Women's Job Gains Come With a Catch, NYT Reporter Says

From

KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the

Record. I'm Michael Dunn. It's always a little strange when a thing can be both good and bad at the same time. For example, the stimulus checks given out during COVID literally helped save the economy, but of course all that money pouring in helped drive up record inflation. Another aspect of the economy that fits this mold is the rate of employment for women. Women have seen amazing gains in employment over the years, both in terms of sheer numbers, but also in fields that almost were exclusively the domain of men. And that's certainly great news. But as today's guest on the show tells it, some of those gains have occurred because many jobs and professions have been degraded to such a point that men don't want to do them anymore. A New York Times reporter on workplace issues joins us to explain. That's next on Oregon on the Record. Noam Scheiber, workplace reporter at The New York Times and the author of the recent book, Mutiny, The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. Noam, thanks so much for taking some time out to talk to us.

Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

I really enjoyed your piece. I thought it was very provocative recently that you wrote for The Times. The title was Trump's Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That's not an entirely good thing. What's going on here? What's going on in this sort of workplace dynamic we find ourselves in?

Yeah, so I think the standard story that people tell, which has a lot of truth to it, is that over the past 50 years or so, women have made extraordinary gains in the workforce. Back in 1970, men outnumbered women in the workforce two to one. And just this year, I believe, women actually outnumbered men for the first time. So a huge expansion of women in the workforce. As I said, anytime you have a group that's historically been excluded and suddenly or over a period of many years and decades, they gain access to jobs. That's that's a good thing. So I don't want to say that. But when sociologists and economists have unpacked the kind of details of what that's looked like, it's painted a more complicated picture. And in the story, I specifically focus on a book by a pair of sociologists named Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos. They wrote this book in the 90s called Job Cues and Gender Cues. And what they found is... If you look at a very high altitude, yes, women beginning in the 70s were really making inroads into fields that had been traditionally male. But once you unpack that, you saw that what was happening is men were kind of fleeing jobs that had fallen in status or had become degraded somehow or the pay was lower or opportunities for promotion had vanished. And so men were kind of leaving these occupations as they got degraded and women were entering in them and not just entering into these more degraded fields, but kind of getting stuck there. The term they used was ghettoized. And unfortunately, I think we've seen that, you know, even as women have continued to make these strides over the past several decades, they continue to kind of get ghettoized in these sort of lower status or more degraded jobs. And that's just been a