Making Your Mark In A Man’s World
The advancement of women in the workplace has been phenomenal in recent decades. As recently as the 1990s, many people felt that women had moved far beyond the traditional jobs of nurse and teacher, and that they were holding their own with their male counterparts in every significant career field.
But in the last 20 years and even more recently, it’s become clear that even those limits have been exceeded. Women are taking on even more jobs that were once male-dominated. And while it’s been an amazing transformation, it has further underscored the persistent areas of work life that remain largely populated by men. Thousands of determined women are working hard to prove their worth in these fields, and here’s how they’re doing it:
Food Service
It’s ironic that the provision of food, once considered “women’s work”, remains an area where females are largely excluded from the most important–and lucrative–positions.
Forget hostesses and waitresses. Women in the food service are looking to fill every role, from general manager to chef and everything in between. They are developing recipes, designing restaurants, starting a food truck, ordering from restaurant supply companies, and managing staff.
They’re getting the qualifications to do it, too. Enrollment of women in culinary schools is up, way up, and it’s clear this momentum won’t be slowing down anytime soon. Qualified women coming out of cooking school are quickly filling restaurant roles and establishing their importance and power in food service.
Tech
For such an innovative and new field, tech remains surprisingly male-dominated. For every female CEO like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, there are still countless firms staffed almost exclusively by men.
And it goes right down to the project development level, which is where the situation will first turn around. Getting qualified to write code, develop apps, and build technology is a necessity for women wanting to break into the field. Just as the chefs of tomorrow are slugging away in culinary school today, the next great tech breakthrough may be forming in the mind of a young IT student somewhere in college right now.
For those who cite Gates and Jobs as non-degreed tech innovators who made it big despite their lack of formal education, it should be noted that they were developing the technology, not using it. And while there probably are new things on the horizon that will be developed outside the existing college curriculum, the fact is that Microsoft and Apple are the exception, and that most successful people in tech need a degree.
Construction
Is there anything considered a more manlier pursuit than construction? Long hours in the blazing sun, powerful tools, heavy materials, and a locker-room atmosphere replete with wolf whistles and nonstop ogling. For decades, it was anything but the place women wanted to be.
But now a new generation of women is growing up, often alongside dads who engineered or built things, and they’re making no apologies for joining in on construction trades.
Our grandfathers largely estimated things. They couldn’t calculate the load requirements needed to build a barn or a house, so they built them so heavily that they knew it would work. They trained builders the same way, so it took only apprenticeship to qualify someone.
Engineering and STEM
Today’s roads, buildings, bridges, and cars are more heavily engineered than any in history, so the edge a woman needs will once again come from education. In this particular case, it must start even earlier than college, though, because it’s clear that students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields must be ahead of the curve even in elementary school in those categories.
There’s nowhere left for men to hide. Every occupation is ever-more heavily staffed with women than ever before. It remains true that they must often prove themselves more qualified and more capable than men in the same roles, but equality grows each time they prove their mettle. The next trailblazer could be you.