In her prescient 2012 book, “The End of Men,” my friend Hanna Rosin described a modern American dynamic between archetypes that she called “Plastic Woman” and “Cardboard Man.” These comic book characters represented American women who made miraculous social progress in the 20th century and American men who stalled out. That’s because women in the past 60 years or so have been able to be infinitely flexible and responsive to structural economic changes and men remained rigid planks. This hasn’t just caused a shift in the job market, it’s caused a shift in the marriage market, too. If men aren’t breadwinners, and they’re not caregivers, either — what are they for?
Rosin explains that Plastic Woman went “from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If a space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it.” By contrast, Cardboard Man “hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way.”
She added that a man’s sense of himself is often tied to having a traditionally masculine, physical job in construction, utility work or some kind of manufacturing. “They could move more quickly into new roles now open to them — college graduate, nurse, teacher, full-time father — but for some reason, they hesitate.”
A lot of Rosin’s book still rings true 12 years later. Though on the campaign trail both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promised to bring back those old-school, manly jobs, as Rebecca Patterson pointed out in an Opinion guest essay in October, manufacturing jobs are long gone and they’re not returning. “Even if every estimated open role is filled, the total employed in manufacturing would still be about three million short of its 1979 peak, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data,” Patterson noted.
Which is why I was so pleased to see that Cardboard Man may be softening up, even as the political posturing around him may not have shifted. According to Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, “The number of male registered nurses in the U.S. has nearly tripled since the early 2000s,” going “from about 140,000 in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2023.” In health care, wage and market growth exceed the national average, and people still need emergency surgeries even in recessions, CNN’s Bryan Mena notes. Health care jobs are particularly vital in rural parts of the country, where hospitals may be among the largest employers in the area.
Torry describes men who are moving into traditionally female jobs (or the “pink collar” sector) as rational economic actors who are dealing with the job market as it is, rather than as they wish it might be. “Many of the manufacturing jobs that are being moved overseas, replaced by automation or phased out of the American economy were mostly filled by men. As a result, other occupations traditionally dominated by women are now gaining a larger share of men, including elementary and middle schoolteachers and customer service representatives,” Torry writes.
Torry also notes that a lot of men come to nursing as a second career, often after spending some time in the military. Men are more likely to switch to teaching from another career than women are. I wonder if that’s because they’re less concerned with living up to antiquated stereotypes of manly jobs once their frontal lobes are fully formed and they have to worry about supporting a family.
There can be ample social benefits for men taking up these roles beyond just economic security. If more men return to female-dominated professions, they may bring better pay and more prestige with them, and they may also make the idea of men as caregivers more palatable and encouraged.
So what does this mean for women? There is evidence that when women enter and start dominating any field, the pay decreases. After looking at a study that analyzed United States census data from 1950 to 2000, my newsroom colleague Claire Cain Miller found that “when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.”
Any profession associated with care work and women is particularly undervalued. According to a 1999 study from Paula England and Nancy Folbre that Miller references, “Because caring labor is associated with women, cultural sexism militates against recognizing the value of the work.”
Though the feminist in me wishes that we would not just devalue anything that is associated with women, the realist in me recognizes that it’s good for society if we valorize nurses and teachers — including paying them better — and I don’t particularly care how we get to that outcome.
Because of our aging population, we’re going to need a lot more health care workers, so I’m not concerned about an increase of men in the field displacing women. Registered nursing is projected to grow faster than the average occupation, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates nearly 200,000 job openings each year between 2023 and 2033. Despite a projected decline in teaching employment between 2023 and 2033, there will still be more than 100,000 job openings each year because of current teachers leaving the profession — more than enough to go around.
I hope the normalization of men doing paid care work in the coming decades might go hand in hand with them doing more care work at home, too. Because if we start seeing caring in society as a less gendered activity, not as a low-status job, more men may be eager to do it.
This isn’t something that will happen overnight. Regardless of what politicians say, I think there’s nothing more powerful than seeing examples of men doing the unglamorous work of care day in and day out, especially for kids. I still remember when my older daughter broke her arm a few years back, the pediatric nurse at the E.R. was a young man who patiently answered all of her 47 questions about anesthesia, and little interactions like that can make an impression in aggregate.
The fact is that men are doing more caregiving at home than ever before, too, even if it’s still not equal. A 2021 report from New America about male caregiving found that “though more women than men said they have ever cared for adults or children with special needs (56 percent), more than four in 10 men (45 percent) said they, too, have been responsible for this often labor-intensive yet invisible and underappreciated care work.” We should be talking more about how showing up for your family — as millions of American men clearly do every day — is a form of masculine virtue.
While it’s true that there is a segment of the population that wants to remain cardboard for eternity, I think we do a disservice to the millions of men who are way more complicated, and who are willing to evolve. When I texted Rosin to tell her about the dramatic increase in men becoming nurses she was so excited to hear it, and told me: It’s about time. Maybe in another 20 years we can dispense with the cartoon characters altogether.
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The post Men in Caring Jobs Will Make Society More Equal appeared first on New York Times.
