It's NOT a Man's World, and Hasn't Been for a Long Time

F or a book she's writing, Former New York Times career columnist, Marci Alboher, asked me about the differences between male and female career changers.

I think you'll find my response instructive, not just about career changing, but about why I deeply believe that "It's still a man's world" is an utter canard.

Here is my response to her:

Of course, any generalizations across an entire sex will have many exceptions. That disclaimer made, here is what I have observed over the 3,800 career coaching clients I've worked with over the past 25 years:

Many men today are scared. They feel it's women's era. For example, the unemployment rate is 25% higher for men than for women, and the media and colleges disproportionately present men as inferior to women. Those are just a couple of reasons why fewer men than women try to change careers. They feel they're lucky to have what they have, even if it doesn't feel great.

Here's an even more prevalent reason why fewer men than women try to change careers. Despite societal changes in expected gender roles, many men still feel--perhaps encouraged or manipulated by their wife--to remain the primary or sole breadwinner. So they believe that the risk of making a radical career change, especially to follow their (unlikely to be remunerative) passion, is too risky to their family's financial security. So they stay put. They usually rationalize, "I'll follow my passion when the kids go off to college, when I retire, etc."

But in our economy, which is so fragile and unlikely to turn around for the foreseeable future, and with talk about cutting Social Security for future recipients, many of these men may never afford to retire.

Except for the top few percent of earners (rich executives, doctors, etc) most men will have to work on that non-passion-inducing job until they drop, which is 5.2 years sooner than women--There are 4+ widows for every widower. For so many men within the middle and working class, Death of a Salesman, isn't a play, it's reality.

Marci then asked for more on male career changers. Here was my response:

1. Most men feel they must make their career change FAST. As mentioned, they feel the need to bring home the money. His wife may contribute little or no income but expects that paycheck to keep coming, unreduced. (Remember, women do 85% of the consumer spending.) If a man's attempt to make a career change forces him to cut back on how hard or how long he's working on his current job, he may fear that risks his losing his job or of a promotion and the additional money he feels pressure to get. Such men feel they can't afford to leave their job until they have another source of good income. So they work hard at making the career change for a month or two. But if, after a month or two, there aren't signs that their career change efforts will pay off, scared of the loss of income, they usually give up.

2. More men than women look down on networking. They view "networkers" as people who are trying to substitute a smile for substance, people who do favors for others only so they can get something bigger in return. Such men feel they're more worthy if they put their time into working and into developing their skills rather than in networking. That's one reason why, for example, more men listen to a self-help book on their iPod as they jog rather than, as more women do, jogging with a friend or networking target. My doggie Einstein and I walk around a three-mile lake every day. I notice that when men are in pairs walking/jogging, they're more likely than women to be talking about work. The women much more often talk about friends, clothes, vacation, etc.

On average, men spend less time networking than do women unless absolutely necessary, for example, when trying to change careers. Unfortunately, by then, it's usually too late: For a career changer's networking to pay off, those networking relationships usually need to be deepened over months if not years. That's another reason why male career changers have such a hard time of it.

3. There are tremendous barriers to men setting up men's networking groups. Perhaps the biggest impediment is that they'd be attacked as sexist and pressured, with media support, to shut down. But for reasons beyond the scope of this email, women are not only allowed to set up women's networking groups so without reprisal, they're encouraged to.

4. As I wrote, far fewer men than women allow themselves to even consider a "dream" career that would be low-paying, for example, writer, actor, musician, artist, etc. Following their dream is too unlikely to allow them to keep bringing home that big-enough paycheck consistently. So most men suppress their dreams until retirement, a retirement that is unlikely to ever come. What often happens is they die, leaving enough money to their wife that the wife can, if she hasn't already, pursue her low-pay dream of being a writer, artist, singer, etc.

Why do so few men assert what legitimately should be a right, equal to women, to pursue their low-income-producing dream? My hypothesis is that society's main mind-molders, the colleges and the media, have done such a good job of portraying men as inferior to women, that many men have come to feel inferior and that to justify their existence, men feel they must BE a paycheck, a beast of burden. So they stay on a job, any job. How many women, compared with men, would stay on a job as a pest remover, plumber, roofer, ice fisherman, or even a traveling salesperson who must fly around the country to God-forsaken places to try to sell some widget, or even move their family to places like Montgomery Alabama to get a promotion?

Truly, the most important difference between men and women career changers is that fewer men contemplate it and fewer still feel they can afford to take the often years it takes to make a radical career change. After their 20s, most guys tend to just keep their nose to the grindstone so they can support their family. Career changing usually inhibits their ability to do that.

Marci's response to that email encouraged me to write this explanation for why it's so difficult for men's groups to form. More important, I then go on to explain why it is, nor has been for a long time, "a man's world."

Many opponents of men's groups who nonetheless applaud women's groups, sweep away their double-standard with a cheeky, "All other groups are men's groups."

Marci, that has long been untrue. Nor is their assertion, "It's a man's world" as self-evident as feminists would have us believe.

