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Most Female and Male Occupations Since 1950
- MBCook 9y agoI'd love to see the list of jobs that flipped from female to male.
- mikestew 9y ago"Computer programmer" could be argued to fit that description.
- danielam 9y agoThough arguably, FWIW, the meaning of "computer programmer" has also changed.
- humanrebar 9y agoIt clearly changed. Just like "debt collector" used to involve more property repossession and less robocalling.
- Lio 9y agoThis isn't shown in the data in the article. That could be explained as the data only goes back to 1970 (that I could see, apologies if there's a way to go back further that I missed). Is there any publicly available data source that backs this up?
- Practicality 9y agoNothing that went from female to male?
- ddlatham 9y agoGaming Services Workers
- AstralStorm 9y agoThey have a selection of ones fluctuating. I'd be surprised if you would find any job typically female since 50s other than perhaps being a housekeeper and child care.
- aidenn0 9y ago> I'd be surprised if you would find any job typically female since 50s other than perhaps being a housekeeper and child care. All still more than 70% female: Elementary school teacher Flight attendant Registered nurses, also vocational nurses Wait Staff Occupational Therapists
- briandear 9y agoSocial workers and mental health counselors are overwhelmingly female (and white.)
- aidenn0 9y agoLook for jobs in the service industry. Many of them used to be nearly 100% female and are now 50-50
- mrweasel 9y agoI was wondering the same thing. "Also the Paper Goods Machine Setters, Operators, and Tenders" seems to be more in the female to male category and not fluctuating category.
- MBCook 9y agoThe text says there were a few but they're not called out.
- jedberg 9y agoTour and Travel Guides is one of them. I basically went to the circles thing in the middle and started moving my mouse around till I found one that I thought might have been female dominated in the past, then I checked it in the box below. Would be nice to get the data though.
- riphay 9y agoSeems to be a few as other comments have pointed out. But the female labour-force participation rate at the start of the dataset would make it difficult for individual job categories to switch from majority female to male over this particular time span.
- exDM69 9y agoProgrammers and computer operators did, but I can't find it in the page. "Computer" used to be a person crunching numbers using slide rules and mechanical calculators and it was an overwhelmingly female profession. When machines appeared, the operators were predominantly the same personnel that were doing it by hand earlier.
- ChrisSD 9y agoOf the software related occupations it lists, they don't seem to go before the 1970's. This is much too late to see that trend.
- astura 9y agoThey have "Software Developers, Applications and Systems Software" and "Computer Programmers." The latter goes back to 1970. However, I'm really not sure if there's supposed to be a difference between the two.
- Kiro 9y ago"Computer Programmers" is there but looks like it has always been dominated by men.
- exDM69 9y agoDoes the data set go all the way to the 50s for that profession?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- sbov 9y agoThere isn't a lot written about that time. So my understanding could be incorrect. But as far as I know, back in the 40s/50s, programmer meant something different and very specific than what people today might mean. Basically, a programmer would have all the algorithms and pseudocode written and chosen by someone else (a man), and your job as programmer was to translate (for pseudocode) or transcribe (when provided more direct instructions) that into the computer. Even this was not easy though - programmers may have had to debug the pseudocode or a broken computer (not nearly as reliable as our modern ones). Once it was revealed it wasn't a straightforward process, men took over. My understanding is that this happened relatively quickly - in the 50s or 60s. But, still, it was a job most people on here probably wouldn't care for. If anyone has any good books on this subject, I would love some recommendations.
- astura 9y ago>Between 1950 and 2015, there were 82 occupations out of 459 that flipped from male to female and/or female to male. Out of the 82, 72 shifted from male to female majority. There were 28 occupations that shifted from majority female to male.
- TorKlingberg 9y agoFrom click the random button for a while, a lot food food-related jobs have become more male. Chefs and Cooks for example.
- Snoozle 9y agoI think that regardless of your social or political stance of anything regarding males, females, workplaces, salaries, or sexism, more data is always nice to have. Now I'm going to figure out how to twist this into fitting my own personal world view and then make a news article about it.
- justinjlynn 9y ago> Now I'm going to figure out how to twist this into fitting my own personal world view and then make a news article about it. Not cynical enough. 5/10
- komali2 9y agoNot obfuscated enough. 27/54
- paulddraper 9y agoData is nice, but please don't forget lots and lots of anecotes in your article!
