Trash Princess

so, that “stop devaluing feminized work post”

nice idea and all

but the thing is, as soon as a decent number of women enter any field, it becomes “feminized,” and it becomes devalued.

as women enter a field in greater number, people become less willing to pay for it, the respect for it drops, and it’s seen as less of a big deal. it’s not about the job- it’s about the number of women in the job.

observe what happened with biology. it’s STEM, sure, but anyone in a male-dominated science will sneer at the idea of it being ‘for real,’ nevermind that everyone sure took it more seriously when it was a male dominated field. so has happened with scores of other areas; nursing comes to mind

so the thing is, it’s not the work or the job that has to be uplifted and seen as more respectable. it will never work out, until people start seeing women as respectable

Personal anecdote time!  I’m in a biology graduate program.  An acquaintance wanted to introduce some guy to me because his son was thinking about becoming an undergrad science major.  When he found out I was in the biology department, he grinned and said, “Well, I guess that’s kind of related to science.”

I gave him what I hope was an icy look and said, “Isn’t it strange how men outside the field started saying that right around the time biology majors shifted from mostly male to mostly female?”

for example, i once heard a girl in mech eng list some of the engineering fields in the order she thought was hardest to easiest. you know what it was? electrical, mechanical, chemical. it’s absolutely no surprise that this list is also a handy ordering of fewest women in the field to most women in the field.

Eventually, after a lot of hard work, they were successful in getting the award changed. Quite a few librarians and archivists got a significant pay rise - after the government agencies they worked for got round to re-assessing all of those positions to work out where they sat on the new set of gradings under the new award.

Of course, the government agencies hated the new pay scale, so over time a lot of those jobs were “reassessed” as not specifically librarian or archival roles and turned into clerical positions. Often, when this was done, professional qualifications were no longer listed as an essential requirement on the position description. They still did essentially the same work as before, but they were now on the clerical pay scale and paid less, plus their work was de-professionalised into the bargain.

[♔]

“Pet,” Loki calls sweetly as the pair of unnaturally blue eyes stares listless past him, “who owns you?”

my only sunshine

you make me happy

when skies are gray

you’ll never know dear

how much i love you

please dont take

my sunshine away