For example, if it were a man's world, men would have the full range of career options: from stay-at-home non-income earner to actor/writer/artist to CEO. But while women have all those options, a man who chooses the former two is widely viewed as lazy. It would be socially unacceptable. So most men don't even allow themselves to consider such options. Women feel greater freedom to do so. Men are made to feel they must BE the paycheck. If it were a man's world, a man would have freedom to make important choices about their careers. They don't. Women do.

Other examples of how it's far from a man's world:

• Only men are allowed to serve in direct combat in the military, and 99% of the deaths in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have been men. Perhaps that's surprising in light of the media's unrelenting attempt to hide that fact with such phrases as "the men and women who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan."
• giving women preferences in Small Business Administration female-set-aside loans,
• women but not men allowed to have caucuses in corporations and government to facilitate women's advancement
• having many social-service programs just for women, almost none for men
• having "targets," virtual quotas, for women hired and promoted to al levels, but not for men
• having female-set-aside scholarships but not for men, even though there are many more female college students.
• women's networking and other organizations are encouraged while men's organizations are attacked as sexist with media-trumpeted demands they be disbanded.
• If a man impregnates a woman, even if she falsely claimed to be on birth control, he's stuck with 18 years of financial and temporal responsibility. Only she has the choice to abort.
• 93% of workplace deaths occur to men.
• And in a most painful example, when women have a deficit, for example, they're "underrepresented" in science, massive nationwide redress is undertaken, even though a recent two-decade study reported recently in the New York Times found that women in academic science fare as well or better than men. But if men have the deficit, even the ultimate deficit, they die 5.2 years younger, all we see are more pink ribbons or other women's health initiatives. There are seven federal agencies on women's health, none for men. 39 states have offices of Women's Health, none for men. Even more unfair, a PubMed review, indicates, as mentioned, that over the past 60 years(!), 95+% of gender-specific medical research has focused on women's health issues. Women claim this is because men don't take care of themselves as well: "If only they'd see the doctor." Well, would those women say that to minorities, who also "don't see the doctor" and smoke and drink at much higher rates than men?
• and perhaps most important to the next generation, a school system that has replaced boy-friendly competition with girl-centric collaboration, boy-friendly adventure stories, with soporific-to-boys tales of girl relationships, and history textbooks disproportionately extolling women from Sacajawea and Pocahontas to Simone DeBouvier and Sally Ride while sparing no pages to pound home the evils of white men from Hannibal to Hitler, Joe McCarthy to Timothy McVeigh, and perhaps worst of all, an insistence on ever more seatwork, which when active boys can't endure, are put on a Ritalin leash at a ratio of eight boys for every one girl.

Rather than it being a man's world, men are beasts of burden, the target of ridicule in the media, and the disposable sex.

I'm glad you said that my previous emails give you a lot to think about. I hope this one does too, Marci.

Career Change Success Stories

Because I've been having trouble helping my clients change careers, I searched the Internet for career-change success stories to provide inspiration and ideas.

I could not find recent success stories but found more than 30 from a few years ago. There were some accomplished by very high achievers, for example, those with Harvard degrees, but I didn't feel those would be the most instructive.

The following career changes were accomplished by more typical people. For more pleasant reading, I've edited and paraphrased a bit and put the stories in the first person, but the facts and the author's name are as originally published.

I didn't learn anything that would help my career counseling. Instead, I'm struck at how important luck and persistence are and how irrelevant career counseling seems to be--not one of the 30+ stories mentioned that a career counselor was helpful.

R. Marie Taylor
(This well-written one is presented here virtually verbatim.)
"Come to California, you'll love it out here!" I begged my sister to leave Louisiana for good.

"I'll end up being homeless with my kids" she fretted.

But I told her that she would have a home as long as I had one. So she came, by bus, with three very young children, a bag full of groceries to eat on the trip, two gallons of fruit punch and $100 pinned inside her bra.

She had a high school diploma and almost no work experience. She'd left behind the small town that she'd lived in for most of her life.

She worked as a cashier at a discount store. Before she could go to work, she had to take the bus to the daycare center, then get back on the bus to get to and from work, before returning to the daycare center, to get back on the bus and head home.

Life was hard but she signed up to take night classes once a week and eventually earned a bachelors degree in business and a master's degree in business accounting.

Today she is in charge of the payroll department of a large company and is studying for the CPA exam this year.

This is the woman who once pawned her high school graduation ring to buy the uniform I needed to sing in the school choir, the one person in the world who would be there for me and I for her.

She changed her career path from one dead-end job to another and made her way into the professional ranks.

That's my sis! And I'm proud of her.

Nicole Williams
I had been a stay-at-home mom, no college, no real skills, just a little bit of office experience and some odd job experience here and there. Yet I got a job in a bank. It turned out the new manager just had his admin give her two weeks notice. He was still trying to figure out what do to, he was overwhelmed, needed to hire someone, and he must have liked something about me and so he gave me a try. Looking back, I still can't believe they hired me and paid me that much.

