> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
i.e. Nursing jobs mostly go to women not because men can’t do them because “nurses aren’t men”, per our current cultural norms.
There's been a lot of talk about "toxic masculinity" over the years but I've heard of and would worry about the female equivalent if I were considering a role in nursing as a man. Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances. Seems awful
> Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances.
In other words, men in nursing are treated to the same indignities that women experience in most jobs?
Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men. I recall reading a study about harassment in the restaurant industry. Both genders were harassed but harassment towards men was largely ignored in the analysis because it didn't fit the focus or narrative of the authors.
As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.
Rather, I am pointing out that irony in the hope that men, dismayed by the treatment of men in certain professions, but find within themselves the empathy to appreciate what women go through and to adjust their behavior accordingly.
What you're doing here is part of the problem. "Suck it up, buttercup!"
Many men would rather not work and deal with the financial and social consequences of that than deal with the toxicity both in the workplace and later on if they talk about it.
Out of that list only sexual advances apply to men. So no its not the same. Having worked in mostly female workplace i can confirm the pissing matches there are on a whole new level.
sarcasm? most of the people i hang with are nurses and instances of female bullying at the workplace is annoying at worst where their more sinister stories are about men stalking and making sexual advances. both male and female nurses telling me these stories at parties
When a company hires for an entry level public facing position, they always mean a young individual with a welcoming smile instead of a bald middle aged man who has been unemployed for two years. That's something that everybody knows and even the most progressive HR department, overtly or tacitly, will try to enforce. Society is full of small hidden prejudices that people don't really see as harmful.
The job itself caters to the natural disposition of women much more than men. That said, having a some male nurses in every hospital to me is mandatory. You need men in those teams for various reasons. But overall the job caters to women.
I also believe the number of female primary care physicians recently surpassed men. Or at least in Family Medicine, or something like that.
how? i dont think it caters to anyone particularly. in my experience its a quite physical job where, education being equal, caters toward motor skills, endurance, and strength. i think historically women were in nursing because they didnt fight in war, then the next generation saw nursing as a viable career for women repeat repeat repeat
There are a number of reasons at play here why the premise of this article does not make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For years, men have have had a much higher employment rate than women, e.g. 85 million men vs. 66 million women in the US in 2024 [1]. In other words, women are just catching up.
2. Women have a much higher rate of part-time jobs [1]. That is, a certain job would employ more women than men if women typically work part-time while men typically work full-time.
3. Employers are sometimes incentivized to hire women over men in case of equal qualification, e.g. [2]
4. Women earn better salaries than ever before, making it more attractive for them to apply to more jobs.
5. The statistics doesn't say anything about job migration: if I'm a woman who got a good job today but could get an even better one in half a year, will that be counted as two jobs given to a woman?
The premise of the article is exactly the same as the title. You’re making an assumption that anyone pointing out these numbers is claiming men are being oppressed, and then arguing against that. There’s no need. Almost no one is making that claim.
The real issue is the opposite narrative. The idea that men broadly oppressed women across history, preventing them from participating in economic roles, and that modern outcomes are primarily the result of that dynamic being corrected.
There are a number of reasons at play here why that premise doesn’t make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For most of history, labor was dictated by physical constraints and survival needs. Work like hunting, land clearing, construction, and early farming depended heavily on upper body strength and endurance, which skewed participation toward men. That’s a division of labor shaped by biology and environment, not a simple story of exclusion. As technology advanced, much of that physicality became unnecessary, which is a major driver of why participation has equalized in modern roles.
2. Women’s roles were not an absence from work, but a concentration in different forms of labor. Childbearing, childcare, food preparation, and household production were essential to survival, even if they don’t show up cleanly in modern employment statistics.
3. Many of the institutions we associate with modern economic life, including formalized science, engineering, and large-scale industry, were disproportionately created and originated in contexts where men were the primary participants. That’s not a claim about superiority, but it does mean the structure of what we now recognize as “work” and “progress” was heavily shaped by that historical imbalance.
4. The concept of a formal job market is relatively recent. In pre-industrial societies, most people, including men, were not participating in anything resembling today’s labor market. Applying modern employment categories backward creates a distorted picture of inclusion and exclusion.
5. Modern workforce participation is strongly driven by changes in technology and incentives. As physical constraints decreased and the returns to education and careers increased, more women entered and competed in the workforce. That shift is not well explained by a single narrative of oppression being lifted, but by broader structural changes.
> ... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
In fact, it has started to reverse. When controlled for experience and hours worked, and comparing pay for the same job, young women out-earn young men. The reason for this is simple: the ratio of men and women in college has flipped since the 90s, going from 60:40 in favor of men to now roughly 60:40 in favor of women.
We'll see if that remains true in the long-term, however, as women tend to pay a steep penalty, compensation-wise, for maternity leave.
> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
read a lot of backward assumptions for why "women hold nearly 80% of jobs" in health care. ill offer that its simply because when men fought in war, women worked as nurses. women used those skills to be nurses professionally. their kids saw women as nurses, making great money, and kids often try to do what they see adults around them do. over and over
theres nothing inherently feminine about nursing. its gritty job
It amazing how the language differ in this kind of article when the roles are reversed. In the past we talked about inclusion, discrimination, and industries that excluded women. Now we have statements like "make girly jobs appeal to manly men.". I can just imagine how well received the statement "make manly jobs appeal to girly women" would had been around 2010.
