Quotes of the Day
Jim Warner always had good jobs, but they never seemed to last. He had been a technical sergeant in Vietnam, and then, after returning to Los Angeles, he worked as an air-traffic controller, a Hughes Aircraft manufacturing coordinator and a real estate agent. When the cold war ended and Southern California's economy slumped, Warner moved to New Jersey and took a low-wage position as a shoe salesman. He worked hard, but the job didn't really pay off — until the day he fit a pair of black, Italian flats on the slender feet of Mary Del Guidice.
Del Guidice, a director of nursing at Hackensack University Medical Center, liked Warner's way with customers. "He was helping out these little old ladies who would have driven anyone crazy," she recalls. "I saw how patient and compassionate he was with them, and I thought he was a natural for nursing." They got to talking, and, over time, she persuaded him to make yet another career switch. Today Nurse Warner, 53, bustles around the hospital's unit for patients emerging from surgery, his goateed face smiling above a burly frame clad in spotless white scrubs. He earns $65,000 and goes home feeling a sense of satisfaction. "A lot of men have had good careers — even many good careers, like me," he says. "But at some point, you realize you're lost. I have finally found my calling in, yes, a women's field."
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More and more men are heeding the call, taking up occupations traditionally dominated by females. Searching for more meaningful work or simply desperate for a paycheck in a sluggish economy, they are applying in increasing numbers for jobs or training in nursing, child care, housekeeping, teaching. The jobs are often crying out for more applicants, and offer solid, if unspectacular, pay. There's a downside, though, including cutesy nicknames like "murses" for male nurses and "mannies" for nannies. And pop-culture stereotyping is hard to shake. Consider Ben Stiller's ridiculed nurse in Meet the Parents, Freddie Prinze Jr.'s fragile nanny on Friends and Eddie Murphy's hapless child-care provider in the upcoming film Daddy Day Care.
But there may be strength in the shifting numbers. Men account for 5.4% of registered nurses, up from 2.7% in 1980--still a small number, to be sure, but they represent 9% of nursing-school students, and schools say applications have swelled. In public schools, just 26% of teachers are men. But males account for about a third of students in crash training courses for teachers in New York City and Los Angeles; in L.A., 43% of applicants for those courses are men. A rush of men is hitting employment agencies like Help Unlimited in Washington, which says males account for half its placements in secretarial and administrative temp jobs, up from just a few before 2000. Maria Raimo of Elite Nannies in New York City says, "Male applications are way up in the past year, what with all the layoffs. I have people who used to work at IBM and other corporations registering as housemen, companions for the elderly."
For women, the trend is a mixed blessing. Some advocates have long argued that pay in fields like child care and teaching would not rise significantly until men moved into them. But amid today's persistently high unemployment, some women are worried that men are muscling into the last reliable sources of jobs for females — not to mention the management posts. With men around, for women "it's like being an apprentice who never becomes a journeyman," says Tina Abbott, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO in Michigan. Certainly the job market remains bleak. Overall unemployment rose again in April to 6%, with job searches for laid-off workers averaging five months. Half of all job seekers have switched industries over the past year, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Given that the industries with the most openings include nursing and teaching, notes CEO John Challenger, "artificial barriers like gender begin to break down when people have to make ends meet."
It isn't always desperation that drives the shift; sometimes it's simply the quest for job satisfaction. Nick Peters, 48, of Des Moines had spent years in hospital administration when he hit a wall. He had grown up believing "the man gets up, puts on his suit and tie, goes to work from 9 to 5 at the same place for 35 years," he says. "But I realized that's a bunch of hooey." In the fall, he will begin course work to become a "real-time" reporter, the modern moniker for a court reporter. The skill is in brisk demand, in part to provide closed captioning for TV, and reporters average $64,000 a year. Membership in the National Court Reporters Association is 90% female. Peters will join the other 10% when he starts his reporting course in the fall, although no men are enrolled in that course today.
The "female" professions tend to offer more flexible hours. Ron Patrizio, 43, a biotech-firm sales rep in Central Florida, got sick of his old routine. He spent much of his time wining and dining doctors, hoping they would prescribe his firm's drugs. He made as much as $67,000 a year, and constantly accompanied clients to operas and hockey games. "But you have no life," he says. "You live and die by how many vials of insulin you sell that month. They expected you to schmooze 24-7." On a whim, he took a class in massage therapy. Men make up less than 20% of the profession, but at the Pinellas Park school Patrizio attended, a third of those enrolled were men. In his first year he earned only $18,000, but the job gave him time to meet the woman who is now his wife.
Some men making these choices are perceived to lack ambition. Fraternity brothers were baffled when Michael Strumph chose nursing as his major. "They said, 'You're so much better than that,'" he says. Strumph, 27, had his priorities. His volunteer work as a paramedic attracted him to the medical field, but as the single parent of an 8-year-old boy, he wanted the flexible schedule a doctor doesn't have. Plus, he says, "doctors give orders and plan someone's care, but it's the nurses who actually make them better." While his frat brothers scrambled for scarce jobs in finance and technology, Strumph had three offers before he graduated in 2001. With extra shifts at his Montclair, N.J., hospital, he earns $90,000 a year.
While murses don't cause much of a flutter anymore, mannies remain a rarity. When Lloyd Morgan walks around the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his two charges, the sight unhinges strangers' jaws. "Here I am, a big black guy with two little white kids," he laughs. "We get stared at every single time." Morgan, 25, earned his college degree in social work, but when offered a job as a nanny, "I said, 'What the heck, I'll give it a try.'" Three years later, he finds the hours and duties give him the freedom to pursue other dreams, like acting. Employed by a couple who are both lawyers, Morgan picks up the kids from school, takes them to parks and museums and supervises their homework. On a snowed-out school day, they made snow forts for hours. Reared by a single mother, Morgan considers his work great training for becoming a dad someday. He says, "I look intimidating, but I've been around kids so much it's made me a gentle giant."
Many men who enter female-dominated fields endure winks, nudges and misunderstandings. "My parents thought I was gay," says massage therapist Patrizio. In child care, some of the concerns are so serious as to harm job prospects; some nanny-placement agencies refuse to consider men, for fear of hiring a pedophile or turning off parents. But in many cities, parents with hectic schedules and energetic boys are increasingly asking for male nannies. "I have a larger demand than the pool of available male nannies," says Cliff Greenhouse, president of the Pavillion Agency in New York City, which has placed three men in recent months, up from maybe one annually in recent years.
Younger men seem less concerned about gender stereotypes than do their elders, perhaps because many grew up with working mothers, with girls as equals in the classroom or with female bosses. If women can be police officers or CEOs, they reason, why can't men be kindergarten teachers or librarians?
Adrian Echevarria's father owns a beauty salon, while his mother is vice principal of an elementary school. The 21-year-old sees no problem going from drumming with his rock band by night to wiping little noses and teaching kids their colors and shapes by day. That said, he knows he's unusual. When parents walk into his preschool in Oak Park, Ill., and see a young man in baggy clothes, some "freak out," he says. But when their children clamber onto his back and call him Mr. A., the moms and dads come around. ("Isn't he adorable?" whispers a mother to a visitor.) The job pays Echevarria about $15,000 a year and helps him finance his next goal: earning a degree to teach elementary school. Teaching is already a profession he loves. "At circle time, half of them used to use the cushions as Frisbees," he says of his well-behaved tots. "Knowing that you've taught them some things is cool. I'm 21. I shouldn't be thinking that this is so cool, but it is."
Teachers, like librarians and bank tellers, weren't always primarily female. Men tended to fill those jobs until poor pay, low prestige and small chance for advancement drove them out. Today, just 9% of teachers in elementary and middle schools are men, down from 18% in 1981. The absence of male role models in the classroom concerns educators, parents and policymakers. "When men teach children, people think they couldn't make it in another industry," says Bryan Nelson, director of MenTeach, an advocacy group. That's changing with recruitment programs like Call Me Mister in South Carolina, which focuses on putting young black men at the chalkboard.
As a young man, Reginald Grant, 47, excelled in traditionally male, high-earning fields. A former Marine and defensive back for the New York Jets, he segued smoothly into subsequent careers in financial planning and software sales. During the tech boom, Grant co-founded two sports-related Internet-based companies. "I was a shark," he says. "You eat what you kill." But after the tech bubble vaporized, he found himself staring at a billboard advertising a teaching fellowship in Los Angeles. A year later, he's teaching honors English to eighth-graders in the tough Watts neighborhood. He makes $36,000; in tech his base salary alone was $60,000. "My lifestyle has taken a change, but I touch kids nobody else could touch," he says. "Every day I make a difference."
Men like Grant are learning what women have known for years. "The secret of these so-called women's jobs is that they do in fact involve a lot of skill and training," says Heidi Hartmann, a labor economist and president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Men often require more training and vetting for household positions, but the Pavillion Agency has fielded a "flood" of resumes from out-of-work men believing they can easily nab a post as, say, a personal chef.
Some experts doubt the durability of the male-to-female-job trend. A University of Pennsylvania study found, for example, that within four years of graduating, male nurses leave their profession at twice the rate of women. Another study seemed to determine that gender flexibility is even bad for you: women in top management and men playing Mr. Mom have an increased risk of heart disease. So when the economy recovers, as it someday must, will murses and mannies go back to traditionally male jobs?
Many men profess a commitment to their new occupations, though fitting in is not always easy. "There are conversations I wish I had never walked into, girl stuff like menstrual cycles," says Nurse Strumph. But there are some sweet perks. Says Morgan of his job as a manny: "The ladies think it's great."
- Lisa Takeuchi Cullen