Cultural or Structural? Explaining Men’s Transition to Care Work Jobs

• In Event: 1563 - Gender Segregation and the Culture or Structure Quandary

Abstract

Gender occupational integration has become stalled and the pattern is “uneven.” Men’s presence in gender-atypical occupations remains rare despite the fact that jobs in education and health care are growing fast, while traditionally male-dominated manufacturing jobs are disappearing. Why do men cross gendered work boundaries or not? The cultural approach looks at how the gender essentialist cultural norms shape gender identity and the gender-typing of work, thereby affecting men’s preferences for or against working in gender-atypical occupations. In contrast, the structural approach emphasizes the differential constraints that men face in the labor market by race and class backgrounds, and it tends to focus on men on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum who are involuntarily pushed into female-dominated/care work jobs.
This study investigates whether the difficulty in encouraging men to enter female-typed care occupations can be boiled down to a matter of rigid gender attitude and/or is to be understood as a labor market mobility issue. I use nationally representative, longitudinal data and employ discrete-time multinomial logit regressions to estimate the hazards of entering different types of care work jobs. Findings from this study provide support for both cultural and structural approaches, calling for a combination of both perspectives in understanding the factors leading men to or preventing them from entering non-traditional jobs.

Author

• Shengwei Sun, Washington University in St. Louis