It seems unlikely that the success of women in STEM was based on making STEM more feminine, and helping women understand that they can have STEM roles and still stay feminine. It seems more plausible that affirmative action, privileged opportunities, exclusive spaces, and preferential hiring practices had more to do in making women in STEM successful than words about femininity and masculinity.
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!
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.
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.
Present day men aren't a threat to a government's leadership, when they have weed, video games and porn at home, and testosterone levels are at their lowest levels ever.
Manosphere is a symptom, not a problem. And manosphere is a boogie-man nothing burger that has no leverage over men, since it's co-opted by grifters and scammers trying selling you courses. There's no actual "leader" there that men recognize.
Manosphere is perfect breeding ground for your own private army since a neolith. Currently manosphere is abused by grifters, but put there somebody with ideology who actually wants to do as much damage as possible, pool money together and you have terrorist training camp.
And just to be clear, it really does not matter what ideology you will wrap your targets into.
Some of those that you'd call grifters are actually seen as leaders by those who claim to be in the movement. That's the problem. If they admit it or not, that's besides the point - if young men look to the likes of Andrew Tate or Clavicular as thought leaders, then they look to them as thought leaders and thus said actors are leaders if they want to be or not.
It's similar to how some athletes are viewed as role models even if they outright tell people "I'm not a role model, I just happen to be good at a sport".
Spare the fear mongering about "my testosterones!"
Testosterone levels, when adjusted for BMI, are consistent. If you dont control for BMI they are declining, but thats a false comparison. Weed, video games and porn at home have nothing to do with testosterone.
I don't really know how to word this, but it feels like we've lost a loving kind of wisdom as a society. In an effort to be better and provide access to women (a good thing), we have also pushed down men. I don't exactly know how we get back to lifting both up while evolving norms as a society. It seems so simple on the surface, but it doesn't seem to be happening in practice.
That's why historically, leaders would send those men to die in wars. Totally not what seems to be brewing right now.
Though present day men don't seem to be biting the "let's join the military and fight foreign wars for our corrupt baby-eating pedo leaders" nationalist propaganda, like they did generations ago.
The problem is that it became really hard to lead society into a war. See support for Iran war. It started basically on zero and kept cratering.
Now you want to lead these males to die in war, while they are fully aware of what you are doing? At best you will get dysfunctional army fragging itself constantly. At worst you will trigger unrest because males would rather should they have an agency than be sacrificed as cattle.
Which will likely be immediately called out as so. See recently (few days ago) when Orban's goons put explosives on gas pipes in Serbia going towards Hungary and then loudly blaming Ukraine.
Everybody immediately knew that this would make no sense for Ukraine to do that - i.e. Why would they just plant explosives to be found, when they would blow it up on spot if they really wanted?. Whole thing kind of fizzled out because nobody took the bait.
I don't think you should be downvoted: the article talks about this (kind of). It says there's a need of "framing jobs as more masculine" by eg emphasizing the physicality of them: making job names more masculine is totally in line with this (whether this "masculinisation" is the right solution is very debatable of course)
> while the DEI types waltzed right in with shitty grades
And you know that because you checked everyone's grades?
I'll also note, you didn't say your "white son" had good grades himself.
Given that "local state school" almost as a rule let most people in, I doubt your "white son"'s good grades. And besides, grades aren't what matters. SAT or ACT scores are what matters.
That would be true if those ideals were applied in alignment with liberal values. However, the most common material form of DEI is rooted in postmodernism and its various offshoot theories (queer theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, post-colonial theory, etc) in which colourblindness is inherently racist.
>Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men.
(...)
>The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall,
How can a part add more than the total? Are pure increase figures being mixed up with increase-reduction in the article? And if so, how is gender balanced in those figures?
No because the title is using the word "new jobs".
If there's 100 men and 100 women employed and 100 women get fired then you have an equal number of "newly" employed people (0).
If there's 100 men and 50 working women and you fire 100 men and hire 50 women then 100% of the new jobs went to Women. Same is if you didn't fire anybody and just hired 50 women.
If there's 100 men and a 100 women, you hire 50 men and 50 women, and separately 50 men are fired, total is +50 growth all women, despite the fact that non absolute job creation was balanced. I'm wondering if the author is missing this effect.
The net result is the same, but in the case in my example there is no barrier to men getting jobs.
In fact, if you start with a male dominated economy and it gets progressively balanced, you would see years of absolute female job creation, and that would not imply men are blocked from entering the workforce, just that the male dominated generations are exiting the market as they age and being replaced by a more balanced mix.
Here's another explanation. My hypothesis goes deeper than gender imbalance.
Most job interviews are theater nowadays. It's about conformity, performative culture fitting, agreeableness (read, willing to slave away without complaining).
On average, women tend to better suited for such processes. Along with immigrant groups.
- nursing: I don’t want to work 60-70 hours a week at your horrific body shop of a PE asset
- teaching: unruly kids. Bully’s get protected and those who stand up get punished. There’s some level of societal distrust of men around children not their own.