- scarmig 9y agoThere's a study that indicates an interesting trend: you can have articles that have hard data, have soft anecdotes, or have both. Of those, the ones that try to do both are significantly less convincing than the ones that solely focus on one approach. I know a guy who loves articles that do both though, so YMMV.
- malandrew 9y agoHave a citation for that with data?
- scarmig 9y agoSo, having spent some time trying to track it down, the best I found was [0], which wasn't nearly as strong as I suggested: "In an experiment, people read a realistic persuasive message that was relevant to them. Results showed that anecdotal evidence does not benefit from the inclusion of statistical evidence or from its intrinsic quality." I originally heard about this from Kevin Drum [1], but I was unable to track down the actual study he alludes to. That said, he does link to an interview [2] with... an anecdote about the use of data: "We have an experiment of helping a starving child. A certain percentage of people help [by donating money to the kid]. Then we have another condition with a different group, same child, same situation, except we put the numbers of the statistics of starvation next to her picture, and the donations dropped in half." [0] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163853X.2017.1312195 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0163853X.2017.13... [1] http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/facts-or-anecdotes-pick-one-and-stick-with-it/ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/08/facts-or-anecd... [2] https://www.vox.com/explainers/2017/7/19/15925506/psychic-numbing-paul-slovic-apathy https://www.vox.com/explainers/2017/7/19/15925506/psychic-nu...
- tlb 9y agoAccording to the first visual, secretaries are 108% female and carpenters are -10% female. Don't trust this data too much.
- l0b0 9y agoYep, this is a typical example of statistical lying[1] - clearly the data is not represented in such a way that you can get the accurate numbers from the visualisation. I really don't understand why the parent is being downvoted. [1] http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Lie_Factor http://www.infovis-wiki.net/index.php?title=Lie_Factor
- nebulous1 9y agoI'm not sure that statistical lying entirely fits here. The general shape of the visual hasn't been challenged, just the location of the percentage markings. Of course, this doesn't inspire confidence in the visual as a whole, but seems more likely to be a typo or technical issue than an actual lie ( I can't see a benefit to any argument by having impossible data points on both side of the graph ).
- rtpg 9y agoI think the technical issue is related to the circles and their sizes. Feels like the best solution would be to remove the percentages, with more of a vague "more female" or "more male"
- paulddraper 9y agoBut we need the (accurate) scale. Are carpenters 48% female and teachers 52% female? Or is it 5% and 95%? Or 108% and -10%?
- dEnigma 9y agoI was just about to make the same compaint; the first diagram is really confusing. They also say that "carpenters" was the "most male" job, but "Pipelayers, etc." is clearly to the left of it in the diagram.
- lawlessone 9y agoSeems like while female employment has increased much much more than male employment has decreased.
- tzs 9y agoSone of these may be more skewed than they should be due to similar jobs sometimes having more than one title, with the different titles being strongly associated with gender. For example, in a small organization one person might perform the duties of a janitor and of a maid. If that person is male he will probably be called a janitor, and if that person is female she will probably be called a maid.
- paulddraper 9y agoIndeed, the categories are "Maids and Housekeeping Cleaners" (predominantly female) and "Janitors and Building Cleaners" (predominantly male). That said, I'm not convinced there's a significant classification bias.
- heartbreak 9y agoThe story behind AVMA's push to become more inclusive for women is an interesting one. You can see the results in the profession lookup under "Veterinarians" on the page. The tech community could certainly learn lessons from that campaign, both what to do and what not to do in order to try to balance out gender disparity in tech.
- khawkins 9y agoWent to a graduation at NC State, one of the top veterinarian schools, and one of the takeaways was that we're not going to to see gender parity any time soon. This profession will be dominated by women over the next few decades.
- heartbreak 9y agoThe story here is that it was 100% male a generation ago.
- russdill 9y agoI think the Veterinarian one shows that some of these numbers are seriously lagging. It'd be interesting to see age plots with these. While the industry reached parity in 2010, college admission reached parity in about 1987: https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g1.gif https://www.avma.org/News/JAVMANews/PublishingImages/100215g...
- nv-vn 9y agoThat's true of the overall workforce and I don't see it as evidence of lag. I think the effect is caused by a disproportionate number of women who go to college but either don't ever enter the workforce or stop work after a few years. The cause for this is obviously pregnancy/raising children. So even if it was 50% in 1987, maybe 10% of women who studied to become veterinarians chose not to pursue a permanent career because they wanted to have kids either right after or a few years after finishing college.
