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mostly sad elves with occasional les misérables, interspersed with keysmashing about nirvana in fire. Currently and unexpectedly losing my mind about the old guard, sometimes reblogs to not-scythian. I also like: science, history, dwj, and books about faraway places. Here are some things I've written. What's with all these frogs? The Nirvana in Fire liveblog. ask away! Submit to my will

October 4, 2014

biorobo:

slyjinks:
pyrositshere:
internetgoose:
I’m gonna depress the hell out of all of you. ready? ok go
so, that “stop devaluing feminized work post”
nice idea and all
but the thing is, as soon as a decent number of women enter any field, it becomes “feminized,” and it becomes devalued.
as women enter a field in greater number, people become less willing to pay for it, the respect for it drops, and it’s seen as less of a big deal. it’s not about the job- it’s about the number of women in the job.
observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field. so has happened with scores of other areas; nursing comes to mind
so the thing is, it’s not the work or the job that has to be uplifted and seen as more respectable. it will never work out, until people start seeing women as respectable
but there’s a doozy and who the fuck knows if it’s ever happening in my life time
“observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field.”
Personal anecdote time! I’m in a biology graduate program. An acquaintance wanted to introduce some guy to me because his son was thinking about becoming an undergrad science major. When he found out I was in the biology department, he grinned and said, “Well, I guess that’s kind of related to science.”
I gave him what I hope was an icy look and said, “Isn’t it strange how men outside the field started saying that right around the time biology majors shifted from mostly male to mostly female?”
The guy got this look on his face like he was about to play the “just a joke” card, and then an older woman who had been standing nearby, talking to someone else, turned to me and said, “The same thing happened with real estate.” She went on to explain that, over the course of the career, the male-to-female ratio among real estate agents had dropped, and the pay and “prestige factor” of that job dropped along with it.
It’s also interesting to look at fields where the reverse pattern happens, such as computer programming. Computer programming used to be a female-dominated field, but, in order to raise the prestige of the field, new entry tests and hiring practices were instituted to discourage the hiring of women. Because, naturally, there’s no way a field can be dominated by women and prestigious at the same time (reference: Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls”).
I’ve argued this exact thing before! Biology was NEVER considered a soft science before women entered. And medicine is now losing prestige too because women are becoming doctors instead of staying in lower positions. Suddenly these mentally rigorous fields based on insight and analysis are “just memorization” or some other bullshit about how they’re not REALLY using “intelligence.”