- social work: you’re exposed to some of the worst most horrific side of society constantly for peanut pay. You’re constantly in a position where you want to help people, but are constrained by things far outside your power.
Yeah I don’t care how “masculine” you try to frame them, just not interested.
That's a shallow analysis. These reasons (which are very reasonable) aren't inherently gendered, yet don't seem to deter women as they make up something like 80-90% of these jobs, they're not "just not interested".
So... seems like gender _does_ have something to do with that? Maybe just maybe more women gravitate towards these roles because these roles are associated with traditionally-feminine values (care, empathy, nurture)?
Maybe you're "just not interested" because as a man, you've been educated with traditionally-masculine values (strength? protection? power?), and if you had grown up in an environment where these roles are associated to these values, you'd be potentially-interested in them despite their obvious downsides
Men are also often the primary breadwinners in families, so they feel the need to take a higher paying job. In families where the husband's job pays well, the wife's career can be decided by personal fulfillment. Teachers are respected (but not paid well), nurses are respected and can earn a good amount, and social work is a very self-fulfilling role (I don't think society holds them in esteem more than other professionals).
If we want men to take up certain roles, we need to pay more. That's the simplicity of capitalism and free markets. We bend ourselves into knots trying to find clever and (maybe) cheaper solutions to thorny problems.
Postmodernist movements like DEI were never about objective reality — in fact the idea of an objective reality is outright rejected. It doesn't matter if men are being left out of jobs (statistically) — they're [according to the ideology] the eternal benefactors of invisible, omnipresent systemic privilege. This is of course the complete opposite of the ideals of liberalism and the human rights movement, which is why so many people are fundamentally at odds with common illiberal corporate policy today (although it's often difficult to articulate why without being dismissed as a bigot).
For more on this, I recommend Cynical Theories[0] by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
> It doesn't matter if men are being left out of jobs (statistically) — they're [according to the ideology] the eternal benefactors of invisible, omnipresent systemic privilege.
This implies a contradiction that doesn't exist.
Centuries ago, the aristocracy was statistically left out of jobs and also the eternal benefactors of (quite visible!) omnipresent systemic privilege.
There are multiple potential reasons for men to, statistically, be taking fewer of a set of newly created roles. It could certainly be some systemic bias against them, but it could easily also be that they are choosing not to take them for what are surely good reasons for themselves. It could be that fewer men are interested in new jobs right now period, relative to women. I'm sure there are many other potential explanations as well.
Paragraphs like this use a lot of words to not actually saying anything. If you don’t mind elaborating:
What about DEI rejects reality?
How have men /not/ been the clear benefactors of gender for effectively all of history, which negatively impacts women in the workplace today?
Human rights is about equality, and DEI achieves that through pulling up the mistreated to reach parity, no? Are you saying “it’s not equality unless everyone is treated equal”? (IE building a wheel chair ramp is not equality, because we’re treating disabled people different)
Oof… It's a big topic. That's why I referenced a book.
You'd have to read some of Lyotard's or Foucault's work to understand the roots of this. The idea is that all knowledge is shaped by language, power structures, and cultural context. This is where we get the idea that there isn't "the truth", but that instead there is "my truth".
> Human rights is about equality, and DEI achieves that through pulling up the mistreated to reach parity, no?
Equality is an overloaded term here, which is also a device prevalent in this ideology. Similarly, the term "normal" is taken to mean either statistically common or morally acceptable or both, depending on the argument and who's making it. That's where we get the idea of the problematics of heteronormativity, for example.
It is of course debatable (and has been hotly debated for decades) what qualifies as "mistreated", and to what quantity. As is what counts as "pulling up" versus paradoxical discrimination.
---
I'm sorry, but I can't boil down decades of philosophy into a neat paragraph for you.
> That parity masks the significant gains women have recently made in the labor market. Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
...
> Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
The article and journalism research should have been about the absurdity of this number. If there has been a 10% increase in the total number of nurses in a single year in the USA, either there is an on-going health crisis to be covered; or you know, the numbers are just garbage.
Academic achievement isn't rewarded socially for boys except a select core group. Therefore you don't get as much effort on boys who aren't in that core. Knock on effects could continue through the education system to the working world.
Also there is certainly a world right now that says, oh your a man? Life is pretty grand to be a man - especially if you are a certain social economic class. There is some truth to that but thats the exception not the rule.
In the US, there is (and has been) a pretty solid route from academic achievement to high incomes, and from there, higher incomes leads to larger selection of potential mates.
I don’t see how boys are not rewarded socially for academic achievement. If anything, men have lower physical attractiveness standards, so men are more rewarded than women for the same amount of academic achievement.
Congrats on not reading the article I guess? It explicitly points out "the lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs". Healthcare has always been women-heavy, this article [1] corroborates the 80% figure of the article. Nothing to do with positive action.
I suspected that within healthcare, women tend to occupy the lower-qualification roles more than the higher-qualification. This article [2] seems to confirm that: women are large majority in roles like nursing, hygienist, technologist but only occupy 44% of physician roles.
So... yeah sounds like despite women getting most new jobs, they're not exactly privileged, just lucky to be in a growing industry.
Even adjusted for maternity and career entry/exit differences, the gender pay gap is still big and real. And while there is overlap and outliers, many more women-dominated industries are at lower pay segments (and with fewer benefits) than industries dominated by men.
