The country has seen a drastic shift away from jobs that require physical strength. Less than a tenth of jobs today require heavy lifting, a sector once dominated by men.
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Jung Getty / Getty Images
The country has seen a drastic shift away from jobs that require physical strength. Less than a tenth of jobs today require heavy lifting, a sector once dominated by men.
Jung Getty / Getty Images
Friday amount of work from the Department of Labor reveals a worrying continuing trend among men: An increasingly small percentage of them are working.
Consider men of the so-called primary age, between 25 and 54.
60 years ago, nearly 97 percent of men in that group were working or looking for work. Since then, there has been a steady decline. In October, the figure was 88.5%, down slightly from two months earlier.
In a new book, Brookings Institution scholar Richard V. Reeves sounds the alarm about men’s struggles, both economically and socially, begging policymakers and society at large. Pay attention to what’s happening and intervene.
Title Of men and men, The book explores the economic, social, and cultural changes that have forced men to marginalize the economy, including the loss of jobs in male-dominated sectors such as manufacturing and the entry of women into the workforce, reducing the need for men to serve. as service providers for their families.
Instead of trying to revive an era long gone, Reeves argues that we should help men adapt to the jobs of the future – including many of the jobs that are now being performed more by women.
In an interview with NPR, Reeves warned that if nothing is done to help struggling men, families will become poorer and economic inequality will only worsen.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
New book by Richard V. Reeves Of men and men Discover why men struggle and what can be done to solve it.
Brookings Institution
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Brookings Institution
You were a little hesitant to write this book about boys and men, fearing some of the criticism you might receive for shifting the focus away from girls and women. But you call it a wrong choice. Can you explain that?
The reluctance is simply because of the way the debate is framed – it’s ‘Whose side are you on?’
But of course, most people in the world are perfectly capable of worrying about two things at once.
The danger in even addressing the specific challenges of boys and men is that it will be seen as a distraction from ongoing efforts to help women and girls. I think it was a wrong choice. Partly as a result of changes in recent decades, we both can and should now pay attention to both sides of gender inequality.
You say the economic relationship between men and women has changed so quickly that our culture has not yet kept up. Women went to work. They don’t have to rely on men for income.
It is important to realize that that was the central material goal of the postwar women’s movement – to ensure economic independence for women so that they would not have to be materially dependent on men. That was achieved to a very, very, very fast extent.
In 1979, only 13% of women earned more than the average man. Currently, 40% of women earn more than the average man. Forty percent of U.S. households have a woman as the breadwinner, four times the number a few decades ago.
It was an extraordinary success. But when it happens so fast, it’s hard for our culture to keep up. It is difficult for our ideas about fatherhood, motherhood, masculinity, femininity, family life to adapt so quickly as basic economics has changed.
Author Richard V. Reeves, senior economist at the Brookings Institution, has three grown sons. He said while he used to worry about three young men, now he is worried about millions.
Brookings Institution
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Brookings Institution
Author Richard V. Reeves, senior economist at the Brookings Institution, has three grown sons. He said while he used to worry about three young men, now he is worried about millions.
Brookings Institution
We didn’t come up with a new positive vision for men in this new gender-equal world, and the failure to adjust to and adapt to masculinity – it didn’t happen by itself. I think our collective culture of failing to do that is one of the root causes of some of the problems we see men and boys facing today.
You often hear about the gender pay gap – that women earn only 82 cents for every dollar a man earns. But as you write, this doesn’t tell the whole story. What has happened to men’s wages in recent decades?
There is still a gender pay gap, but that story has two sides. We’ve seen women’s wages rise across the board, but especially at the top. And we’ve actually seen a drop in men’s wages in the middle and the bottom. So most men in America today earn less than most men in 1979, which is an unusual economic retreat.
You have this entire population, half of the population, whose economies have fallen back to where they were more than four decades ago. And ironically that’s one of the reasons the gender pay gap is narrowing. I don’t think anyone wants to close the gap as men get poorer.
The general pattern is to increase overall wage inequality, but stagnate the wages of most American men. And that has created this unsettled economic situation.
The big shift in the labor market has moved away from those kinds of jobs that can be done primarily with physical fitness and/or with a relatively low level of education. According to the stereotype, the guy with a high school diploma could graduate from school and get a decent union job in a factory. And those jobs are becoming increasingly scarce due to these changes in the economy.
There has been a significant shift away from so-called “hardcore” jobs, jobs that require physical strength, such as manufacturing. You say the solution is not to bring more “muscular” jobs to men, but to help men adapt, to take up what you call the medical field. Talk about HEALTH.
So I think it’s tempting for politicians to imagine we can restore those old jobs. Honestly, it’s the magic wand. There is little that can actually be done to reverse such profound economic changes.
But where does the work come from? Many of them come in the fields of Health – health, education, administration and literacy. In a way, it’s a mirror image of STEM – science, technology, engineering, and math.
The Health professions include things like medicine and nursing, but also teaching, many health care professions, social work, psychology, those types of jobs that require a lot of verbal or technical skills. writing rather than math skills. By my calculations, for every STEM job that we will create between now and 2030, we will create about three Healthcare jobs.
In fact, there are some shortages in some of these professions, in areas like teaching and nursing. These are indeed industries that are looking for workers, but if they are, they have become more female-dominated in the past few decades.
About 27% of STEM workers today are women, which is not enough, but that number has increased from 8% in the 1980s. But in HEALTH jobs, there are fewer and fewer men. There are fewer men in the classroom, fewer male social workers, and a small percentage of men in fields like psychology.
Among psychologists under the age of 30, only 5% are men. It was a truly male profession in the 1980s. Back in 1980, and 40% of elementary and middle school teachers were men. Now the ratio is down to 1/10 in primary schools.
One of my sons works in early education. He can speak quite touchingly about the stigma you face as a man. People will question your motives. At worst, some will suggest, jokingly or not, that you may be motivated by pedophilia. “What is it about young children that appeals to you?” is the kind of question you hear.
There are some pretty nasty stereotypes surrounding men in those professions. And so we have to be realistic about that and say there are barriers. That means we have to work even harder to try to make those professions seem suitable for men.
We’ve had decades of scholarships to engage women in STEM. I think that’s great, but I think now we need scholarships to attract men to be HEALs.
In addition to employment, you also say that there are social benefits to having men fill these roles. Teachers for example.
Fifty percent of our students are male. I think the fact that they see so few male teachers – that’s a problem.
If you have a mental health problem and you want a psychologist, there will be men who would prefer a male therapist. I certainly did better with a male therapist.
You enter fields such as substance abuse counseling. Most substance abusers are men, but most substance abuse counselors are women. Most of the children mentioned with special needs are boys, but most teachers with special needs are women. And such.
Therefore, there is a growing mismatch between the gender of the user and the provider. I’m not saying it’s always important, and in some cases it might be better if it’s a woman. But there is enough evidence to suggest that sometimes it is good to have a man care for a boy or another man.
You note that there is not much recognition of these issues just for men and boys. What are the consequences of remaining silent on the matter?
I think the consequences of not looking at these problems in the face and dealing with them, first and foremost, are going to get worse. They won’t fix it on their own. They will need purposeful public policy to address them.
And on a deeper level, unresolved grievances can metastasize at the political level into grievances. And that can then be taken advantage of by some ingenious populists or online personalities or whoever.
Now enough young men, and men in general, feel that they are being neglected or ignored or dismissed. That makes some really fertile soil for some pretty bad stuff to be able to seed. And I think we are suffering the consequences of neglecting ourselves.
