JOB QUEUES - GENDER QUEUES : FEMALE STUDENTS ESSAY

IF, in the coming years, artificial intelligence further hollows out the white collar fields where women have made progress, it will hardly be unprecedented.

Historically, employers have often associated automation with women's work, whether in the factory or in the office.

'' Managers quickly developed the idea that competence working with machines was a feminine attribute to differentiate it from the supposedly intellectual work done by male clerks,'' Hicks write in the book '' Programmed Inequality '' about the British computing industry.

It's tempting to believe that employment in 2026 no longer resembles the blunt ranking system Reskin and Roos described, making it unnecessary for women to wait for men to lose interest before entering an occupation in large numbers.

Certainly women have made real strides in high-status fields like law and medicine.

But when you disaggregate the numbers you begin to see the familiar pattern : men holding on to the most prestigious and highest paying jobs ; a higher number of women in degraded versions of the jobs men once dominated.

[ The new wrinkle, Roos observed in a 2018 paper she wrote with a colleague, was that a number of low-paid and low-status jobs, like cooks and crossing guards, were '' masculinizing, '' and were disproportionately filled by nonwhite people and immigrants.]

The health care profession may reveal what ails us. Brian surgeons and cardiologists, who make over half a million dollars a year on average, remain overwhelmingly male, while women are now about two-thirds of pediatricians and nearly half of family doctors, both among the lowest-paid doctors.

Women are also now a majority of pharmacists - a field in which consolidation has undermined working conditions - and a majority of nurse practitioners, the fastest growing health job in America.

Nurse practitioners typically make about  $130,000 a year and perform high-status tasks like diagnosing patients and prescribing medicine.

But, as a practical matter, many patients and medical facilities rely on them as a cheaper alternative to doctors.

'' Doctors cost a lot of money and nurse practitioners don't,'' a staffing company official recently told  The Wall Street Journal. 

 This Master Prime Publishing Essay continues. !WOW! thanks Noam Scheiber.