Also worth noting that several studies have shown pay differentials to be highly correlated with women being less likely to negotiate compensation or ask for less.
Underwater welding does pay extremely well. But to break into that field needs a commercial diving license and lots of time/skill at saturation diving. Basically, it is easier to train a diver to weld than it is to teach a welder to be a commercial diver. Many (US) entrants are ex-SEAL. There's about 20-25k such people worldwide and the death rate is about 1 in 15. Career ending injuries are about the same. If you need nightmare fuel: "Byford Dolphin".
The article is pretty clear, Women are getting most of the new jobs because they're in fields that Men largely don't try to enter (ex. Teaching).
Like whats the big initiative to increase the amount of Women with a Masters of Education? I've heard of a bunch for STEM but Men still dominate that field but that field is growing slower than other Women dominated ones so it's a non-sequitor.
> 1. Give massive preferential treatment to women during university
"Some schools are trying to attract male applicants by improving their sports programs; others invest more heavily in buying boys’ email addresses or give incentives to boys that they do not offer to girls — such as free stickers or baseball caps — for filling out information on the school website. Marketing materials are sometimes designed to speak specifically to young men. Heath Einstein, dean of admission of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, recalls fondly a pamphlet known internally as the “bro-chure,” which featured shots of the football team, a rock climber and a male student shoving cake in his mouth. But the easiest way for many competitive schools to fix their gender ratios lies in the selection process, at which point admissions officers often informally privilege male applicants, a tendency that critics say amounts to affirmative action for men."
It's not the NYT making the claims, they are merely reporting on them. And I think it's weird to just dismiss all evidence that conflicts with your priors. But fine, how about the NY Post:
Or how about this quote from a former admissions officer at Brandeis:
"We might admit the male student and wait-list the female student because of wanting to get closer to this sort of gender parity in terms of percentages in the class."
> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
i.e. Nursing jobs mostly go to women not because men can’t do them because “nurses aren’t men”, per our current cultural norms.
There's been a lot of talk about "toxic masculinity" over the years but I've heard of and would worry about the female equivalent if I were considering a role in nursing as a man. Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances. Seems awful
> Many stories where the only man in the room is expected to be, simultaneously, a punching bag, a mediator for drama, and a willing recipient of sexual advances.
In other words, men in nursing are treated to the same indignities that women experience in most jobs?
Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men. I recall reading a study about harassment in the restaurant industry. Both genders were harassed but harassment towards men was largely ignored in the analysis because it didn't fit the focus or narrative of the authors.
As a man who has worked in a predominantly female workplace, my experience has taught me that harassment is less about gender and more about power. Those in power will always feel entitled to behave poorly, regardless of gender.
> Or it might simply be that there is a lot of unreported or unacknowledged mistreatment of men.
I am sure that there's a lot of unreported mistreatment of anyone who represents a minority in a given profession.
Are you saying this should be acceptable behavior? Am eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
No, that's not at all what I'm saying.
Rather, I am pointing out that irony in the hope that men, dismayed by the treatment of men in certain professions, but find within themselves the empathy to appreciate what women go through and to adjust their behavior accordingly.
What you're doing here is part of the problem. "Suck it up, buttercup!"
Many men would rather not work and deal with the financial and social consequences of that than deal with the toxicity both in the workplace and later on if they talk about it.
> What you're doing here is part of the problem. "Suck it up, buttercup!"
I literally have no idea how you could have extracted that interpretation from my comment.
Out of that list only sexual advances apply to men. So no its not the same. Having worked in mostly female workplace i can confirm the pissing matches there are on a whole new level.
sarcasm? most of the people i hang with are nurses and instances of female bullying at the workplace is annoying at worst where their more sinister stories are about men stalking and making sexual advances. both male and female nurses telling me these stories at parties
Or also being the only male hire in something like HR department.
When a company hires for an entry level public facing position, they always mean a young individual with a welcoming smile instead of a bald middle aged man who has been unemployed for two years. That's something that everybody knows and even the most progressive HR department, overtly or tacitly, will try to enforce. Society is full of small hidden prejudices that people don't really see as harmful.
The job itself caters to the natural disposition of women much more than men. That said, having a some male nurses in every hospital to me is mandatory. You need men in those teams for various reasons. But overall the job caters to women.
I also believe the number of female primary care physicians recently surpassed men. Or at least in Family Medicine, or something like that.
how? i dont think it caters to anyone particularly. in my experience its a quite physical job where, education being equal, caters toward motor skills, endurance, and strength. i think historically women were in nursing because they didnt fight in war, then the next generation saw nursing as a viable career for women repeat repeat repeat
seems regional. in the pnw i have male friends who wish they went into nursing
edit: said "quite a few" originally but then only counted 3
There are a number of reasons at play here why the premise of this article does not make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For years, men have have had a much higher employment rate than women, e.g. 85 million men vs. 66 million women in the US in 2024 [1]. In other words, women are just catching up.
2. Women have a much higher rate of part-time jobs [1]. That is, a certain job would employ more women than men if women typically work part-time while men typically work full-time.
