% increase in proportion female is associated with .5% to 5% percent decrease in hourly wage in each decade,” the three researchers found.
The world of computer programming is the perfect example. Historically a female-dominated field, men started to take over in the 1980s. And as they did, things changed: “When male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige,” Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times writes.

I was responding to the poster who said that “as women enter a profession” there is a “steep decline in prestige” which is clearly nonsense in the examples I gave. It’s 1 in 5 at the consulant/partner level but much higher at lower levels with trainees being >50% female in both cases. So in that sense both surgery and city law are most certainly becoming feminised. We can look at medicine (as opposed to surgery) and dentistry in which there are more women overall and there there has not been a drop in wages, with some particularly female-dominated specialisms earning relatively higher than other specialisms.

And if we were to compare across jobs. Mechanical engineering has a far lower female % than law and medicine but is a lower paying and lower status career.

In Man Made Language, Dale Spender said when women speak 25% of the time, they were seen as having an equal contribution. If they speak 30% of the time, they're seen as dominating it.

That was about speaking in groups, and I don't know if the figures would be the same if it was a study today. But it wouldn't surprise me if they were, and it wouldn't surprise me if it was a similar figures for work-based participation.

It’s not “instances” it’s studies and data. You are responding to studies and data with “instances” and anecdote.

Your comment on “supply vs. demand” makes zero sense in this context. Why would supply vs. demand be the response for wages falling when an industry becomes feminised but wages rising when it becomes masculinised?

Now “why” it happens is a topic for debate but you are arguing with data and the output of empirical research because you don’t like what it shows.

The data shows the opposite though.

Or rather the data shows as it becomes female dominated (as opposed merely to women entering the field) average pay falls.

The opposite is true for fields that become male dominated (and the shift in status follows that too.)

1 in 20 vs. 1 in 5 is still not a feminised industry.

It is still overwhelmingly male.

The data on the trend is quite clear.

I hadn’t really thought about it , but yes all the veterinarians at the practice I take my pet to regularly are women ..and the vets at my previous practice were mostly women .
My female cousin married a male nurse and he has many male colleagues in his department.
Another male relative is a primary school teacher .
Nursing and teaching within a primary school would have been traditionally mainly female

There. Is. No. Conspiracy.

No, there isn't. But there is a lot of unconscious bias and discrimination going on.

I really don't know the direction of causation. I am very certain about the correlation though. I suppose there might be a vicious/virtuous cycle aspect to it which makes it hard to pin down.

But some further facts about this example. The classes covered various engineering and IT disciplines. The highest female % was about 40% and the lowest around 7% so the overall perception of value, status, prestige etc within the cohort would be quite influenced by what men find prestigious.

The high-status courses were either very abstract, e.g. very theoretical maths, computer science internals like compiler design etc, or they were "weed out" style classes with high failure rates e.g. advanced fluid dynamics or electrical engineering classes where you needed six different types of transforms before the maths became manageable etc. I would say that they were all heavily g-loaded if I can say that - it wasn't about having lots of repetitive homework etc.

I took some of these courses, not all and really struggled with some, as in truly hit the limits of my intelligence and I'm not stupid overall. FWIW this group also included some of the most esoteric and useless courses I took at uni, so there's that!

I think it is a combination of women being less interested in very abstract and impersonal systems design/analysis (but men valuing this skill and rating it high in status), and something about the OMG WEED-OUT positioning being a status attractor for men but a turn-off for women (also a concrete threat to grades which I think women care more about).

A class on the same topic run by a different instructor might have quite a different "profile" though. Similarly a corporate department, say "the data team" might be a cutting-edge research lab or a glorified data entry typing pool and this will influence status and M/F dynamics.

It's not about believing in a conspiracy. It's much subtler and more insidious than that.

How do subjects get a reputation as “intense” though? Do you think it has anything to do with the time commitment, abstract concepts that are difficult to understand, creative problem solving etc.? Or is just what percentage of men study the subject?

I have never, in all my life, heard anyone refer to a Medicine degree or a Biochemistry degree as easy, a “doss” degree, etc. despite those being dominated by female students year after year.

Just as an anecdote to the above. When I was in undergrad I found a list of the sex breakdowns in all the engineering classes and sorted them from lowest female % to highest.

It was essentially like reading a list of "most intense/hardcore" classes by reputation. Inevitably if I asked people "should I do elective X or Y", where X had a higher male %, they would say that X was a "legendary" course or something, or if they said that I should do Y it was because it'll be "a total doss" or something along those lines.

I can't think of a single exception. I was very curious at the time so I tested it quite a bit. I am not sure which way around any causation may have gone, though...

You can see this within tech subfields too. There are quite a lot of women in frontend web dev, UX design etc but relatively fewer in say electronics design, machine learning etc. The latter are much more respected and seen as "harder" in the STEM sense i.e. more real, higher status, implies higher IQ etc.

I've often found it a bit of an interesting paradox as someone who works at the intersection of 2-3 quite male dominated fields. I'm always being asked to speak at "Women in X" events and I sometimes do, but I'm always like - hmm, is it in my long-term financial interest to encourage more women into this field? ;)

Anyway OP I agree - I think men don't enter this fields almost entirely due to status reasons - possibly pay as a secondary. There are some social reasons for sure but I'd say it's more a preference. Maybe there's something to the "woke" thing but again idk if I'd say that's intimidation so much as rational self-preservation...

If you want to believe there’s a gang of - presumably - old white men plotting to keep women down in IT or whatever profession (over a glass of scotch on a golf course?) then you’re free to believe that. How far can you really take the “the patriarchy is holding me down 😭” excuse in 2025, really?

People are made redundant based on performance. There is zero benefit to a business of sacking a woman, especially if she’s working harder than the men AND she’s costing you less (which is every woman in IT, it would appear from this thread). It makes no sense whatsoever.

And plenty of men have been unsuccessful when they’ve asked for a pay rise or put themselves forward for a promotion or applied for a job - these things are not unique to women.

There. Is. No. Conspiracy.

Women in my current industry fall off a cliff when it gets to senior roles. This doesn’t mean women aren’t capable of those roles or don’t self promote, the roles just aren’t there because they are filled by mediocre men who aren’t going anywhere. If anyone has any ideas as to how to prise plum jobs out of the hands of mediocre beige men I’m all ears 😁

Surely in most historic professions (i.e. not something new like IT) there's only one way for male percentages to go, and that is down. A hundred years ago women couldn't go into veterinary, now they can, as that happens of course it will affect the male %

What if you ask for payrises - just to make equal pay, for doing (more than) the same work as your male peers, you ask for promotions, you do advocate for yourself, and it still doesn't happen?

Women in IT are often better qualified than their male peers, and often with very solid experience. And yet they don't get allocated to the high-profile projects, they don't get the promotions and payrises as easily. Often it's the only woman in the department who gets made redundant. It gets very tiring, it's why there's a "leaky pipeline".

It takes a determined mindset to stick with it.

This was my first thought, rather than the pay aspect (which probably is a result of fewer men in the professions.)

Correlation is not causation and all that nonsense.

Exactly, what manager ever thinks…

“I’m going to hire this man. He’s worth £x, and that’s all I’d pay for a women, but because I love the patriarchy, I’m going to pay him more! Who cares if my profits are lower as a result, so long as a patriarchy continues!”

People get paid their market worth - period.

So? That’s always been the case, even when men were the majority.

If PP’s theory is correct that increased female representation brings pay down, then these specialisms would have experienced a relative drop in pay. But they haven’t. They’re both very lucrative still.