This explains two related phenomena, both much deplored by feminists, who are in the business of ignoring human instinct.
The first is male flight: the tendency of male involvement in a given profession, occupation, institution, or industry to drop precipitously once a certain threshold of female involvement is surpassed.
The second is the low value assigned to women’s work.
Occupations seen as a predominantly masculine are almost invariably perceived – by both men and women – as conferring a certain intrinsic status, whether high or low. Garbagemen, oil rig roughnecks, firemen, special forces operators, and private equity sharks are all male-dominated occupations, and each occupies a distinct plane of social status. Conversely, social status being a primary attribute of male sexual allure, a profession in which women predominate is unable to confer status, by definition. To say that female professions are ‘low status’ is a category error; they’re simply outside of the status hierarchy. A kindergarten teacher is not really of higher or lower status than a plumber or a stock broker, because neither the plumber nor the stock broker will care very much about what she does before asking her out on a date; the kindergarten teacher, however, will care a great deal about which man is a plumber, and which a stock broker.
The preceding paragraph implicitly assumed a female kindergarten teacher. There are, of course, a very small number of male kindergarten teachers, may Thor have mercy on their souls. Men who work in occupations perceived as predominantly female pay a steep sexual penalty. Their lifetime odds of marriage decline as compared to men who work in sexually neutral or male-dominated professions; a woman’s success in marriage is wholly unaffected by working in a male-dominant field. This is intuitively obvious, but I was able to dig up a study that apparently quantified this.
The flood of women into the workforce over the last several generations has led to several professions switching from male-dominated to female-dominated – for example, high school teachers, nurses, and veterinarians were all, almost within living memory, masculine vocations. After becoming feminine occupations, in every single case, those professions immediately plummeted in status. Men who entered them came to be thought of us somehow defective; what else is one to conclude about a man who chooses to compete with women, rather than with his peers? This is certainly not always fair. There is nothing necessarily defective about being a male high school teacher. All of my favourite teachers in high school were men. I have friends who work as high school teachers, whom I respect greatly, not least because someone has to be there to set a good example for our lost and abandoned boys; on that note, if you have not yet read this excellent piece from the Librarian of Celaeno, I implore you to do so, for it is thematically relevant to the topic at hand:
