In my current job, I help people cultivate “adulting” skills. My clientele is disproportionately adult men. I have observed firsthand that men — particularly those who are unemployed, under-employed or engaged in wage labor — are struggling. My typical work week includes many discussions about social isolation, housing insecurity, job market challenges, the bureaucratic nightmare of accessing health care and the never-ending struggle to “keep up.”
When I work with women, they are often struggling in these same exact areas. However, I can typically expect that a woman client will only attend a fraction of our scheduled appointments. Child care and other caregiving responsibilities often conflict with women accessing supports — even with (and sometimes because of) the presence of male co-parents and partners.
Furthermore, even college-educated and fully employed women are facing major challenges. As a contract worker in a helping profession, I experience significant precarity. I do not have health insurance, my rent continues to increase, and I remain under-qualified for most forms of “skilled” and white-collar work. My primary options for employment are care work or service industry work. LinkedIn recently recommended that I become a surrogate. My bachelor’s degree in Anthropology undoubtedly gives me cultural capital, but it has not translated into financial capital or significant social mobility.
As women increasingly outnumber men in higher education, we should be weary — just not for the reasons often given. When an institution or industry becomes “female-dominated,” we can usually expect that society has (or will start to) decrease its value. The financial utility of a college education is in decline. Some young people, especially young men, have (accurately) determined that they will have better economic outcomes if they pursue the trades or nontraditional forms of income.
The young women attending college, rarely encouraged to pursue skilled trades and often intimidated by the prospect of being the minority in male-dominated fields, are disproportionately funneled into the social sciences, humanities and lower-paid industries. I was genuinely passionate about my college major and found my education deeply empowering, but I still unintentionally wound up in the care work industry — performing the traditional feminine labor I thought I was escaping.
To be clear, I love my clients. I think every human should find a way to share in the labor of caring for others. This work is extremely needed and important and should be compensated far more adequately. Yet, like other humans, I love exercising my creative, intellectual and physical capacities. I dream of having the freedom to be both a caring community member and someone who can be an “artisan” of sorts. In grade school, how many of us wanted to be artists, writers, musicians, craftspeople and professionals who could build, repair and invent things? Under current conditions, people women and men alike are increasingly denied a very human need to use our minds and bodies in fulfilling ways.
In a world that is increasingly difficult to thrive in, it is easy to grow resentful of one another (and some of these resentments are valid). Nevertheless, I will always have far more in common with a poor or working class man than I will ever have with a woman CEO. If we want affordable housing, Medicare for all, livable wages, publicly-funded higher education, the capacity to build and support our families and the freedom to retire before age 80, we are going to have to start seeing that people of different identities have the same economic interests. We are in this struggle together.
It is almost as if politicians — Democrats and Republicans — benefit from our lack of solidarity with one another.
Catherine Ledue is an executive functioning skills coach who lives in Dover.