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- kharms 9y agoInteresting. One of the theories I've heard regarding a possible decline in educational quality in the US was that in the 50s, the most qualified women became educators due to a lack of other jobs, while today they become CEOs, etc. On the surface this data seems to contradict that.
- MBCook 9y agoI wonder how much of if the gender disparity in education is pure preconceived notions. "All my teachers were women", so women are more 'teacherly' and more likely to be hired. More recent fears over men in proximity to kids probably reinforces this. I've certainly heard the theory you suggest and it does seem to make sense. Perhaps the data doesn't show that because as smart women have 'left' teaching they've been backfilled by the additional women joining the workforce that didn't used to be there? Interesting questions around the massively skewed jobs.
- jsonne 9y agoI would say this sort of thing goes well beyond gender and even "demographic" preconceived notions. I'm a freelance marketer and since I've had success in paid social in the past I am now the "paid social" guy despite the fact that I have a much broader skill set with areas I'm arguably more skilled in. I think human brains are lazy and just desperately want to put things in buckets.
- losteric 9y agoI've wondered the same, from a different angle: What happens to the structure of society when a larger fraction of intelligent people have access to higher education, the ability to easily relocate, and a financial incentive to work in finance, science, engineering, and applied-academia? How does that impact legislative and executive politics, community groups, and education (direct and educating the educators)?
- PKop 9y agoInteresting to think about in the context of overall rate of "moving" in the US has been declining for a while[0[ [0] https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/cb16-189_migration.html https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2016/comm/cb16...
- disconnected 9y agoMany of those shifts from a majority male workforce to a majority female workforce seem to happen quickly (or even abruptly) at around the 1960s/1970s. I'm not well versed in American history. Did anything significant happen then to cause this, or is it just an interesting anomaly?
- michaelleslie 9y agoMore women entered the workforce at that time, and households with more than one breadwinner became more common due to wage stagnation in the 70s, but I imagine there's more at play than just that.
- briandear 9y ago“The Pill” (widely available birth control.)
- mikestew 9y agoThere are a variety of possible contributing factors, primarily that it was the era of "women's lib", or in full "women's liberation". IOW, "a woman's place is in the home, preferably barefoot and pregnant" began to go out the window. Along with that was the civil rights era, meaning at the least the idea of equality for all. In summary, the U. S. began, even if just a little bit, to pull its head out of its ass with respect to equality and rights.
- vowelless 9y ago> "a woman's place is in the home, preferably barefoot and pregnant" Is this your own quote or something that was used before the women's lib era you reference ?
- tptacek 9y agoIt's obviously not his own quote; it's quite famous, and it is not an ironic coinage by the women's liberation movement.
- ciex 9y agoI would love to see the first diagram with circles coloured according to average wage of the respective occupation. I would expect to see more high-income male occupations and vice versa – a correlation that explains most of the gender pay gap.
- daveguy 9y agoYour statement reflects a misunderstanding of how the gender pay gap is analyzed. The pay gap is a gap between genders performing the same occupation. Therefore, job position/title is not a confounding factor. Some confounding factors (which are well known and usually accounted for) are length of time at the job, education level and prior experience. There is still a pay gap of ~5c/dollar adjusted. Non adjusted is 20c/dollar. There is no excuse for the adjusted discrepancy and the unadjusted discrepancy will require the crumbling of boys clubs.
- nv-vn 9y agoWhile there's a small discrepancy, the "77 cents on the dollar" thing has been spread so much that I think it's important to put into context the real differences. I agree with your statement, but it's also true to say "the gender wage gap [as presented in media/by politicians] is a myth." To me, both sides seem at least slightly deceptive. Saying it's a myth outright makes people forget that there's a real issue, but saying that it exists outright confirms the false notion of a 23% gap for the same work. It's obviously extremely unfair that a man and a woman doing the same exact job in the same exact way are getting different pay. One thing that I started wondering about while reading your comment (as a confounding variable, I guess) is proportions of men/women in every company. Clearly if women were much cheaper to employ, only women would be working many jobs. What I wonder about is whether the discrimination occurs because employers with more women pay less on average. As an example, Google might employ more women than Facebook (their culture may be seen as more friendly to women, for example, or their hiring practices may differ). But at the same time, it's entirely possible that Facebook pays higher on average regardless of gender. So in this situation, women are choosing (or being chosen for) more lower paying jobs in the same industry, and thus being discriminated against indirectly in terms of pay. Clearly this too is an issue, but it changes the ways that this issue can be addressed.
