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Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
In the US the prime aged male labor force participation rate has fallen from 97% to 83% from the 1960’s to today. You have a lot of workers by boosting that percentage.
A second issue is when women enter a field it falls in stature. Men flee the field. Biology/Veterinary science are now viewed as female coded and have dropped hard in stature.
This might be mistaking cause and effect (or, more likely, it's a more complicated relationship). Equally plausible is that, when a job becomes less entrepreneurial, more stable, and more bureaucratic, it drops in stature and becomes more appealing to women. E.g. when vets were predominantly male, the job was typically a sole practitioner who traveled from farm to farm, essentially permanently on-call and dealing with inclement weather; messy, rough workspaces; and large, relatively dangerous animals. Nowadays, the job is typically in clinics (increasingly consolidated), with set hours, treating small companionate animals like dogs and cats, with a much heavier layer of accreditation.
The last psychiatrist puts this as pursuing the power or the trappings of power:
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Horse doctors are still heavily male.
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I can easily buy that decreased risk appetite and increased internal focus makes jobs more appealing to women, causatively, in fact I think even liberal sociologists would quickly agree, but I'm not quite sure it follows that the profession drops in stature. But not for the two candidate reasons listed.
It's a little bit of an awkward self-reinforcing question, or poorly defined, because in my view what we typically call "status" or "stature" is mostly set by men for men (invoking a sense of ranking, not just goodness or desirability) while women operate their own parallel system of "status": perhaps "respectability" that mostly dovetails but diverges in some key ways, as a system by women for men; and something like "social capital" which more often operates by women for women. The systems often dovetail but are not in fact interchangeable because they prioritize differently (but correlate well because the primary drivers such as exclusivity, intellectual rigor, social function, or most commonly, wealth generation are super similar). You might notice that, for example, how prestigious high-risk jobs are highlight this.
I don't think the difference is huge so that's a valid objection, but I do think it's a very real piece of nuance that pops up particularly in certain fields. I'm not denying/ignoring that surveys seem to find predictive power in feminization of professors and prestige, just that we have to be pretty careful about the words and might be doing that thing where two people think they are talking about the same thing but really aren't. A man and a woman, in different contexts, might both call all of my 3 proposed paradigms above "status"!
I haven't gone digging too deeply, but I'm pretty sure the classic "prestige surveys" do not attempt to disambiguate, like at all. It's a collapsed index. There's a small handful of studies exploring power dynamics and prestige as distinct IIRC, but very little else. I think this is mostly because the money-prestige link is so dominant! Which to my eyes signals that you simply cannot consider them in isolation, and statistically creates a lot of traps all over the place. At any rate, when I skimmed a few studies related to this, quite a few of them seem to admit straight up that prestige alone is very likely a flawed construct with iffy methodological rigor.
But as you say to the broader point, it's still quite open whether broadly speaking, jobs change -> therefore women enter or women enter -> therefore the jobs change. As to whether women enter -> men flee is the right factual framing (are we talking absolute numbers, proportions, changes in training pipelines?) to be honest I don't know what the data suggests there.
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