Why Don’t More Men Go Into Teaching?
AS Tommie Leaders, 22, approached college graduation last spring, his professors told him he would have no trouble getting hired. “You’re a guy teaching elementary, ” they said.
Mr. Leaders, who earned his education degree from the University of Nebraska in June, started teaching fifth grade last month in Council Bluffs, Iowa. He is the only male teacher in the building.
Across the country, teaching is an overwhelmingly female profession, and in fact has become more so over time. More than three-quarters of all teachers in kindergarten through high school are women, according to Education Department data, up from about two-thirds three decades ago. The disparity is most pronounced in elementary and middle schools, where more than 80 percent of teachers are women.
Educators, advocates and lawmakers fight bitterly about tenure, academic standards and the prevalence of testing, but one thing most sides tend to agree on is the importance of raising the status of teaching so the profession will attract the best candidates.
A change in the gender imbalance could sway the way teaching is regarded. Jobs dominated by women pay less on average than those with higher proportions of men, and studies have shown that these careers tend to enjoy less prestige as well.
Although teaching was once a career for men, by the time women began entering the work force in large numbers in the 1960s, teaching, along with nursing, was one of very few careers open to them. But despite inroads that women have made entering previously male-dominated fields, there has not been a corresponding flow of men into teaching and nursing.
“We’re not beyond having a cultural devaluation of women’s work,” said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. “So that if a job is done primarily by women, people tend to believe it has less value.”
Although teachers have more time off and, at least for now, better benefits and job security than many other professions, their pay has remained essentially stagnant since 1970 in inflation-adjusted terms. The median pay for an elementary school teacher is now about $40,000.
According to Maria Fitzpatrick, an economist at Cornell University who analyzed census data, women who work outside of teaching have seen their pay rise by about 25 percent since 1970 while average men’s wages in nonteaching jobs have actually fallen, also in inflation-adjusted terms. Still, men can earn much more, on average, outside of teaching, while women’s Why Don’t More Men Go Into Teaching? - NYTimes.com: