Masculinity resides in many different areas of society. It can be found in advertisements for everyday products such as food and body wash, depictions of athletes, and representations of the “average” relationship. Today, however, I want to focus on a slightly more insidious aspect of masculinity: the economics of being a man. 

Work has transformed significantly over the past millennium. In just Western Europe, we can observe the evolution of work from a feudalist, subsistence structure in which the patriarch oversees and negotiates the family income to an all-hands-on-deck, each person earns their way system of employment during the British industrial revolution, a period during which women entered the workforce and lowered the economic value of men’s jobs. In The Struggle for the Breeches, Anna Clark documents the rise in public violence against women that occurred in the late 1700s and early 1800s following women’s entrance into the factory. She argues that this rise in violence, which at some points was able to be tempered by religious influence, came as a result of men’s need to assert their dominance over women, who were now taking up the economic prong of industrial Britain’s masculine yoke. This cycle has repeated itself since this historical moment, with one cycle taking place at present. 

Claire Cain Miller wrote a piece in The New York Times detailing the ways in which “Women’s Gains in the Work Force Conceal a Problem.” According to Miller, one “thing holding men back from service jobs is norms about masculinity. The markers of masculinity include earning a good income and distancing oneself from feminine things, research has shown. Taking a job traditionally done by women threatens both…” In this statement, Miller establishes two key facts: (1) that the jobs women are taking on are not paying as well as the positions that men traditionally pursue, and (2) that although women are willing to enter areas of work that men have historically favored, men are not willing to make the same transition. This is despite that fact that  “when men do so-called pink-collar jobs, they tend to have more job security and wage growth over time than they would have in blue-collar jobs, research has found.” If we take this information and compare it to Miller’s first quote, that “markers of masculinity include earning a good income and distancing oneself from feminine things,” with the understanding that earning a stable wage has not, in the U.S., typically been a “feminine thing,” then we reach a contradiction. Are men just not aware of the wage-earning potential of these roles “traditionally done by women”? And if so, how do we counteract this misunderstanding? 

Miller proposes one solution: “Improving the quality of pink-collar, working-class jobs” by raising wages. Before delving into this response, I want to explore nursing as an example of a traditionally female role so as to better understand the reasons for which certain jobs are associated with women versus men. In NPR’s Hidden Brain, Shankar Vedantam investigates the historical impetus for women’s primacy in the field of nursing. According to Vedantam, it was only after the Crimean War in 1854 that women tightened their grip on nursing as a profession. “Before the Crimean War, nursing was not seen as the exclusive preserve of women.” Julie Fairman, a guest on Hidden Brain, corroborated this claim, positing that before the Crimean War “Everybody was a nurse. Everybody took care of their family members. They took care of the children. They took care of the wounded in battle. And so the profession – in fact, you don’t even talk about profession. But the idea of providing care to people was pretty heterogeneous across men, women and others.” However, with the Crimean War, men were too occupied with battle to take care of each other, creating a situation in which women’s professionalization of nursing as a female field was requisite for soldiers’ success.  Thus, it seems that it women’s predominance in nursing actually came as a result of wartime necessity — an irony if we consider the fact that war has historically been associated with a assertion of masculinity. Who would have thought that such an assertion would actually become an example of modern mens’ inability to embody our current conception of what it means to be masculine: accumulating capital. 

So what do we do? Signal to the world that many of the jobs we now think of as being for women were actually once relegated to men in an effort to obscure their perceived femininity? I would argue that no, that it not a sustainable solution, given that it supports the gender separation of labor and perpetuates the stigmatization of “feminine things” (though I appreciate Vedantam’s historical analysis). In response to this question, I fall first in foremost in alignment with Miller, who, again, posits that “Improving the quality of pink-collar, working-class jobs” by raising wages would effectively remedy the stigmatization of pink-collar jobs, men’s economic instability resulting from avoiding such jobs, and low wages across the board. While I’m cautious of such a simple solution to such a nuanced situation, I’m interested in the ways in which men will now respond to their loss of the workforce majority and whether or not they would be willing to reconsider their aversion to “feminine things” in such a way that it could reshape our understanding of economic masculinity, thereby putting an end to this pervasive cycle of women’s encroachment on masculine jobs and men’s tendency to either then avoid those job or reassert their dominance through violence or other demonstrations of authority.

 

Sources:

  1. https://phys.org/news/2019-06-meat-masculine-food-advertising-perpetuates.html
  2. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1536504217714257
  3. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/upshot/womens-gains-in-the-work-force-conceal-a-problem.html?searchResultPosition=4
  4. http://mediasmarts.ca/gender-representation/men-and-masculinity/masculinity-and-sports-media
  5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6470281/
  6. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/653339162
  7. Clark, Anna. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. :University of California Press, 1995.