Gender Roles Are Still at Work

Peggy Biro didn’t plan to be a truck driver. But in 1996, laid off from her grocery-store management position and going through a bitter divorce, she began to consider it.

“They said you can be away in the truck 30 days at a time; I said that sounds like a good runaway job to me,” said Biro, who lives in the Northern California town of Anderson.

Five years later, she has remarried and settled down with Pomona-based KKW Trucking.

With her new husband she forms a relay team: Typically, one drives the 1,140 miles to Pomona and back for the pickup--two days at most--then hands the keys over to the other, who hauls the freight to its destination in the Northwest. That way, one spouse is always home with their four children, ages 9 to 15.

If it’s been a while since you glanced up at the truck in the next lane and saw a woman at the wheel, you’re not alone. Ninety-six percent of Biro’s colleagues are male, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data for 2000.

And truck driving isn’t the only occupation in which women are a distinct minority. When was the last time you saw a female plumber, carpenter or electrician?

Simple economics would seem to dictate that gender-driven occupational barriers would fall. Artificially limiting the applicant pool, after all, opens the door to a competitor moving in and reaping the benefits of the untapped source of labor. But certain occupational patterns continue to defy economic theory, suggesting that we are still a long way from a gender-blind work force.

Stereotypes affect both sexes. If you’re an executive interviewing for an administrative assistant, and you think nothing of it when the applicant walking into your office is a man, consider yourself unusually evolved.

“It’s very difficult for a male CEO to consider hiring a male administrative assistant,” said Terry Neese, who has headed a national executive search firm, Oklahoma City-based Terry Neese Personnel Services, since 1975. “We get in these comfort zones, and anything out of that comfort zone causes us stress.”

Jim Keville’s comfort zone includes teaching preschool.

As a graduate art student at UCLA, Keville began working at a summer camp for young children. He was hooked.

Upon graduating, Keville decided that a position working with children in which he also would have time to focus on his art would be ideal. For the last six years, he has taught 3- and 4-year-olds at Temple Isaiah Preschool in West Los Angeles, while selling his ceramic sculptures on the side.

“I get to go in and play with kids for four hours,” Keville said. “Building with blocks. Making art projects. Doing puzzles. Reading stories. Giving children the opportunities for self-discovery. It’s very rewarding.”

If it seems unusual to hear a man spelling out the joys of spending his days with preschoolers and boasting of having changed his share of diapers, it’s because it is. Nationwide, 99% of pre-kindergarten and kindergarten teachers are women.

Many people in today’s work force grew up at a time when professions were much more clearly ascribed to one gender. Women were teachers, nurses, secretaries, social workers, stewardesses and librarians; men were just about everything else.

That has changed dramatically. It wasn’t long ago that a female attorney or physician was a rarity; now, women are entering the legal and medical professions in roughly the same numbers as men. Women are accountants, clinical psychologists, life scientists and journalists. Even in traditionally male law enforcement, women populate 16% of the work force.

So why do some professions change while others remain stubbornly segregated? When fields such as law and medicine are achieving gender balance, why is engineering, despite substantial efforts to attract women, still 90% male?

In a generalized sense, the extent to which professions are dominated by one gender may be partly attributable to innate differences between the sexes--for example, the tendency for women to show more verbal aptitude and men to be more spatially inclined.

Women have not moved in great numbers into fields with high math requirements, said Barbara Gutek, professor of management and policy at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Some studies have suggested that teachers have lower expectations or are less encouraging toward girls in math, though that may be changing.

“I believe women have the intellectual wherewithal to succeed across the board,” said Nancy Pfotenhauer, president of the Independent Women’s Forum, a policy group in Washington. “But if you’re a young woman trying to determine what you’re better at than the next person, it’s more likely to be talking and writing than quantitative skills.”

Lifestyle factors also play a role. One reason teaching has remained a favored female occupation is that the hours and break schedules enable a mother to spend more time with her kids.

“Since women are still generally most responsible for raising the children, they often choose occupations in which they will have an easier time fitting child-rearing into their work lives,” said Sandra Schwartz Tangri, a psychologist at Howard University in Washington.