- lumberjack 9y agoI'd like to know what makes Physics so different from Math and Chemistry. Why are the latter almost equal but Physics is just so overwhelmingly male?
- umanwizard 9y agoProbably just depends on what they decide to include in each category. I can tell you that when I was studying math (2008-2013), almost all of my professors were male. But maybe "university professor" isn't the only thing they include in their data set for mathematicians, but for physics maybe it is.
- afsina 9y agoAFAIK Most woman Mathematicians are school teachers.
- jack-r-abbit 9y agoSince this data is about occupation and not training, it seems like the "Teacher" category would skew a lot of other categories. Is a Computer Programming Teacher in the "Teacher" category or the "Computer Programming" category? Probably "Teacher" since that is their occupation. But it hides the fact that they probably have the background & skills to be a programmer but chose a different outlet to use their knowledge.
- andreygrehov 9y agoIt's interesting, but I personally could not find any "surprises". Common job circles are pretty much obvious. Technological progress is probably one of the main reasons of the male->female shift.
- DINKDINK 9y agoI thought the section showing which fields had gender oscillations was an interesting axis to pivot on. Another interesting metric might be: "Jobs that the gender distribution has remained the most static" and "Once Female, Shifting to majority male" to contrast the section "ONCE MALE, SHIFTING TO MAJORITY FEMALE"
- VirtualAirwaves 9y agoDon't we need more men in primary and secondary school teaching? I would think so.
- kerkeslager 9y agoOne strong argument for this is that boys who are at the highest risk for crime, not graduating, lower incomes, etc. frequently lack positive make role models.
- andai 9y agoIndeed! It seems to me that parents have largely left parenting to schools, which aren't really designed for that.
- kerkeslager 9y agoEh, that's a potentially true narrative, but not really what I'm taking about. I'm referring more to lower income neighborhoods where as many as 80 percent of children's fathers will be absent for at least a year of their childhood.
- watwut 9y agoThat is highly discussed issue in pedagogic cycles - how to get and keep more males. For years. The answer usually ends up "yes, but they would come only if there would be higher social status and salaries for teachers". And no one knows how to achieve that. It is possible that money is not the only thing to keep males away, I dont recall any studies. Just that is the usual assumption. The fact that male teachers tend to come up as ironical response (nor saying you are doing this) to female-in-tech topic suggest also contributing cultural reason. Non trivial amount of people finds idea of male working with children (except coach for some reason) funny or absurd.
- humanrebar 9y ago> And no one knows how to achieve [higher status and salaries for teachers]. They do. There are lots of ways to do that. Just none that are attractive to the pedagogic establishment. > It is possible that money is not the only thing to keep males away I know male teachers who have had to deal with sexism (the men as sexual predators stuff). A non trivial amount of people find men untrustworthy with children.
- bbarn 9y agoSo according to that, software developers are around 20% female. That seems high to me, from my own experiences. Even still, with all the "let's get more women in tech" stuff I read, are there initiatives to get women in the other jobs even further to the left on that graph? (largely physical labor jobs)
- foldr 9y agoYes, of course there are. You can just google it. E.g. here is a relevant result for "women in construction": https://www.ucatt.org.uk/women-construction https://www.ucatt.org.uk/women-construction
- yung_endian 9y ago>That seems high to me, from my own experiences. It's almost as if your own individual experiences are not indicative of population-level trends at large
- joenot443 9y agoJust a friendly reminder as I noticed you're new - patronising, nonproductive comments like this don't go over as well here as they do on reddit.
- seizethecheese 9y agoYour comment is equally patronizing.
- shawndumas 9y agobut it was productive
- screaminghawk 9y agoI don't think the comment is nonproductive. The majority of "women in tech" issues like this post is referring to, are belittled/misunderstood due to the differences in individual experiences. It's a fair comment to point out at this sometimes works in the reverse as well (i.e. sometimes there are more woman and/or fewer problems).
