LAST WEEK, government statisticians reported that women have surpassed men in numbers in the workforce, largely pushed to a slim majority by the recession which has been harder on male occupations in construction and manufacturing.

Hip Hip Hooray for working women! Let’s look at the ten most common jobs women hold and see what a wonderful milestone this is:

1.  Secretaries and administrative assistants
2.  Registered nurses
3.  Elementary and middle school teachers
4.  Cashiers
5.  Retail salespersons
6.  Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides
7.  First-line supervisors/managers of retail sales workers
8.  Waiters and waitresses
9.  Receptionists and information clerks
10. Bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks

These Department of Labor figures are from 2008, the latest year for which numbers are available.

Here we have it. Women have left the home in the past fifty years to file papers and answer phones, raise other people’s children, and care for the sick. Save for the occupation of nurse, none of these jobs are as exalted, or satisfying to the majority of women, as caring for husband, children, home and community. Educating other people’s children as a goverment-employed bureaucrat is not the same as educating one’s own.

Girls are constantly told they can be anything they want, except a devoted mother and wife. How often are they informed by today’s schools that they will likely end up in one of these jobs while raising their family on the side?

                                              — Comments —

Lisa writes:

Why is it honorable and self-sacrificing to do these things for others’ children, but not our own? Why is it respectable to do these things for other men’s businesses but not for our own husbands at home? What is the mental disconnect, and how has it been so effective that sane and intelligent people cannot even think anymore?

Laura writes:

The difference is financial independence. But of course these jobs do not offer independence, merely a different sort of dependence.

More than two million women, many of them mothers with children, are elementary and middle school teachers. If this isn’t the clearest evidence of feminist’s success in turning family functions over to the government, I don’t know what is. Send these women home. Privatize education to reduce the tax burden. Turn more teaching jobs over to men.

JJ writes:

As my screen name implies, I’m a (registered) nurse. I think many women go into fields such as nursing and teaching because they do tend to be a little more flexible and family friendly. Nursing is a job which is easily part-time and I have found myself a job which allows for some flexibility in hours, and allows me more time at home with my family. It also pays well, as far as I’m concerned. I went into school intending to be a doctor (that changed when I realized that would likely involve too many hours), but I’m much more happy being a nurse.

Laura writes:

Yes, of course. Women don’t choose these jobs because they are the only ones available to them. They don’t want to work so hard that they have no time or energy for family. (About 25 percent of all working women are employed part-time.) They also seek outlets for their maternal inclinations.

The pay disparity between men and women is a reflection of these choices by women, not of unsavory discrimination.

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