Why 94% of New Jobs Going to Women Is a Conversation for Parents and Teachers
Thursday afternoon, in the school parking lot, a dad I only know by sight waved his phone at me. “You see this?” he said. “Ninety-four percent of new jobs went to women. What are we supposed to do about our sons?”
I hadn’t seen it yet. I looked it up later. Between late March and late July, about 350,000 new jobs were added, and nearly all of them went to women. Depending on where you read it, this was either a victory for workplace equality or the collapse of American civilization. The comment sections were split between people who were thrilled and people who were writing obituaries for masculinity.
I teach high school English. I spend my day looking at a room full of seventeen-year-olds, and I have to say: the panic about boys is not entirely crazy, but the headlines don’t help.
That dad in the parking lot had his son in the backseat, earbuds in, staring out the window. The kid wasn’t thinking about job statistics. He was thinking about whatever you think about when you’re fifteen and someone else is fighting about your future. That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?
We talk about boys and girls as if they’re statistically doomed from birth. Girls are told they can be anything, and then they are. Boys are told they need to step up, and then they get quiet. In my classroom, I see the difference daily. Girls hand in their college essays early. Boys sit in the back and ask if the assignment actually matters.
I’m not saying girls are perfect, and I’m not saying boys are broken. But the new jobs report made me think about what we’re actually teaching kids at home and school about who does what in the world.
Last week, I did a career research project with my juniors. A girl researched electric work and found out you can get paid to learn through an apprenticeship. She said, “I thought it would be a boys club, but my dad said, go try it.” A boy in the same class researched early childhood education. He said, “I like kids, but my uncle says that’s a chick job.” I asked him what he thought his uncle meant. He sat there for a minute and said, “Probably that it doesn’t make enough money and people don’t respect it.” Exactly. We don’t need to save boys from doing “girl work.” We need to change what we call girl work.
That’s where parents and teachers come in. It starts smaller than most people think.
One of the simplest things I’ve changed in my classroom is not saying “guys” when I mean everyone. It’s such a small word, but language tells kids who belongs. I say “folks” or “everyone” now. When I bring in articles or books, I don’t hand a story about a nurse to the girls and a story about a mechanic to the boys. Everyone reads both. I don’t say, “The boys might like this one.” It sounds minor, but it removes a permission slip. Kids don’t need to be told they can do anything. They need proof that nobody is assuming they’ll pick only one side.
At home, I’ve started rotating chores not by gender but by whoever has a free block of time. My son does the laundry. My daughter digs holes. My son makes dinner on Tuesdays. My daughter takes out the trash. The neighbors probably think I’m running some kind of experiment, but the kids don’t. They just know the house gets cleaned and someone has to do it. That’s actually the most career-relevant education there is.
People talk a lot about boys losing ground in school, and it’s true. They’re more likely to drop out, they get more behavior referrals, they’re less likely to go to college. But I think part of the problem is we’ve given them a very narrow idea of what a successful man looks like. It doesn’t include comforting a crying child. It doesn’t include reading novels. It doesn’t include being a nurse or a preschool teacher. And then when the economy starts adding mostly those kinds of jobs, we panic.
We don’t need boys to become more like girls. We need boys to have the same emotional vocabulary that girls get to practice and that the modern workforce actually rewards.
One of the most useful things I’ve seen another teacher do is start the morning with a two-minute feelings check. She has a list of words on the board: tired, annoyed, anxious, restless, okay. Every student puts a dot next to one before they sit down. They don’t have to explain. It’s simple, but it gives kids words beyond “fine.” A boy can say, “I’m frustrated because my brother laughed at me this morning,” instead of slamming his backpack on the desk. That’s not therapy. That’s vocabulary. And it’s a skill you need in a workplace, especially a workplace where patient care or teamwork is the actual job.
The reading gap is another thing. Boys score lower than girls on most reading tests, and everyone acts like it’s a crisis. But I’ve seen what happens when we stop treating reading as medicine and start treating it as a way to find something you care about. A graphic novel is reading. A manual about old tractors is reading. A biography about a skateboarder is reading. When a boy finds one page he actually wants to turn, he’s on his way. He just needs us not to say, “That’s not real reading.”
There’s a political side to all this, and I honestly don’t have a clear answer. The politicians are still arguing about bathroom bills and dress codes and mascots, or whatever the current version of panic is. But meanwhile, in the classroom, the work is slower and less dramatic. It’s asking a girl to explain why she’d make a better electrician than the boy sitting next to her. It’s telling a boy that his uncle is wrong about “chick jobs.” It’s making sure a kid who doesn’t fit the category still has a place in the room.
I don’t think 94% of new jobs going to women means the end of civilization. But it does mean something has shifted. The economy is changing, and it’s changing faster than our cultural expectations. We can either keep preparing kids for a world that no longer exists, or we can teach them to cook, clean, read, fix things, listen, apologize, and say what they need.
That’s not a policy. That’s a Thursday afternoon in the parking lot. That’s the boy in the backseat with the earbuds in, waiting for the conversation about him to sound less like a crisis and more like a life.
Maybe the best thing parents and teachers can do is let the kids watch us cross those lines ourselves. I still don’t know what the politicians are doing. But I know my kids are watching what I do, not what I say. That’s where I’m putting my attention.
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