- verelo 9y agoI wish there were three additional views to this data: 1) Average salary, adjust the circles such that they change shape based based on this value. 2) Total $ spent on employing people in this occupation 3) Average cost to train someone in this occupation It could get real interesting if you could intersect data like average salary with the number of people in a field, and the cost to benefit ratio of training v's income once on the job. I think we all know what direction it would point in, but it'd be nice to see it regardless...and hey, maybe i'm wrong? [although we know that's unlikely here]
- andai 9y agoWhat direction would it point in?
- 11thEarlOfMar 9y agoAutomotive Service Technicians and Mechanics 99% male Haven't considered that, but might be the highest level of imbalance.
- ArlenBales 9y agoThe only graph that surprised me is the one that says most bartenders are female now.
- ars 9y agoSurprised me at first as well, until I realized that a bartender is basically a waiter. Some are also people to chat with. Both are roles more often associated with females. And they live off of tips, and since most drinkers are male, females do better there as well.
- tgtweak 9y agoWould be very interesting to see which professions trended from very bias to near parity, and study those to see what truly influenced that change with the goal of applying those influences to other professions that remain biased or are trending away from equality.
- randyrand 9y agoI've said this before, but technology progress is the reason women now work outside the home. Not societal progress. Tasks that took all day in the 1900s - 1930s are now completely outdated or take minutes instead of hours. A housewife today would be bored out of her mind relative to how much work a 1900s era housewife had to do. Making 3 meals from near-scratch for 6+ people every day, raising 6-10 children so they could help on the farm, making and hand cleaning your family's own clothes, fetching water because you did not have home plumbing, etc etc etc. Today doing these tasks is either trivial or not necessary. Food prep has changed dramatically (freezers, microwaves, affordable food delivery, gas stoves, plumbing). As has the number of children because we no longer use child labor for farming. The movement of women into jobs outside of the home was a change brought primarily through tech innovations. Not feminist protesting, a societal "wake up" or anything like that. Additionally calling a 1990s era housewife as "not in the labor force" is pretty condescending given how much work they did in the home.
- Retric 9y agoSchool is really societal progress. Many mothers stay at home with very young children, but K-12 is a free babysitter.
- randyrand 9y agoWe basically implemented public schooling as soon as it was technologically feasible. The main issues were affording teachers, affording your kids to leave the farm, and affording transportation. The cost of books and classrooms was non-trivial for a long time as well.
- alexashka 9y agoYou make it sound as if as soon as farmers had surplus, we took that surplus and invested in public education. Wikipedia reads that England had their agricultural revolution in the 16th century and the population boomed to 5.7 million by 1750. [0] School however: "The Elementary Education Act 1880 insisted on compulsory attendance from 5 to 10 years.[20] For poorer families, ensuring their children attended school proved difficult, as it was more tempting to send them working if the opportunity to earn an extra income was available." [1] The main issue with public education was that people didn't want it, hence compulsory attendance. The British Empire ruled the world, and had an industrial revolution - "The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840" [2] Something tells me given the choice to go work in a factory and make money, or go get educated - people chose to go make some money. None of this had anything to do with technology not allowing the existence of public education - if anyone could afford it, it was the British Empire at the time. They just had other priorities - like bullying the world and trade. The usual capitalist stuff. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture#British_agricultural_revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_agriculture#British... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_England#Introduction_of_compulsory_education_1880 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Englan... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution
- jonthepirate 9y agoThe sad reality of the Bay Area is that many engineers would get into trouble for sharing this link at work.
- Cthulhu_ 9y agoCitation needed. It's a neutrally worded data visualization article, it doesn't even reference IT or the SV drama wrt gender distribution, nor does it pass judgment on the data it presents. (I shared it in my work slack, mind you I don't work in Bay Area and we haven't had trouble with aggressive political correctness etc yet)
- mahyarm 9y agoIt's hard to explain without being misconstrued. The bay area tech scene is embedded in the general culture of the SF Bay Area itself, and that culture is very sensitive to these topics. It's like opening a recent wound before letting it heal. Imagine a school shooting happened where you were recently and then some shared an article about the distribution of school shootings around the country on company chat. Just not a good thing to do.
- Clanan 9y agoI don't have a whole lot to add, except to say that this is a great article with excellent presentation of data (minus the flexible boundaries; -10% female construction!).
- zaroth 9y agoToo bad that first bubble chart isn't an animated GIF showing the changes over time. Or it could have a 'Year' slider under it.