Kay McElroy was tired of hustling to find freelance writing assignments and she was sick of paying $1,200 a month for mediocre health insurance. With her three sons well into their teens, she decided it was time to find a regular job with regular benefits.
Today, McElroy, 48, is a rookie teacher at Plainfield South High School. She earns less than $30,000, but has quality insurance for her and her family, relative job security, and summers and holidays off with her kids.
McElroy is on the leading edge of a new trend in the post-9/11 world: heading back into a profession once seen as women’s exclusive domain.
Three so-called “pink collar jobs”-teachers, nurses and librarians-are hurting for workers as women have turned away from these traditionally female professions in favor of jobs where the pay and status are greater.
But life is getting easier for teacher recruiters in the months since Sept. 11. One group, Teach for America, saw applications triple in 2001 versus 2000, both because of the terrorist attacks and an extensive recruiting campaign. The national organization, which recruits college graduates to teach in inner-city schools, expects to far exceed its hoped-for 6,600 applications this year. Last year, the organization placed 920 teachers in classrooms across the country.
“People are seeking to ensure that all parts of their lives–professional as well as personal–are fulfilling and meaningful,” said Elissa Clapp, vice president of recruitment and selection for Teach for America.
Others see teaching as a recession-proof job. Still others, like McElroy, see some benefits from working in a more traditionally female occupation.
“Most of the women I know still have traditional lives. How do you fit this non-traditional career around your traditional life with kids who need to go to the orthodontist and soccer games?” she asked.
Two other traditionally female careers–librarians and nurses–don’t have teaching’s time-off perk to attract women back into the business. Both still are struggling to fill vacancies.
The image issue
Over half of the librarians working today are age 45 or older, which means that in the next 20 years, they will hit the age at which they contemplate retirement. But the stereotype of Marian the Librarian with her hair pulled back into a severe bun and a “shh!” on her lips is making it difficult to attract young people into the profession.
“I’m not the picture of the typical librarian,” acknowledged Yvette Garcia, 29, head of adult services at the Round Lake Public Library.
The typical librarian is white, over 40 and on her second or even third career, said Lorelle Swader, director of the Office of Human Resource Development and Recruitment for the Chicago-based American Library Association.
Her job is to convince young women, men and minorities that libraries are fun and exciting places to work.
“We have to re-educate the public about what it is that library and information professionals do,” Swader said. “The possibilities are endless. In the new information age, there are wonderful opportunities.”
Those opportunities are starting to update the image of Marian the Librarian. In truest librarian fashion, Sarah Ann Long, director of the North Suburban Library System, can cite the moment when that image began to shift.
“For me, the tipping point was in January of 1999. On the cover of Inc. Magazine was a very beautiful woman in a white pantsuit with her arms folded and looking cocky as anything. She was a librarian. The story was about how this corporate librarian was helping the CEO re-envision his company,” Long said. “That was when, in the popular culture, librarians began to have cachet.”
Recruiters in nursing and teaching agreed that they also must change the image of the professions if they are going to fill all of the empty slots in the coming decades. Like librarians, nurses and teachers suffer job-related stereotypes, receive low pay and deal with some pink-collar stigma.
Sharon Sanderson, director of student recruitment for the Yale School of Nursing, faults the media for not giving nurses more respect.
“I can’t think of one TV program that has a strong nurse character–even `ER.’ On the surface, you think they do really well. They make the nurses seem bright. But what the doctors tell the nurses to do, a nurse already would have done in an emergency setting.”
The labor shortage among nurses is so acute that the jobless rate among registered nurses is at a decade-low 1 percent, Sanderson said.
The average age of nurses is rising gradually (according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, it increased from 37.4 in 1983 to 41.9 in 1998), as older nurses retire and younger nurses burn out, driven from their jobs by staffing shortages that force them to work mandatory overtime and limit their ability to meet patients’ needs, said Sandra Feldman, president of the American Federation of Teachers and the Federation of Nurses and Health Professionals.
High pressure, little support
Teachers also are spread thin–serving not only children but also answering to administrators and parents–amid rising fears of violence in schools.
“Women who feel the calling are dropping out in huge numbers and they’re feeling terrible about it,” Feldman said. “I have sat with women who were teachers and nurses who wept because they didn’t want to leave but they couldn’t stay. The nurses are frightened that the tremendous stress they’re under would endanger a patient. Teachers are under enormous pressure. All these accountability systems are in place, but they don’t get the support they need.”
Major hindrances for all three professions are that the levels of pay, autonomy, support and respect traditionally drop as the number of women doing the work rises.
Jackie Blount, associate professor of education at Iowa State University, for example, has studied the history of gender in public school employment. It goes like this: When schools first open in the early 1800s, most teachers are men. As free schooling becomes more widespread, demand for teachers escalates. Women are plentiful, and willing to work for half to one-third the salaries paid to men. Women dominate the profession and run their classrooms with relative autonomy until the 1920s. Then, a supervisory class of men is added. The men must be paid more and the money is culled from the education budget. As a result, pay for women teachers falls further, and those supervisors begin to usurp teachers’ autonomy as well.
In recent years, women have begun making some gains at the administrative levels, but the high-prestige, big-money jobs–superintendents of the large, urban school districts and principals of high schools–continue to go to men, Blount said.
Men also have dominated the management ranks at libraries, said Long of the North Suburban Library System, although she believes that is changing.
“At one point, when we would get together at conferences, most of the directors [of large metropolitan library systems] were men. Now, the balance has shifted. It’s about 50-50,” she said.
Nowadays, beginning teachers in the Chicago Public Schools are paid $33,000 a year. Beginning librarians nationwide make about $32,856. And registered nurses’ salaries nationwide average $41,080.
Pay isn’t necessarily the point
Even so, pay increases aren’t necessarily the big push for recruitment efforts.
“When I talk to people who are coming back [to nursing school], what they’re looking for is a career in which they can give service to others, find employment and get satisfaction from making a difference in another person’s life,” said Mary Lebold, dean of the School of Nursing at St. Xavier University in Chicago. “The ones who come from a career in business or the stock market say they don’t have the personal interaction. They want to be working directly with people and families.”
That old-fashioned personal connection was the reason Barbara Shinn, 64, who spent 30 years working for the U.S. Postal Service, decided to go to nursing school. She graduated from St. Xavier last year.
“Nursing is so gratifying,” said Shinn, a home health nurse. “You can go in and do something for the patient. I feel so good about it.”
Similarly, teaching recruiters still draw on the old-fashioned appeal of family friendliness that drew McElroy into the classroom.
As they attempt to fill 1,000 vacancies in the system, Chicago Public School officials will aim part of their campaign at young people who don’t want jobs that require them to travel and be away from their families for extended periods–people “who are saying, `I’m not ready to kill myself and work 12 hours a day,'” said Carlos Ponce, chief human resource officer.
Another part of the campaign will showcase the leisure time that comes with teaching–two weeks off for the winter holiday break, one week off in the spring, 10 paid holidays, three personal business days and two months in the summer.
“We’ve changed all of our material that markets [CPS],” said Ponce. “In the next wave, we’re taking a look at the lifestyle of teachers.”
