Should-Read: Betsey Stevenson: Manly Men Need to Do More Girly Jobs

Should-Read: Betsey Stevenson: Manly Men Need to Do More Girly Jobs: “Donald Trump wants America to make things… bring iPhone assembly to the U.S…

…If he really wants to help his supporters, though, he should think twice about what kinds of jobs to promote…. Nearly half the private-sector jobs in the 1940s and ’50s were in the goods-producing sector. Today less than one in six are. The service sector has more than made up for the losses…. Lower-skilled men don’t seem to want service jobs….

Policy wonks like me have wondered why more lower-skilled men aren’t adapting…. Occupations conflict with traditional notions of masculinity. They require sitting, caring and communicating, as opposed to working with big machines…. The challenge for men is much greater than what women faced in the 1960s through the 1980s, when the latter entered the workforce in greater numbers. Women’s new role clashed with social norms around femininity, but they were able to merge the two…. By encouraging men to cling to work that isn’t coming back, Trump… [will] ll have to do something out of his comfort zone: make girly jobs appeal to manly men.