Women’s new role clashed with social norms around femininity, but they were able to merge the two. (Remember “I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan?”) By contrast, men are being asked to embrace traditionally feminine roles at work and at home, including helping with the cooking and laundry.
Pointer from Greg Mankiw.
Suppose that in terms of the five-factor personality model, men tend to score lower than women on agreeableness.
When women were moving from the home to the labor force, they moved into office work, where agreeableness was not a drawback. In fact, it is often a plus.
But if you want men to move from a factory to becoming home health care aides, then you are asking them to take on jobs that require a high level of agreeableness. It is not such an easy transition.
But if you want men to move from a factory to becoming home health care aides, then you are asking them to take on jobs that require a high level of agreeableness. It is not such an easy transition.
Then according to PSST, these men have to adjust or fail here because a lot of traditional men jobs are be replaced by machines. In terms of an office environment, libertarians really do under-estimate the value of ‘agreeableness’ and knowing when to and where to put out extra effort for the organization is important. (I have worked in the same office 21 years and I do believe be agreeable is the most important quality in remaining employed.)
Also, let us exaggerate the death of man’s work here and it appears the issue is the death of manufacturing work. Looking at the Trump administration cabinet, Senate, of most corporate CEOs, there is no death of men in the labor market.
While conservatives blame this on feminism, when in reality it the nature of work changing.
That said, I think most pundits are way underestimating the value of ‘agreeableness’ any job especially in construction or manufacturing. These are dangerous job and people not following the rules gets co-workers hurt. And isn’t the military considered the most ‘man’ job out there? And agreeableness is absolutely mandated.
And the military have extraordinary structures to get that agreeableness from men.
Yep. I think things are being conflated here. The kind of agreeableness you need to put on a happy face and work with grumpy old people in a retirement home is distinct from what you need to work well as a part of a team. Women seem better at the former, but worse at the latter. The problem seems to be that in the workplace (as elsewhere), women are much more demanding of relationships, so they’re more intimate, but less stable, with much more capacity for fallings-out, tears, drama, hurt-feelings, etc. That’s certainly the case in my wife’s female-dominated workplace. And the same dynamic seems to show up, in the much higher rate of divorce for lesbian marriages vs heterosexuals and gay men.
I like women, but I’ve only ever had problems with women.
+10
Most men i know now spend a significant portion of time doing household duties…even if they are the only one who works. Among my peer group (urban, educated), i’d actually argue the pendulum has swung too far and men now have it worse off. Younger men seem less inclined to sign up for this and are waiting longer to get married..if at all.
I don’t like the way that the argument is phrased.
I agree that men score lower than women on agreeableness and that this tends to hurt them in pursuing jobs in health and education, compared to women and compared to old factory style jobs.
However, I’m sort of skeptical on the claims that greater agreeableness helps women in business. Maybe on average it helps, but it seems that women are still under-represented at higher levels of corporations.
I don’t see non-college educated men becoming nurses aids and home health care workers in great numbers. Which is probably OK, since these jobs are poorly paid anyway.
But the idea that automation is going to steadily destroy what remains of traditional jobs for these men is, I think, much exaggerated. Factory assembly jobs? Yes, but those have mostly gone already — the low hanging fruit of factory automation has already been harvested. And note that in much of the world, further factory automation will affect women as much as men) .
But beyond that I think people are deluded (a lot of smart people especially) about how close robots and automation are to having a major impact on unskilled labor generally. If the job doesn’t involve a large number of repetitions of the same well-defined task done in the same place, it’s not going to be automated anytime soon. Consider what it would take, for example, to replace a worker on a landscaping crew — supposedly one of the lowest skilled jobs around. The robot would need to be able to operate a variety of wheeled and handheld power tools mowers, leaf-blowers, weed-whackers, trimmers. It would need to be able to use a rake and shovel. It would need to be able to plant different kinds of bushes and flowers and then spread mulch without damaging the plants. Oh, and let’s add in installing and fixing sprinkler systems on occasion while we’re at it and building the odd retaining wall. There are simply no robots that anywhere close to handling *any* of these ‘unskilled’ tasks, let alone all of them (with the possible exception of roomba-style robotic mowers, which have been around for years and kind of work if you don’t mind if your lawn ends up looking a little shaggy). And all of the building trade jobs are just as far from being automated — even the lowest skilled ones like hanging drywall.
You are correct, the lowest skilled jobs remain. It is the stepping stone jobs that are mostly repetitive, but require some basic decision-making, at least to recognize and fix when the machine is going wrong, that are being automated. That means there isn’t a clear, or smooth, path from “helper” to craftsman. It now requires a lot of personal initiative and funding to leap over the machines. Also, many of the older bosses don’t recognize that the implicit OJT of the stepping stone jobs is no longer available.
Mike Rowe was interviewed recently on the topic of jobs:
http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/mike-rowe-dirty-jobs-reached-same-people-as-trump-s-campaign-830292547924
Reading stuff like this makes you wonder if the 19th century wasn’t really the pinnacle of human society.
The fact is that if you’re independent minded, “agreeableness” is either willful suppression of socially uncouth truths in order to smooth cooperation, or it’s ignorance of those things, willful or otherwise. Some measure of a man’s self respect derives from the independence he feels himself to posses. So by the nature of things agreeableness and man’s nature eventually come into conflict. Any 19th century thinker could’ve told you the same thing in more eloquent terms, so why are we pretending to need to learn things like this over again? You can open up a page of Nietzsche at random and read something more profound than anything said by our political leaders and social engineers in the last sixty years, yet these people have no problem believing they have a right to tell us all how we should live, assuming away your fundamental nature as the first axiom. Things are completely crazy and the inertia is overwhelming.
“There’s always a big future in computer maintenance”
Making things, custom things, and fixing things, like cars or robots, will have lots of jobs for the next 20 years, at least.
But all jobs depend on work habits and a willingness to learn from experience, plus patience as one gets better at the work.
Plus the unemployment/ disability/ welfare/ cash-crook economy remains an alternative for low skilled men. The low rungs on the worker ladder need more support/ subsidy in order to increase their attractiveness.
Voluntary National Service will help reduce this problem, as well as providing more data on what jobs low-skilled men try out and find out that they are successful.
Also “The challenge for men is much greater than what women faced in the 1960s through the 1980s,” <<
"Manly" jobs will be less valued as we get more AI & robots doing more stuff.
In Wall-E, all the humans in orbit were pretty soft & chubby — not a lot of manly jobs up there. As we convert Earth into a spaceship simulation, this seems likely to be humanity's fate, except for those who spend more time in gyms to avoid it (and get more hot chicks … or hot guys — lots of chicks go to gym. Far more than guys in ballet.)