The End of Women?

~ Laura

In The End of Men, Hanna Rosin argued that as the economy shifts, women are making adjustments more than men and finding jobs that support the family. Women, she argues, are more flexible and are finding work in government and social services, while men are still clinging to the old norms of union jobs that no longer exist.

I think women are in trouble, too. Traditional female-centric jobs are also in bad shape.

As the population shifts across the country, there is less need for new teachers. 239,000 teachers are trained each year and 98,000 are hired. My SIL, who works in Human Resources for the Cleveland hospitals, says that there are too many nurses now. With the cut backs in government, public service jobs aren’t there either. Meanwhile, people spending five or six years in local colleges and accumulating more debt.

The rules are changing rapidly, and a certain segment of the population hasn’t gotten the memo.

Published by Laura

16 thoughts on “The End of Women?”

  1. My guess is that there are shortages and surpluses in certain specialties of both nursing and teaching: too many elementary ed teachers and LPNs, not enough math teachers and nurse anesthetists. Teaching and nursing can still be viable careers but the pathways to success in those fields usually require more training and more debt.

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  2. Nursing/health care jobs still exist and the need will grow, but the health care “systems” want to pay as little as possible for labor. Also, the shortages/surpluses vary a lot by geography. I have a friend who recruits nurses. They get many applications from Canadians, who all want to work in southern California, not Wisconsin, South Dakota, or Cleveland.

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  3. I guess that Cleveland hospitals have too many nurses and don’t need Canadian nurses. Well, they have enough of nurses with Associates degrees. They need nurses with MA degrees.

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    1. Thinking about my sister’s experiences: I think she has an Associates. She could go on to get a bachelor’s, I guess, and she has considered that. But here’s the thing: people who go into nursing aren’t usually academic. They are practical and hands-on. Nursing school was a bit of a chore for my sister (especially when she had to take English classes to get her degree!), but she loves being on the floor *doing* nursing.

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  4. When I left Ohio, it had more restrictions on what nurse practitioners could do than other states. I don’t know if that has changed or not.

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    1. RNs and nurses with even more advanced training have a lot of opportunities outside of direct patient care. A lot of positions in public health, clinical research or hospital administration require a nursing degree without being considered “nursing” jobs.

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  6. A lot of America still hasn’t gotten the memo about things like outsourcing and computerization in all industries. My MIL still thinks everyone should be a pharmacist and I have tried in vain to explain to her that many of the things that pharmacists used to do (like check for interactions between medications) are now done automatically through computer programs and therefore it is no longer a growth industry. Eventually there will be robots that can perform physical therapy, I am sure, and all of those jobs which were previously kind of like safe fields where you could be guaranteed employment will vanish. Curious to see how Obamacare affects people’s desires to become doctors as well — aren’t incomes supposed to shrink?

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  7. I think (without trying to cite to data) that both the data and the caveats apply to the same trend in all employment: there are few if any no low-risk, location-specific, long term, direct path to employment any more. You need to market your specific skill set, find the employer who is looking for it, and move to take advantage of the opportunity.

    In nursing folks are levering efficiency (using the least qualified person for every job, so that a nurse who is trained, say, to place IVs does nothing but place them all day, while someone else takes the patient’s blood pressure) and lots of jobs get displaced to others with less medical qualifications (As an example, take the battle with school nurses about whether teachers will be required to perform insulin injections for diabetic students).

    In teaching, TFA and the growign associated organizations have become a means for producing a temp teaching workforce. It’s not in full swing yet, but I’m convinced that the new goal of the TFA is to produce a 2-year temporary work force (largely untrained and inexperienced) to substantial teaching needs (undercutting long term teaching). Decreasing the cost of teaching labor with a temp workforce then provides money for iPads and educational software (and planned curricula), all of which will fund centralized businesses (like Google centralizes the economic value of blogs).

    In tech, there was the drive towards outsourcing and now the drive towards providing visas so that the price of tech labor can remain that of a temporary workforce (or freelance, if you want to look at it from the other side).

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    1. (using the least qualified person for every job, so that a nurse who is trained, say, to place IVs does nothing but place them all day, while someone else takes the patient’s blood pressure)

      That’s not least qualified, that is most specialized and there is a very big difference. I don’t think you want to Taylorize every job, but if you ever have to get an IV or a blood draw, you should want the person who does them all day. So much less painful.

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      1. Agreed. Best blood draw I ever had was a hospital phlebotomist.

        My sister is currently a hospital floor nurse (LPN?) on Long Island. She is thinking of getting certified to do chemo so she can work in oncology. She got the job relatively soon after graduating nursing school. The hours kill her, but she does feel that a 12-hour shift is necessary on a hospital floor.

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      2. So true. Having had a number of bad blood draws over the years (I have squishy veins), I walk into labs announcing, “I have bad veins! Could I have the best person here?” It’s been years since I’ve had a bad experience (tfoo-tfoo) and I have deep, heartfelt appreciation for skilled phlebotomists.

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      3. OMG, I just had a PTSD flashback to the worst blood draw I ever had. I was in college or grad school and visiting my parents, and I had UTI symptoms so I went to a walk-in clinic on Long Island. OMFG. The doctor (or young snotty male in a white coat–for all I know they just dragged him off the street) became convinced I was pregnant and made me get a blood draw. I passed out it was so bad. I left and never went back. I forget what happened with the UTI. I was definitely not pregnant, though he might have been distracted by my explaining that the UTI was probably because I’d been having sex. (I’m thinking that was around the time I started dating my now-husband.)

        Oh ugh. Since then I’ve only gone to women doctors who get where I’m coming from.

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      4. Wendy,

        I had a somewhat similar experience in my early 20s with a doctor’s office nurse (a middle-aged Russian). I just left after a couple unsuccessful tries. The combination of bad veins and extreme squeamishness is what did me in. I’m a much better patient these days, but I’ve had lots of practice.

        By the way, my understanding of the medical conventional wisdom is that everybody is pregnant, until proven otherwise.

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  8. I would bet that many of the new teachers who were not hired either couldn’t get through the interview process, or couldn’t pass the state licensing tests. The National Council on Teacher Quality’s standards for giving an education school its highest ranking for “selection criteria” are “above average SAT or ACT, or at least a 3.0 GPA.” Only 36% of the undergraduate education schools, and 7% of the graduate programs, qualify as “likely drawing almost all candidates from the top half of students.”

    Note that the 50th percentile of the ACT lies around 20, whereas only 25% of ACT test takers met the ACT’s benchmarks for “college and career readiness.” The 50th percentile for the SAT lies around 1490, but the SAT’s benchmarks for “college and career readiness” starts at 1550.

    Of course, the students who take standardized tests for college admission are likely to be more academically oriented than the group of all US high school students. The national high school GPA lies around 2.94 (http://nces.ed.gov/ssbr/pages/transcript.asp?IndID=14), which before grade inflation should mean 2.94 = C, and a 3.0 would be a C+. The NCTQ’s aspirational standards, in other words, don’t set impossibly high standards for aspiring teachers–I’d regard them as about as low as you’d want to go.

    In other words, people may be graduating from ed schools who should not be teaching. That doesn’t mean there’s a shortage of teaching jobs. It is immoral and unethical for education schools to be taking tuition from students who need loans, to prepare them for positions the ed schools must know they will never secure.

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  9. We also have a problem with labor data. By the time it reaches the eyes of students or adults seeking a new job or further education, it’s out of date. Information on new jobs (think webmaster in the late 90s) isn’t easily captured so it’s hard to provide good guidance on up-and-coming jobs. One of the more interesting tools that has been developed is the computer analysis of job ads so that overall trends can be assessed as well as shifting skills requirements. I am not affiliated with Burning Glass but know of them and they do this sort of work.

    http://www.burning-glass.com/

    It is interesting stuff and has the potential of changing the timeliness of labor data provided to job seekers as well as students.

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