Kara, we need to get jobs in the sciences and other seemingly girl-unfriendly places and get the hell out of pink collar ghettos because if we want the world to become any different than it is, we have to MAKE it be different. Some of that change is made by making our voices heard at the polls and in public life, and some of it by conducting our personal lives with a non-negotiable demand for equal treatment in our family relations, and some of it will come from integrating work disciplines and workplaces. Time and again, women find art history and social work and other barely compensated careers more congenial and more to their liking on first glance. But if we want to make more than $25K for the rest of our lives, if we want to participate in the work that will make the world survive our current bad environmental behavior, then we have to suck it up and take science and math and at least try to work in less traditional fields.

I think that a lot of why young girls / women don't want to be engineers or scientists is that those fields are marketed to guys by guys on the strength of guy interests -- cool gadgets, love of technology for its own sake, etc. I think that engineering and science would appeal to young women more if it were sold to them on the strength of WHAT YOU CAN DO with it, what those disciplines make it possible for one to participate in. Wanna save the planet? Wanna feed hungry children? Wanna cure cancer? Those are caring professions, on steroids.

( I am a web developer for a govt. lab full of weather scientists, and it rocks. I was a liberal artist who thought she hated math, but still took lots of it. Thank you, dad.)

Pink collar jobs aren't necessarily a bad financial choice. I'm a chemist, and I've been laid off twice in less than two years. I've had to relocate four tiimes, and every time I turn around, another company is having layoffs. I've been seriously thinking about going back to school to go into something like nursing. It pays just about as well as what I'm doing now, and the jobs are much more stable.

Ironically, when I was first looking at careers, back when I was in high school and college, several of my aunts encouraged me to look at nursing, pharmacy, etc. They told me they were good jobs "for a woman". All I could think is, "how old fashioned, to think that certain jobs are "women's jobs" But now, I look at those jobs and think how nice it would be to have a job that was stable and you didn't have to worry about layoffs, where you could go out and find a job in any city instead of having to relocate every few years, where you didn't have to invest years in graduate school before you could get a job. I didn't think about those things when I was 20.

Not that I would discourage women from going into science, if they really loved it, but it comes with some major drawbacks, at least in my field.

Nursing and pharmacy are pretty unusual in that regard, wouldn't you say? What I'm thinking of as typical women's choices are social work, child care, and less specifically skilled and degreed jobs in the 'caring professions' that typically pay poorly. I'm also thinking of the math and science avoidance many young woman are permitted to indulge in high school and college that limits later options and post graduate studies. I just think that self-stereotyping based on that distaste is a rate-limiting step on women's careers and advancement that it is stupid for us to sign up for.

lorikay4 wrote: "Nursing and pharmacy are pretty unusual in that regard, wouldn't you say? What I'm thinking of as typical women's choices are social work, child care, and less specifically skilled and degreed jobs in the 'caring professions' that typically pay poorly. I'm also thinking of the math and science avoidance many young woman are permitted to indulge in high school and college that limits later options and post graduate studies."

Nurses are in demand and its a very important job. Its also stressful, with bad hours. I'm an accountant and I know of several women who came to the realization that nursing wasn't paid enough to compensate for the drawbacks and got retrained in my profession.

Um, I'm not trying to sell anyone a particular vocation, I'm saying, it's dumb for women to limit their options to liberal artsy / 'caring profession' type educations. I'm saying, suck it up and don't stop taking math in the 11th grade because you don't think it's fun. You know what's not fun? Making $28K when your 35. And whether we like it or not, careers with an element of numeracy in them are uniformly better compensated than those without.

Nursing is by all accounts very hard physical work, but it is 1) portable, and 2) seemingly in demand everywhere.