Anything that a woman can do, a guy can do.

Via the NYT:

The trend began well before the crash, and appears to be driven by a variety of factors, including financial concerns, quality-of-life issues and a gradual erosion of gender stereotypes. An analysis of census data by The New York Times shows that from 2000 to 2010, occupations that are more than 70 percent female accounted for almost a third of all job growth for men, double the share of the previous decade.

That does not mean that men are displacing women — those same occupations accounted for almost two-thirds of women’s job growth. But in Texas, for example, the number of men who are registered nurses nearly doubled in that time period, rising to 22,532 from 12,709, and increasing the percentage of male nurses to 10.5 percent, from 8.4 percent. Men make up 23 percent of Texas public schoolteachers, but almost 28 percent of first-year teachers.

The shift includes low-wage jobs as well. Nationally, two-thirds more men were bank tellers, almost twice as many were receptionists and two-thirds more were waiting tables in 2010 than a decade earlier.

Even more striking is the type of men who are making the shift. From 1970 to 1990, according to a study by Mary Gatta, the senior scholar at Wider Opportunities for Women, and Patricia A. Roos, a sociologist at Rutgers, men who took so-called pink-collar jobs tended to be foreign-born non-English speakers with low education levels — men who, in other words, had few choices.

Now, though, the trend has spread among men of nearly all races and ages, more than a third of whom have a college degree. In fact, the shift is most pronounced among young, white, college-educated men

The Most Dangerous Jobs in America

Via the NYT, Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, 2010:

“Fishers and related fishing workers” died from workplace injuries at the rate of 200 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers in 2009, according to the B.L.S., 60 times greater than the rate of 3.3 per 100,000 for the overall American work force. For loggers, the fatality rate was 61.8 per 100,000 and for aircraft pilots and flight engineers, 57.1 per 100,000. [...] Other dangerous occupations include farming and ranching (38.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers), roofing (34.7), structural iron and steel work– those who put up the steel frames for skyscrapers (30.3) and refuse and recycling (25.2)

[...T]he fatality rate from workplace injuries is more than nine times higher for men than for women: 5.5 per 100,000 for men, compared with 0.6 per 100,000 for women. The B.L.S. reported that 4,021 men died from workplace injuries in 2009, compared with 319 women.

Can we somehow correlate this with wage data?:

Median yearly wage (bls.gov data):
Fishers and Related Fishing Workers $30,220
Loggers $32,870
aircraft pilots and flight engineers $118,070
$60,750
farming and ranching $60,750
roofing $34,220
structural iron and steel work $44,540
refuse and recycling $34,420

Wiki gives us an overall median income for men and women based on US Census Bureau, 2003 data:

Male, age 25+: $33,517
Female, age 25+: $19,679

Female board members take more risk than male board members?!?

Found via this article:

The German central bank's research found that female board members were more likely to take risks with a bank's finances than their male counterparts.

It urges financial institutions to be cautious when re-addressing the gender balance: "Employing a higher proportion of female board members significantly increases risk taking."

[...T]hose women who have scaled the corporate ladder and smashed through the glass ceiling tend to be less experienced than men in a similar position.

In more technical terms as this study is available online:

Executive board composition and bank risk taking - Allen N. Berger, Thomas Kick, Klaus Schaeck - 2012

The socio-economical composition of a company’s executive board is highly relevant for economic and social policy. For example, gender quotas are often advocated to improve career outcomes for females and ‘break the glass ceiling’. Similarly, educational requirements for bank boards have been proposed in the past as a means to improve corporate governance. However, little is known about the effects on firm outcomes of having more female, more educated or older board members. Do female board members really force a less risky conduct of business? Do educated board members increase or reduce bank risk-taking? And does the age of executive board members matter?

We construct a unique dataset for the entire population of German bank executive teams for the period 1994 – 2010. Exploiting this dataset, we examine how the age, gender, and education composition of banks’ executive boards affect bank risk taking. In our first test, we empirically establish that age, gender, and education affect the observed volatility of bank profits. In a second step, we compare banks which experienced changes in board structure to similar banks without such a change. Generally, changes in board structure could be symptoms of underlying trends in a bank’s business model. For example, shareholders might appoint directors with similar views regarding the bank’s optimal strategy. Such underlying trends would confound our analysis, as we would attribute the changes in risk taking to the new board structure. We circumvent this problem by only considering board changes due to the retirement of a board member. This strategy allows us to capture the impact of a younger, more female or more experienced board.

We obtain the following key results. First, we show that younger executive teams increase risk-taking. Second, board changes that result in a higher proportion of female executives also lead to a more risky conduct of business. Third, if board changes increase the representation of executives holding Ph.D. degrees, risk taking declines. This has important policy implications: while quotas regarding the age, gender and education of an executive directly affect the representation of different groups on executive boards, they have a knock-on effect on corporate outcomes.

This should debunk some stereotypes frequently found online.

Workplace discrimination - 2 sides of the coin....

Some stereotypes hurt both sexes, heck, probably all stereotypes do. I have often heard how men feared being alone with children in fear of having a false accusation being made against them. Be it in kindergarten or in school or whatever place you could think of where a false accusation could ruin your career. The same seems to be true in the workplace:

The CWLP research shows that sponsorship is the critical promotional lever for women stuck just below the top layer of management. However, fear of being even suspected of an illicit sexual liaison causes 64 percent of senior men to pull back from one-on-one contact with junior women; conversely, for the same reason, 50 percent of junior women are hesitant to have one-on-one contact with senior men.

These fears are often well founded. As mentioned in my previous post, illicit relationships (between a boss and a subordinate) wreak havoc in teams.