Should we deliberately recruit more male teachers and nurses in order to raise pay?

[yubgummy]

Female-dominated professions in general have lower pay than men's.

The direction of causality is disputed, obviously.

But surely it can't hurt to try to bulk up the numbers of men a bit and see if it increases the prestige and then pay of the profession a bit? If nothing else, a whole bunch of big burly men on the picket lines would probably do wonders for the cause 😉

Maybe if they are paid more then it will attract a wider range of applicants.

It's not just about the pay. Teaching is hard.

You need to start talking to boys about entering caring professions or teaching when they are in primary school! By the time they are making decisions about their careers they've already subconsciously discounted many female dominated careers.....

It also doesn't help that one of the biggest influenced is role models. If they don't see male teachers they don't aspire to be a teacher so it's a vicious cycle really 🤷🏼‍♀️

Or we could just start treating women like they are humans.

But do you think it could work the other way around? Bring in the men first (via some affirmative action program, recruitment drive, scholarships etc) and see what that does.

We could try to eliminate sexism in the world... or we could think of creative ways to harness it!

My nephew applied to be an EYT...he got told that he should re-think as he would be regarded with suspicion for wanting to teach that particular group and to stick to secondary age teaching. If he had been a woman then there would have been no issue with it. If his treatment is anything to go by it's little wonder there are so few men teaching in primary schools.

School teachers used to be 100% male and low paid.

I think it’s the case that when women got the right to have a profession that required a Uni degree, the low paid professions were opened up first and that then over generations resulted in those fields becoming female dominated.

If we could recruit more teachers, male or female, we would.

Regardless, I’m not sure why you think recruiting male teachers would somehow increase salaries - it would surely be the opposite (if we ascribe to the theory that men are more money oriented), that you increase the salary to recruit more male teachers not recruit more male teachers in order to increase the salary. There’s literally no causation between your proposed action and your proposed outcome.

My nephew applied to be an EYT...he got told that he should re-think as he would be regarded with suspicion for wanting to teach that particular group and to stick to secondary age teaching. If he had been a woman then there would have been no issue with it. If his treatment is anything to go by it's little wonder there are so few men teaching in primary schools.

Who told him that?

There are already plenty of male secondary teachers

It’s well known that career paths dominated by women are low paid, and that pay increases for men. Try this www.epi.org/publication/womens-work-and-the-gender-pay-gap-how-discrimination-societal-norms-and-other-forces-affect-womens-occupational-choices-and-their-pay/

Whether such paths should deliberately try to attract men to raise pay is another matter entirely, and that same link above raises many of the problems involved in doing so. Leaving aside the tiny, tiny matter that too many men cannot be trusted near vulnerable people, consider whether attracting men will oust women from the career paths they can actually access. Further, whether those men will not immediately take over what higher pay routes are on offer: or whether they will merely attract more money to themselves, rather than the profession as a whole. The last likely is the means by which more money enters a profession. This is not the way to deal with the fundamental problem of male entitlement, arrogance and natural chauvinism.

His Uni tutor.

His Uni tutor.

That's disgusting. I hope he complained?

In my 30 years of Nursing experience it always seemed to be the male nurses who made their way up to the higher band jobs more quickly anyway, so by increasing more male nurses you'd probably make it even harder for female nurses to get promoted/ climb the ladder.

Primary schools do everything they possibly can to appoint men anyway, and even though men are a tiny minority, they end up in the senior positions, and no longer interested in the pay and conditions of the workers

Yep, it's called the glass elevator. Happens in youth/community/social work too

Teachers have always been notorious for constantly moaning about their salaries and their workloads and their hours and their pupils and their pensions and their employers and even their holidays, and at secondary level the proportions of men to women have always been fairly even. It’s a teacher thing, not a gender thing.

Here we go... 🙄

I was a teacher and I’d (off the record) give the same advice to someone I care about. I think we need male primary school teachers for a whole host of reasons but, the truth is, I wouldn’t want someone that I love doing it.

If you’re a good looking male primary school teacher then you’ll likely be sexually harassed by mothers of students. It’s demonstrated on multiple threads here over the years. Parents finding reasons to request meetings or finding out which gym they go to and signing up etc. There was one thread on here about inviting a child’s male primary school teacher over for dinner under the guise of wanting to discuss the child’s education and hoping it would develop into a date - it was met with a (frankly, embarrassing) chorus of “you never know, he might like you too” and “you only regret the chances you don’t take”.

Alternatively, an unattractive male primary school teacher is automatically a paedophile. Parents cannot accept that a man would choose that role for any other reason. Schools actually receive complaints from parents about having male members of staff just because they’re male. Again, on here a while ago, there was a thread about a male teacher doing up a reception-aged child’s coat and the OP complained to the school about him touching her child.

I’d love a world where sex doesn’t matter and both men and women have equality of opportunity but male primary school teachers get a hard time and I’d definitely warn someone of that reality if they sought my advice on whether to pursue that career path.

I have no idea if he did or not. He did apply for Reception/Year 1 positions but never got as far as a single interview. He was offered a job teaching Year 7's but has still yet to get an interview for an EYT position, so maybe the tutor had a point.

Male primary school teachers get fast tracked through the system as well. “The teaching workforce of England is consistently predominantly female; 75.5% as at November 2021 (2021/22), up from 74.4% in 2010/11.

Male teachers are more likely to work in secondary schools than nurseries and primary schools: 14.1% of nursery and primary school teachers are male, up from 12.7% in 2010/11. 35.3% of secondary school teachers are male, down from 37.8% in 2010/11.

Female teachers are less likely than their male counterparts to be in leadership positions (heads, deputy heads, assistant heads), however this difference is reducing over time. In 2021/22, 69.4% of leadership teachers were female, up from 65.9% in 2010/11. This compares to 76.8% of classroom teachers in 2021/22 and 75.7% in 2010/11”

from explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-workforce-in-england

Women do not have equality. We will always be pushed aside by men when they fancy it. Crone island / Amazon town would be extraordinarily attractive, if only there was still some room.

My son's Junior School has a male Head ( former teacher at the school ) and 50% male staff.

You missed out the advice that if they hate their jobs so much, they should just quit.
(Of course many are doing just that, hence the current teacher shortage.)

Good luck with that. Men don't gravitate to teaching/nursing, not only due to low pay. The type of caring work, close contact with young or unwell people is not always their preference. Men in those professionals actually do very well, and leapfrog the women for promotion into senior positions. Obviously men cannot be given jobs in these professions unless they are the best person for the job. The only way to attract more, quality male applications is by improving salary, benefits and conditions, and that ain't gonna happen.

If you're in one of these professions, would you prefer (assuming these are the only two options):

• your profession stays female-dominated with mostly women at the top, but overall salaries are lower
• your profession becomes male-dominated with mostly men at the top, but overall salaries are higher