3. Employers are sometimes incentivized to hire women over men in case of equal qualification, e.g. [2]
4. Women earn better salaries than ever before, making it more attractive for them to apply to more jobs.
5. The statistics doesn't say anything about job migration: if I'm a woman who got a good job today but could get an even better one in half a year, will that be counted as two jobs given to a woman?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1378067/number-employed-...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4418903/
The premise of the article is exactly the same as the title. You’re making an assumption that anyone pointing out these numbers is claiming men are being oppressed, and then arguing against that. There’s no need. Almost no one is making that claim.
The real issue is the opposite narrative. The idea that men broadly oppressed women across history, preventing them from participating in economic roles, and that modern outcomes are primarily the result of that dynamic being corrected.
There are a number of reasons at play here why that premise doesn’t make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For most of history, labor was dictated by physical constraints and survival needs. Work like hunting, land clearing, construction, and early farming depended heavily on upper body strength and endurance, which skewed participation toward men. That’s a division of labor shaped by biology and environment, not a simple story of exclusion. As technology advanced, much of that physicality became unnecessary, which is a major driver of why participation has equalized in modern roles.
2. Women’s roles were not an absence from work, but a concentration in different forms of labor. Childbearing, childcare, food preparation, and household production were essential to survival, even if they don’t show up cleanly in modern employment statistics.
3. Many of the institutions we associate with modern economic life, including formalized science, engineering, and large-scale industry, were disproportionately created and originated in contexts where men were the primary participants. That’s not a claim about superiority, but it does mean the structure of what we now recognize as “work” and “progress” was heavily shaped by that historical imbalance.
4. The concept of a formal job market is relatively recent. In pre-industrial societies, most people, including men, were not participating in anything resembling today’s labor market. Applying modern employment categories backward creates a distorted picture of inclusion and exclusion.
5. Modern workforce participation is strongly driven by changes in technology and incentives. As physical constraints decreased and the returns to education and careers increased, more women entered and competed in the workforce. That shift is not well explained by a single narrative of oppression being lifted, but by broader structural changes.
> Employers are incentivized to hire women over men in case of equal qualification.
You can't say this, unsupported by evidence, in Trump's America, where revanchist 'white guy DEI' is the ordering of the world.
> Women earn better salaries than ever before
... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
What makes jobs that pay enough 'more attractive', generally, is rising fixed costs, like rent and energy, and stagnant wages.
> ... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
In fact, it has started to reverse. When controlled for experience and hours worked, and comparing pay for the same job, young women out-earn young men. The reason for this is simple: the ratio of men and women in college has flipped since the 90s, going from 60:40 in favor of men to now roughly 60:40 in favor of women.
We'll see if that remains true in the long-term, however, as women tend to pay a steep penalty, compensation-wise, for maternity leave.
> You can't say this, unsupported by evidence, in Trump's America, where revanchist 'white guy DEI' is the ordering of the world.
I've slightly toned down that statement and added a reference.
> ... This is a clever way of avoiding saying that the gendered pay gap still exists, in favor of men, but has been narrowing.
The argument is not about the gender pay gap (which I don't doubt) however.
I do agree though that increased cost of life puts a bigger pressure on everyone to find sources of income.
> The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
read a lot of backward assumptions for why "women hold nearly 80% of jobs" in health care. ill offer that its simply because when men fought in war, women worked as nurses. women used those skills to be nurses professionally. their kids saw women as nurses, making great money, and kids often try to do what they see adults around them do. over and over
theres nothing inherently feminine about nursing. its gritty job
It amazing how the language differ in this kind of article when the roles are reversed. In the past we talked about inclusion, discrimination, and industries that excluded women. Now we have statements like "make girly jobs appeal to manly men.". I can just imagine how well received the statement "make manly jobs appeal to girly women" would had been around 2010.
It seems unlikely that the success of women in STEM was based on making STEM more feminine, and helping women understand that they can have STEM roles and still stay feminine. It seems more plausible that affirmative action, privileged opportunities, exclusive spaces, and preferential hiring practices had more to do in making women in STEM successful than words about femininity and masculinity.
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.
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.
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.
people are only starting to care because really bad things happen when you start to get a large portion of the male population being disenfranchised.
Yep. A bunch of unemployed and "unempowered" men sitting around leads to them thinking things like: "Maybe we shouldn't be so cooperative anymore."
>"Maybe we shouldn't be so cooperative anymore."
Present day men aren't a threat to a government's leadership, when they have weed, video games and porn at home, and testosterone levels are at their lowest levels ever.
The whole manosphere problem shows that with correct leader you can forge your own army.
How does it show that? Do you have any real-life examples of a manosphere leader legitimately challenging an incumbent government apparatus?
Manosphere is a symptom, not a problem. And manosphere is a boogie-man nothing burger that has no leverage over men, since it's co-opted by grifters and scammers trying selling you courses. There's no actual "leader" there that men recognize.
Manosphere is perfect breeding ground for your own private army since a neolith. Currently manosphere is abused by grifters, but put there somebody with ideology who actually wants to do as much damage as possible, pool money together and you have terrorist training camp.
And just to be clear, it really does not matter what ideology you will wrap your targets into.
Some of those that you'd call grifters are actually seen as leaders by those who claim to be in the movement. That's the problem. If they admit it or not, that's besides the point - if young men look to the likes of Andrew Tate or Clavicular as thought leaders, then they look to them as thought leaders and thus said actors are leaders if they want to be or not.