“If we’re still seeing different percentages of men and women going into jobs,” Pfotenhauer said, “some of that is quite simply a reflection of interests. It comes down to personal choice, and no amount of social engineering is going to change that.”

But Gutek believes that the culture of a predominantly male profession can effectively discourage a woman from pursuing her chosen field.

“If women perceive a chilly climate--co-workers feel they don’t belong there and are less likely to offer assistance, or they’re being passed over for promotions they deserve--they’re going to seek a friendlier environment,” she said.

That hasn’t been the case for Biro, who said her male truck-driving colleagues are more likely to offer a helping hand because of her gender. But she admits that a certain amount of unwanted sexual attention also comes with the territory.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re wearing a muumuu, curlers and flip-flops, everything ceases when you step out of your truck at a stop,” she said. “If I could listen in on what the men were saying while I was walking to the truck stop, I’d probably be appalled.”

Some male-dominated fields are much more difficult for women than others, according to Marion Gindes, a New York City psychologist who serves as a business consultant on workplace gender issues. In her experience, professions that involve a physical component, including law enforcement and fire fighting, have been less welcoming.

But even nonphysical occupations can be difficult for women when the culture supports gender stereotyping or sexual language and humor.

In certain settings, Gindes said, women feel uncomfortable but feel they must “join the boys” or risk losing business.

Gindes said she was told by one male executive that his company’s out-of-town clients expect to be taken to topless bars when they’re in town.

“He said, ‘It’s not that we don’t invite the women, it’s just that we know they don’t want to go,’ ” Gindes said. “So what do you do if you’re a woman? If you go, you’re intruding on male turf. But if you don’t go, you’re not making the kinds of connections with clients that can lead to promotions or additional business.”

Men tend to fare better in female-dominated professions than vice versa, Gindes said, often seeing their minority status as improving their chances for advancement.

“The [preschool] parents think it’s wonderful that there’s a male teacher,” Keville said.

Still, he said, certain assumptions are made based on his gender. “Some people are surprised I’m willing to change a diaper. And when we cook in the classroom, people think I might not be able to do that as well as the women, even though I do more cooking than my wife.”

For men, the problem with entering a traditionally female profession isn’t that they might be made to feel unwelcome as much as the fact that these professions have tended to be less compensated.

“Many people still assume that the man is going to be the primary wage earner, and men feel a certain amount of pressure to fulfill that role,” Gutek said.

Female-dominated professions also have held less prestige, she added.

But that, too, may be changing. “It will be very interesting to see the occupational trends in another generation,” said Michelle Larson, deputy director of the Department of Labor’s Women’s Bureau.

Today’s young workers grew up with fewer gender-specific occupational stereotypes than any previous generation, but they are the products of parents raised when jobs were likely to be gender-assigned.

Larson predicts that more women will enter the construction and trade industries, for example, as the days of strict gender roles become more distant. She noted that the Women’s Bureau and NASA are collaborating on an initiative to encourage girls to consider careers in information technology, math, science and engineering--industries historically dominated by men.

High-tech industries hold the appeal of rewarding young people for their knowledge, regardless of gender.

“You have the opportunity to move ahead quickly, as opposed to the kind of moving up the corporate ladder that the old economy promoted,” Larson said.

Technology also is helping to break down barriers by creating positions not burdened by previous gender-role stereotypes. “We’re filling positions today that we didn’t know existed five years ago,” Neese said.

Larson believes that as long as no one experiences barriers to entering his or her occupation of choice, professions that continue to be dominated by men or women shouldn’t be a major concern. The goal shouldn’t be to attain an equal balance of genders in professions, she said, but merely to encourage workers to find jobs that will be rewarding and fulfilling to them.

“Young women and men need to realize that whatever they choose to do is possible if they make the commitment to work hard,” she said. “There are really no boundaries.”

But Gindes isn’t so sure. While emphasizing that women have many more opportunities than even a generation ago, she argues that equality is still a long way off.

“As far as we’ve come,” she said, “we still have just inched along from where we were, which was having very clear expectations for male and female roles.”