Why do ''feminine'' jobs pay a lot less?

[Annie11111]

First being almost all male, second all female :

Engineer vs teacher - both require degrees
Plumber vs hairdresser - both trades
Construction worker vs cleaner - both manual work

Probably others as well.

I believe SRS is free on the NHS . Rumor has it you also get £1 mill spending money , Oxbridge entry and guaranteed FTSE 100 executive position right after uni. Enjoy you ride!

In the case of bin men and cleaners although I accept the skill level the same and I feel that the physical demands of the job re not the same. Wheelie bins have undoubtedly made the job easier but I still think being out in the pouring rain/freezing cold doing a physical job is harder than being in a warm/dry office polishing.

I thought it would be automatic as I started my man course. Will be far to busy for any of that surgery shite. Although I can feel my uterus shrivelling with each day closer I get.

AICM - have you ever been a cleaner? It is very physical work and usually involves lugging heavy equipment around. I cleaned for three summers at university and lost loads of weight but developed sciatica that I still have now. Polishing would be a small amount of a cleaners job.

Bin collection where I live is now done by wheeling the bin onto a tipping mechanism, then wheeling the empty bin back. I think it's much less physical these days, though still quite tiring, no doubt.

Oops, sorry, think AICM said most of what I just said!

Bigger

No I haven't been a cleaner. I accept that I may have underestimated the physical element involved. I think it's fair to say that most of the heavy equipment is on wheels and is been pulled over a completely flat surface. I also accept that some of it will have to be carried upstairs. So yes I do accept your point in part. However I still maintain that working on the bins is, hour for hour, a more physically demanding job than being an office cleaner with the added disadvantage of bad weather.

Sorry to hear about your sciatica.

being not been

Feminine jobs pay a lot less because females are considered lesser beings by the men who have organised the workplace.

For example, in Russia most doctors are female. And being a doctor is a very low-paid profession. Unlike nearly everywhere else in the world where most doctors are men and it's a high status profession. They have the same sort of training, take the same sort of degrees, but that pesky vagina means they can't possibly have the same status.

Sleepy - that is a point I have long observed about unions. A part of the back story to those equal pay claims is that the unions just didn't fight for the 'women's job' pay and conditions the way they did for men.

I didn't know that Basil. I wonder how it came to be 'female'?

Yep, brocialists have always been happy to throw women under the bus, whether it's on equal pay, rape, domestic violence, housework or anything else.

Socialism doesn't innoculate against misogyny unfortunately.

I think after the revolution there was a push to get women in the marketplace - Soviet society paid lip service to women's equality - and medicine was seen as caring.

Interesting. Whereas most countries saw it as academic and sciency.

Wasn't there a law firm behind a lot of the cases? They took on a few, realised that the unions just weren't fighting them & started advertising...

Yes I don't really know what went on there.

This was the article: www.theguardian.com/money/2007/aug/12/discrimination

Most early programmers were female, and it continued being a role popular amongst women for quite some time.

I didn't know that Basil but now I think about it all the Russian Doctors I know or have been treated by are women.

Also, Russia suffered very heavy losses in both World Wars, it is not so visible now but apparently there was a clear imbalance in the number of Men V Women in relevant age groups. Combined with the increase in manufacturing and industry, which of course needed real manly men, I can certainly see women being pushed towards becoming Doctors to fill the gap.

The thing being overlooked here to some extent is that women's professions are, historically, devalued BECAUSE they are women's professions--and for no other reason.

Secretarial labor, when it was masculine, not only paid more than it does today but also could lead to a job in the executive suites. As soon as women were secretaries, the job became "pink collar" with little/no hope of advancement, and since then, people act like this is simply how secretarial work has always been.

Teaching in the United States has seen its reputation as a profession and its pay fluctuate depending upon whether men or women were the dominant sex in teaching. Women historically have been brought in whenever men cost too much, as a wage suppression tactic.

And just in case you think this is because capitalists always want to lower wages, think again. When computer programming started as a profession in the 1940s, women were the primary computer programmers. They were paid extremely poorly. Only after people started realizing what a big deal computers were did programming them start to fall to men--along with prestige and big pay increases for the new crop of male programmers who rapidly pushed out their female co-workers.

Nursing has been a profession much derided as feminine, and underpaid for a very long time. Now that men are involving themselves in nursing, it turns out the profession is becoming more respected and that men who engage in it are being paid more than women.

Make no mistake: the differential you're seeing isn't just random. It is one of the most pervasive forms of sexism in our culture. Children can see the ways in which feminine professions (whichever ones we've deemed feminine recently) are devalued while masculine ones are lionized. It's no wonder that little girl children sometimes ask to be boys because they want to play football--after all, googling for "my black child wants to be white" will bring up dozens of heartbreaking stories about kids who have already observed racial divides and know which side they'd rather be on.

"devalued BECAUSE they are women's professions--and for no other reason." I don't think that's the sole reason, men are more likely to die in work related accidents and the more dangerous jobs will have a pay scale that reflects that. I would be interested to see how this shows in the pay gap and whether removing danger pay would still leave such a void.

Men are pushing into 'feminine jobs', I feel we've got to push the same way. We have to avoid devaluing the 'feminine' but help our young women realised there is no reasonable barrier to the other jobs.

"men are more likely to die in work related accidents and the more dangerous jobs will have a pay scale that reflects that."

Nope. Prostitution is probably the most dangerous job in the world.

Nursing's incredibly dangerous - there are regular incidents of violence at A&E depts.

Do you know AskBasil, when I thought about my post above I did not take working in the sex trade a 'job' and that was rather narrow minded of me.

Well there's a huge bunch of idiots who pretend it's exactly like any other job and want to normalise it. In some states, it is already legal and there's a big pretence that it's somehow safer and nicer than when it was illegal.