It's similar to how some athletes are viewed as role models even if they outright tell people "I'm not a role model, I just happen to be good at a sport".
Spare the fear mongering about "my testosterones!"
Testosterone levels, when adjusted for BMI, are consistent. If you dont control for BMI they are declining, but thats a false comparison. Weed, video games and porn at home have nothing to do with testosterone.
This is almost certainly false. Source?
So far it seems to lead to "let's play some co-op slop on Steam" this weekend, rather than anything else.
The US is wealthy enough that the hedonistic treadmill works even for poor-ish disenfranchised men.
I don't really know how to word this, but it feels like we've lost a loving kind of wisdom as a society. In an effort to be better and provide access to women (a good thing), we have also pushed down men. I don't exactly know how we get back to lifting both up while evolving norms as a society. It seems so simple on the surface, but it doesn't seem to be happening in practice.
Point of no return.
There will be more fires and at least one rich person will be eaten.
this is far too optimistic
They’ll shoot at retarded puppets and minor figure heads.
But all those Epstein pedophile seem pretty safe now.
That's why historically, leaders would send those men to die in wars. Totally not what seems to be brewing right now.
Though present day men don't seem to be biting the "let's join the military and fight foreign wars for our corrupt baby-eating pedo leaders" nationalist propaganda, like they did generations ago.
The problem is that it became really hard to lead society into a war. See support for Iran war. It started basically on zero and kept cratering.
Now you want to lead these males to die in war, while they are fully aware of what you are doing? At best you will get dysfunctional army fragging itself constantly. At worst you will trigger unrest because males would rather should they have an agency than be sacrificed as cattle.
>See support for Iran war. It started basically on zero and kept cratering.
Until the glowies stage a false flag attack on home soil to pin it on Iran.
Which will likely be immediately called out as so. See recently (few days ago) when Orban's goons put explosives on gas pipes in Serbia going towards Hungary and then loudly blaming Ukraine.
Everybody immediately knew that this would make no sense for Ukraine to do that - i.e. Why would they just plant explosives to be found, when they would blow it up on spot if they really wanted?. Whole thing kind of fizzled out because nobody took the bait.
The care: "women are somehow victims again, men need to step up".
> Now Reeves says what's needed are policies and programs to draw male workers into fields such as nursing, teaching and social work.
This is also true for an entirely different reason: all three of these fields would benefit hugely from having more balanced gender ratios
First hurdle: get a guy accepting the label of "male nurse" in the days of the manosphere.
I don't think you should be downvoted: the article talks about this (kind of). It says there's a need of "framing jobs as more masculine" by eg emphasizing the physicality of them: making job names more masculine is totally in line with this (whether this "masculinisation" is the right solution is very debatable of course)
Almost like diversity, equality and inclusion is a net positive thing for everyone
Tell that to the people who can't get hired because of their gender and skin color (males who happen to be White).
They do not exist
What happened was unqualified people stopped getting jobs and found groups of people to blame it on.
My white son and his asian friends got denied for the local state school, while the DEI types waltzed right in with shitty grades.
Just say the N word when you mean it instead of DEI
> while the DEI types waltzed right in with shitty grades
And you know that because you checked everyone's grades?
I'll also note, you didn't say your "white son" had good grades himself.
Given that "local state school" almost as a rule let most people in, I doubt your "white son"'s good grades. And besides, grades aren't what matters. SAT or ACT scores are what matters.
Are you questioning someone's lived experience?
That would be true if those ideals were applied in alignment with liberal values. However, the most common material form of DEI is rooted in postmodernism and its various offshoot theories (queer theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, post-colonial theory, etc) in which colourblindness is inherently racist.
So, no, not really.
So many boogiemen in your post.
Tell me, exactly, why does the study of queer people mean diversity and inclusion is bad?
Not even going to touch your idea that colorblind racism isn't racism.
Your comment is clearly made in bad faith (and queer theory is not "the study of queer people").
Read this first, and then come back to me: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53052177-cynical-theorie...
Yeah, not reading a far right nonsense book. I'm a queer person, I think I know what queer theory is.
>Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men.
(...)
>The lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs. Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall,
How can a part add more than the total? Are pure increase figures being mixed up with increase-reduction in the article? And if so, how is gender balanced in those figures?
The rest of the economy could have added a negative number of jobs (meaning lost).
Yeah, but if we're splitting losses by gender as well then the gender difference might as well be due to men dominated fields getting shredded.
As in, balanced job creation + a shitton of mostly male tech workers fired = female growth.
No because the title is using the word "new jobs".
If there's 100 men and 100 women employed and 100 women get fired then you have an equal number of "newly" employed people (0).
If there's 100 men and 50 working women and you fire 100 men and hire 50 women then 100% of the new jobs went to Women. Same is if you didn't fire anybody and just hired 50 women.
If there's 100 men and a 100 women, you hire 50 men and 50 women, and separately 50 men are fired, total is +50 growth all women, despite the fact that non absolute job creation was balanced. I'm wondering if the author is missing this effect.
The net result is the same, but in the case in my example there is no barrier to men getting jobs.
