Last week I and several colleagues visited a local technical high school to see what kind of dual-enrollment courses we could offer there. The school was leaps and bounds beyond what technical high schools were known for when I was a student: It had an impressive range of programs, new facilities, dedicated staff and some very poised students. I’d be proud to have them here.
That said, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern that hasn’t changed over the decades: gender segregation by field remains robust.
The electronics lab and the computer gaming lab were full of young men. The allied health area was almost entirely young women. When I asked the admins there whether that was typical of what they’ve seen, they responded that it was.
This week I dropped by a continuing-education conference that the college hosts for dental hygienists. I noticed that the attendees were nearly all women. A woman who runs a complementary program and was in attendance told me that over 98 percent of the dental hygienists in our state are women. Strikingly, she noted that the few men in the field have a terrible time getting hired; dentists are afraid that patients will mistake male hygienists for dentists.
This, in 2025.
In each case, the organizers were fully aware of the gender split. They certainly didn’t encourage it and, in some cases, tried actively to counter it. That has been true for years. Yet the patterns persist; if anything, they seem to be strengthening in certain occupational areas.
It’s not news that women have been graduating college at higher rates than men for several decades now. But if you looked only at HVAC and cybersecurity programs, you wouldn’t know it. Conversely, if you looked only at allied health programs, you’d wonder how the percentage of men even hits double digits. The disjuncture between greater integration in certain professional fields and markedly persistent segregation in others is striking.
Honestly, if you had asked me 30 years ago, I would have expected to see much more integration by now. Maybe not parity, but something far closer to it than what we have now. And the fact that the patterns exist among current high school students suggests that it isn’t just a matter of one generation slowly replacing another.
My own bias is that, generally speaking, more integration is better. That means more women in welding and more men in nursing. That’s because defaulting to individual choice as an explanation doesn’t take account of the conditions in which those choices are made. Whether your preferred metaphor is critical mass or a tipping point, there’s often a threshold of representation beneath which folks who might otherwise have wanted to be there will feel unwelcome. That threshold is usually well below absolute parity, but above being the “only.”
Having enough people like you—however defined—in the field can make the option seem more welcoming.
So, no, I don’t believe in trying to engineer absolute parity in all things. People have free will, and an occupational draft isn’t likely to lead anywhere good. But surely we can make headway toward making more choices more welcoming for more types of people. We know that having too much sameness in a group leads to groupthink and that groups with multiple perspectives tend to make better decisions. The same can be said of professions. I didn’t think we’d still be making those points in 2025, but here we are.
