This makes intuitive sense---men have more opportunities to make a decent living in the trades without a college degree. See e.g. https://iwpr.org/numbers-matter-clarifying-the-data-on-women....
It’s not that boys are making a decision in high school not to go to college and therefore letting their grades slip. Once your grades slip, pathways to college narrow dramatically.
To illustrate my point, we can compare earnings of men with no college to women with a bachelor’s degree. Men make $45k, women make $65k. To believe that men are choosing trades you have to believe that men would voluntarily choose to make 30% less.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/05/23/labor-m...
I may be taking the surface level for grantes, but: based on the article, men were a lot more likely to in fact make my decision:
> A 2021 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans without a bachelor’s degree why they chose not to seek one – and found some gender differences in the responses. For example, men without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than women to say they just didn’t want to get one.
And women in another study suggest that they more or less need a degree due to less non-degree options:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women...
>What these numbers reveal is that, indeed, getting more education is an important way to close the gender pay gap. College entry—whether it is to get an AS or a BS—helps women gain access to careers where they have a comparative advantage (e.g., office work). Men on the other hand have better access to lucrative careers that don’t require a college degree (e.g., construction work). This appears to be the most reasonable explanation for why women outnumber men in college.
Encouragement goes a long way, but of course kids aren't dumb either. I'm sure some boys simply seek to work these blue collar jobs and realize you don't need to go to more school (which yes, they do worse in) to star doing this stuff.
Using the men's average is not the right metric. We're looking at a choice here, so the proper thing is to look at the percentage of men without a college degree who earn comparably to men with one, vs the same with women. I think you'll find a greater percentage of high earning men without degrees than you will find with women.
But this is 12-14 years out of date. Maybe standards rose or they couldn't continue this guarantee.
If we zoom out we can see that even the perspective of "who is doing this might motivate me to do it" is already misplaced for many technical jobs. I would think the best way to motivate anyone to do something technical would be to convince them that it is worth doing, not by proxy (because someone like you is doing it) but directly... because that activity is worth doing.
Trade,Estimated Employment Construction Laborers,1,019,090 First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers,777,420 Electricians,712,580 Carpenters,700,290 Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators,450,370
Bls2023
Where as there’s nearly 4 million acredited teachers and 3 million registered nurses
45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 432,200
47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations 6,225,630
49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 5,989,460
51-0000 Production Occupations 8,770,170
53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations 13,752,760
That adds up to 35 million total employed.
[1] https://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/21/data-spotlight-employment-of...
- these aren't the only trades. Sorry i got confused by chatgpt - I only meant to point out, this seems like a very small amount of people compared to what I thought - Not a mistake, but I was kindof joking with the post and it wasn't obvious. For this alone I deserved the massive downvote I got. I do think these numbers don't reflect the true number of people working in the field as say registered nurses or professional teachers because... how do i say this in a nice way.... many of them may be sharing a ssn and that's much more dangerous from a regulatory perspective than doing that as a REGISTERED nurse or PROFESSIONAL teacher. However there's a lot of peop[le nursing and teaching who aren't in those stats as well
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