In fact, if you start with a male dominated economy and it gets progressively balanced, you would see years of absolute female job creation, and that would not imply men are blocked from entering the workforce, just that the male dominated generations are exiting the market as they age and being replaced by a more balanced mix.
Here's another explanation. My hypothesis goes deeper than gender imbalance.
Most job interviews are theater nowadays. It's about conformity, performative culture fitting, agreeableness (read, willing to slave away without complaining).
On average, women tend to better suited for such processes. Along with immigrant groups.
> On average, women tend to better suited for such processes. Along with immigrant groups.
This is quite the claim, and I would understand anyone taking deep offence by it.
Can you substantiate it?
Please further explain this unabashed racism and sexism.
Schrödinger's immigrant, both actively refusing to conform to the host country's culture and best able to show host country's culture to get jobs
- nursing: I don’t want to work 60-70 hours a week at your horrific body shop of a PE asset
- teaching: unruly kids. Bully’s get protected and those who stand up get punished. There’s some level of societal distrust of men around children not their own.
- social work: you’re exposed to some of the worst most horrific side of society constantly for peanut pay. You’re constantly in a position where you want to help people, but are constrained by things far outside your power.
Yeah I don’t care how “masculine” you try to frame them, just not interested.
That's a shallow analysis. These reasons (which are very reasonable) aren't inherently gendered, yet don't seem to deter women as they make up something like 80-90% of these jobs, they're not "just not interested".
So... seems like gender _does_ have something to do with that? Maybe just maybe more women gravitate towards these roles because these roles are associated with traditionally-feminine values (care, empathy, nurture)?
Maybe you're "just not interested" because as a man, you've been educated with traditionally-masculine values (strength? protection? power?), and if you had grown up in an environment where these roles are associated to these values, you'd be potentially-interested in them despite their obvious downsides
Men are also often the primary breadwinners in families, so they feel the need to take a higher paying job. In families where the husband's job pays well, the wife's career can be decided by personal fulfillment. Teachers are respected (but not paid well), nurses are respected and can earn a good amount, and social work is a very self-fulfilling role (I don't think society holds them in esteem more than other professionals).
If we want men to take up certain roles, we need to pay more. That's the simplicity of capitalism and free markets. We bend ourselves into knots trying to find clever and (maybe) cheaper solutions to thorny problems.
Teachers paid well in some places, I checked it recently and in our school district(Seattle area) on average elementary school teacher makes 120-140k.
Postmodernist movements like DEI were never about objective reality — in fact the idea of an objective reality is outright rejected. It doesn't matter if men are being left out of jobs (statistically) — they're [according to the ideology] the eternal benefactors of invisible, omnipresent systemic privilege. This is of course the complete opposite of the ideals of liberalism and the human rights movement, which is why so many people are fundamentally at odds with common illiberal corporate policy today (although it's often difficult to articulate why without being dismissed as a bigot).
For more on this, I recommend Cynical Theories[0] by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53052177-cynical-theorie...
> It doesn't matter if men are being left out of jobs (statistically) — they're [according to the ideology] the eternal benefactors of invisible, omnipresent systemic privilege.
This implies a contradiction that doesn't exist.
Centuries ago, the aristocracy was statistically left out of jobs and also the eternal benefactors of (quite visible!) omnipresent systemic privilege.
There are multiple potential reasons for men to, statistically, be taking fewer of a set of newly created roles. It could certainly be some systemic bias against them, but it could easily also be that they are choosing not to take them for what are surely good reasons for themselves. It could be that fewer men are interested in new jobs right now period, relative to women. I'm sure there are many other potential explanations as well.
Paragraphs like this use a lot of words to not actually saying anything. If you don’t mind elaborating:
What about DEI rejects reality?
How have men /not/ been the clear benefactors of gender for effectively all of history, which negatively impacts women in the workplace today?
Human rights is about equality, and DEI achieves that through pulling up the mistreated to reach parity, no? Are you saying “it’s not equality unless everyone is treated equal”? (IE building a wheel chair ramp is not equality, because we’re treating disabled people different)
Oof… It's a big topic. That's why I referenced a book.
You'd have to read some of Lyotard's or Foucault's work to understand the roots of this. The idea is that all knowledge is shaped by language, power structures, and cultural context. This is where we get the idea that there isn't "the truth", but that instead there is "my truth".
> Human rights is about equality, and DEI achieves that through pulling up the mistreated to reach parity, no?
Equality is an overloaded term here, which is also a device prevalent in this ideology. Similarly, the term "normal" is taken to mean either statistically common or morally acceptable or both, depending on the argument and who's making it. That's where we get the idea of the problematics of heteronormativity, for example.
It is of course debatable (and has been hotly debated for decades) what qualifies as "mistreated", and to what quantity. As is what counts as "pulling up" versus paradoxical discrimination.
---
I'm sorry, but I can't boil down decades of philosophy into a neat paragraph for you.
They're self employed because workplaces are toxic.
Luckily the red flags are usually all over the website and walls of most places so you know not to even interview.
> That parity masks the significant gains women have recently made in the labor market. Of the 369,000 jobs the Labor Department says were created since the start of Trump's second term, nearly all — 348,000 of them — went to women, with only 21,000 going to men. That's nearly 17 times as many jobs filled by women as by men.
