\n<\/p>\n
Last week I\u00a0and 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\u00a0was a student: It had an impressive range of programs, new facilities, dedicated staff and some very poised students. I\u2019d be proud to have them here.<\/p>\n
That said, I\u00a0couldn\u2019t help but notice a pattern that hasn\u2019t changed over the decades: gender segregation by field remains robust.<\/p>\n
The electronics lab and the computer gaming lab were full of young men. The allied health area was almost entirely young women. When I\u00a0asked the admins there whether that was typical of what they\u2019ve seen, they responded that it was. <\/p>\n
This week I\u00a0dropped by a continuing-education conference that the college hosts for dental hygienists. I\u00a0noticed that the attendees were nearly all women. A woman who runs a complementary program and was in attendance told me that over 98\u00a0percent 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.<\/p>\n
This, in 2025.<\/p>\n
In each case, the organizers were fully aware of the gender split. They certainly didn\u2019t 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. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s 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\u2019t know it. Conversely, if you looked only at allied health programs, you\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n
Honestly, if you had asked me 30 years ago, I\u00a0would 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\u2019t just a matter of one generation slowly replacing another. <\/p>\n
My own bias is that, generally speaking, more integration is better. That means more women in welding and more men in nursing. That\u2019s because defaulting to individual choice as an explanation doesn\u2019t take account of the conditions in which those choices are made. Whether your preferred metaphor is critical mass or a tipping point, there\u2019s 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 \u201conly.\u201d <\/p>\n
Having enough people like you\u2014however defined\u2014in the field can make the option seem more welcoming. <\/p>\n
So, no, I\u00a0don\u2019t believe in trying to engineer absolute parity in all things. People have free will, and an occupational draft isn\u2019t 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\u00a0didn\u2019t think we\u2019d still be making those points in 2025, but here we are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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