Men in Caring Jobs Will Make Society More Equal

In her prescient 2012 book, “The End of Men,” my friend Hanna Rosin described a modern American dynamic between archetypes that she called “Plastic Woman” and “Cardboard Man.” These comic book characters represented American women who made miraculous social progress in the 20th century and American men who stalled out. That’s because women in the past 60 years or so have been able to be infinitely flexible and responsive to structural economic changes and men remained rigid planks. This hasn’t just caused a shift in the job market, it’s caused a shift in the marriage market, too. If men aren’t breadwinners, and they’re not caregivers, either — what are they for?

Rosin explains that Plastic Woman went “from barely working at all to working only until she got married to working while married and then working with children, even babies. If a space opens up for her to make more money than her husband, she grabs it.” By contrast, Cardboard Man “hardly changes at all. A century can go by and his lifestyle and ambitions remain largely the same. There are many professions that have gone from all-male to female, and almost none that have gone the other way.”

She added that a man’s sense of himself is often tied to having a traditionally masculine, physical job in construction, utility work or some kind of manufacturing. “They could move more quickly into new roles now open to them — college graduate, nurse, teacher, full-time father — but for some reason, they hesitate.”

A lot of Rosin’s book still rings true 12 years later. Though on the campaign trail both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris promised to bring back those old-school, manly jobs, as Rebecca Patterson pointed out in an Opinion guest essay in October, manufacturing jobs are long gone and they’re not returning. “Even if every estimated open role is filled, the total employed in manufacturing would still be about three million short of its 1979 peak, according to Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis data,” Patterson noted.

Which is why I was so pleased to see that Cardboard Man may be softening up, even as the political posturing around him may not have shifted. According to Harriet Torry in The Wall Street Journal, “The number of male registered nurses in the U.S. has nearly tripled since the early 2000s,” going “from about 140,000 in 2000 to about 400,000 in 2023.” In health care, wage and market growth exceed the national average, and people still need emergency surgeries even in recessions, CNN’s Bryan Mena notes. Health care jobs are particularly vital in rural parts of the country, where hospitals may be among the largest employers in the area.

Torry describes men who are moving into traditionally female jobs (or the “pink collar” sector) as rational economic actors who are dealing with the job market as it is, rather than as they wish it might be. “Many of the manufacturing jobs that are being moved overseas, replaced by automation or phased out of the American economy were mostly filled by men. As a result, other occupations traditionally dominated by women are now gaining a larger share of men, including elementary and middle schoolteachers and customer service representatives,” Torry writes.