...
> Over the past 12 months, health care alone added 390,000 jobs, more than in the economy overall, making up for job losses elsewhere.
The article and journalism research should have been about the absurdity of this number. If there has been a 10% increase in the total number of nurses in a single year in the USA, either there is an on-going health crisis to be covered; or you know, the numbers are just garbage.
Rather than a health crisis it might just be the aging population. The generation born during the baby boom is getting pretty old right around now
and boy do they not like being told theyre old
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Academic achievement isn't rewarded socially for boys except a select core group. Therefore you don't get as much effort on boys who aren't in that core. Knock on effects could continue through the education system to the working world.
Also there is certainly a world right now that says, oh your a man? Life is pretty grand to be a man - especially if you are a certain social economic class. There is some truth to that but thats the exception not the rule.
In the US, there is (and has been) a pretty solid route from academic achievement to high incomes, and from there, higher incomes leads to larger selection of potential mates.
I don’t see how boys are not rewarded socially for academic achievement. If anything, men have lower physical attractiveness standards, so men are more rewarded than women for the same amount of academic achievement.
Congrats on not reading the article I guess? It explicitly points out "the lopsidedness was driven by huge growth in health care, where women hold nearly 80% of jobs". Healthcare has always been women-heavy, this article [1] corroborates the 80% figure of the article. Nothing to do with positive action.
I suspected that within healthcare, women tend to occupy the lower-qualification roles more than the higher-qualification. This article [2] seems to confirm that: women are large majority in roles like nursing, hygienist, technologist but only occupy 44% of physician roles.
So... yeah sounds like despite women getting most new jobs, they're not exactly privileged, just lucky to be in a growing industry.
[1] https://nchstats.com/us-health-industry-jobs/#:~:text=manufa...
[2] https://www.hiringlab.org/2025/08/26/august-labor-market-upd...
Citation needed, bad faith suspected.
Even adjusted for maternity and career entry/exit differences, the gender pay gap is still big and real. And while there is overlap and outliers, many more women-dominated industries are at lower pay segments (and with fewer benefits) than industries dominated by men.
> the gender pay gap is still big and real
Not that big however if you control for line of work (which industry), education, prior experience, and part-time vs. full-time employment.
Also worth noting that several studies have shown pay differentials to be highly correlated with women being less likely to negotiate compensation or ask for less.
https://www.nber.org/digest/apr13/do-women-avoid-salary-nego...
How about adjusted for people who are welding things underwater or throwing 25 kilo garbage bins into a truck?
Thanks for being a big strong tall sexy garbage welder man from Europe commenting on an US specific article.
When women put on scuba gear or touch a arc welder their ovaries explode, killing them instantly.
55lbs also is well known to instantly disable women who do, in fact, labor in physical jobs.
The moment a child turns 7 and reaches that weight, women lose the ability to move the child at all, leading to tragic outcomes.
In all seriousness, just because a certain job is socialized a certain way, doesn't imply a fundamental lack of ability.
Being the only woman on a certain kind of male team sucks so so much more than having to put on scuba gear or lifting something heavy.
This isn't the best way to use HN.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously;
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Underwater welding does pay extremely well. But to break into that field needs a commercial diving license and lots of time/skill at saturation diving. Basically, it is easier to train a diver to weld than it is to teach a welder to be a commercial diver. Many (US) entrants are ex-SEAL. There's about 20-25k such people worldwide and the death rate is about 1 in 15. Career ending injuries are about the same. If you need nightmare fuel: "Byford Dolphin".
Who still lifts garbage cans into a truck, male or female?
It's been cab and camera operated hydraulic lifts on wheelie bins for decades here.
Uh, anywhere around me in the US.
Is this even relevant to their post?
The article is pretty clear, Women are getting most of the new jobs because they're in fields that Men largely don't try to enter (ex. Teaching).
Like whats the big initiative to increase the amount of Women with a Masters of Education? I've heard of a bunch for STEM but Men still dominate that field but that field is growing slower than other Women dominated ones so it's a non-sequitor.
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> 1. Give massive preferential treatment to women during university
"Some schools are trying to attract male applicants by improving their sports programs; others invest more heavily in buying boys’ email addresses or give incentives to boys that they do not offer to girls — such as free stickers or baseball caps — for filling out information on the school website. Marketing materials are sometimes designed to speak specifically to young men. Heath Einstein, dean of admission of Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, recalls fondly a pamphlet known internally as the “bro-chure,” which featured shots of the football team, a rock climber and a male student shoving cake in his mouth. But the easiest way for many competitive schools to fix their gender ratios lies in the selection process, at which point admissions officers often informally privilege male applicants, a tendency that critics say amounts to affirmative action for men."
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/magazine/men-college-enro...
No one believes anything the NYT says.
It's not the NYT making the claims, they are merely reporting on them. And I think it's weird to just dismiss all evidence that conflicts with your priors. But fine, how about the NY Post:
https://nypost.com/2025/09/11/us-news/schools-may-be-using-a...
Or how about this quote from a former admissions officer at Brandeis:
"We might admit the male student and wait-list the female student because of wanting to get closer to this sort of gender parity in terms of percentages in the class."
https://hechingerreport.org/an-unnoticed-result-of-the-decli...
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