Pat Gray
I had done a little tech writing as part of my job at a computer hardware company. After 20 years, the job and the politics got to be a little too much, so I wrote my resume to stress my tech writing skill. I got a job for 25% more money and 75% less responsibility! And most of the contracts were just a few months so I was always learning new things and meeting new people. I worked from home, no commute--I loved being with my dogs all day. And I scheduled my own time so if the weather was nice, I could spend an hour or two gardening in the afternoon and do my work in the evening.

Drew Mitchell
I was sick of the corporate world and sent out applications from everything from small office work to hospice. Finally, an app I sent 6 months earlier that apparently got caught in the employer's spam filter paid off: I got a job as a substitute teacher working with the autistic. It's a year later and I'm still just a sub but have found my calling and I'm applying for autism jobs elsewhere. I'm optimistic I'll get one with that experience on my resume. And importantly, I found something I really like, something I never would have thought of.

Neil Dixon
I was sick of working in a tannery, burning cowhide into leather. So I went back to school to become an accountant. I got a job and after a year it was time for salary review. I had done well and they gave me a nice title but just a few percent raise, still a pittance. I quit and helped my brother with his window cleaning business. I was scared of heights but got to like it. More important, my brother was lazy and did poor marketing. I took over and now the business is thriving.

Julie T
After graduating college, I took a job working for my aunt's pharmaceutical company. Every time I complained of being overworked, she guilt-tripped me by saying my hiring was a gift and there were plenty more intelligent working applicants and with biology degree. I believed her. I was even subjected to janitorial duties from time to time. Finally, I started applying for jobs at other places and one of the jobs was in regulatory affairs. Because I had a little experience at that and he only had a few applicants, I was lucky enough to get hired. Three years later, I'm still there and very content.

Top Careers for 2011 and Beyond

I've given these careers and fields a high overall score on job satisfaction, and compensation including benefits and job security.

These picks are a distillation of the many thousands of nuggets that have entered my brain: from my career counseling clients, colleagues, radio show guests and callers, friends, reading (and I'm a pretty voracious reader of career material,) plus self-generated thoughts.

• Optometry. This has long been one of my top-recommended careers. Yes an O.D. degree requires four years of post-bachelor's study or a six-year B.S./O.D. degree, but the career has major pluses. Optometrists, unlike many other health care providers, have a very high cure rate, they rarely get a middle-of-the-night emergency call, there's no blood, guts, nor communicable diseases, the aging population increases demand for optometrists, and optometrists make a six-figure income.
  

Note: optometrists are different from opticians, who dispense lenses and glasses, and from ophthalmologists who are MDs and do major surgery. Optometrists fit patients for lenses, diagnoses diseases, may prescribe some medications and eye exercises, and even do some minor surgeries.

• Grant/Proposal Writer. The government, foundations, and nonprofits, distribute money through a proposal submission process. So whether it's a desk manufacturer who'd like to sell to the state, a Native American Dance Troupe that would like a grant from the Feds, or a drug addict job training program that wants money from a nonprofit, all of them need grant writers.

• Fundraiser. Money is nonprofits' lifeblood. So nonprofits generally pay the highest salaries to fundraisers and, of course, to the executive director, who is also responsible for fundraising. So even if there are program cutbacks, nonprofits are likely to keep spending serious dollars on back-office development staff (those who research prospects to identify their hot buttons,) developers and maintainers of the donor database, fundraising event planners, and of course, pitchers: those with the moxie to extract big bucks from wealthy individuals and corporations.

• Adult Day Care (the entire field, not just direct care providers.) Most elders want to age in place, that is, in their homes, but they'd do well to have meals prepared and companions to eat and recreate with, someone to be sure they take their pills, etc. Less expensive than 24/7 assisted living, adult day care is growing in popularity with elders, their families, and long-term care insurers. Typically a bus picks the clients up in the morning and drops them back home after dinner. These facilities, like all businesses, employ a wide range of people: from accountants to HR people to CEOs, as well as, of course, cooks, janitors, nurses, patient supervisors, etc.
• Military. I believe the U.S. will enter a period of decreased foreign adventurism yet will continue to maintain a large headcount. Benefits are extraordinary: for example, free housing and education for the servicemember and family after just 90 days of service! Please know that the military offers an enormous range of careers beyond grunt: from artists to engineers.
• Health care administration. The 2,500-page ObamaCare programs will cover an additional 32-45,000,000 disproportionately low-income high health care users plus 12,000,000 more when Obama fulfills his promise to legalize illegal immigrants and their family members. All of that will profoundly affect health care in the U.S. Hospitals, physician group practices, health organizations such as Kaiser, Humana, Sutter, etc., will, for the foreseeable future, be employing large numbers of people to deal with the myriad required changes.

• Bilingual special education teachers, school psychologists, and speech therapists. Limited-English-proficient students are America's fastest growing category of students, and, by definition, they have extensive, often expensive, special needs. Unlike education for regular education kids, services to special education students are absolutely mandated by law, no matter how tough the economy or how great the cutbacks to other students. So funding will exist to pay for teachers, school psychologists, speech therapists, special bus drivers, etc., to provide the mandated "free and appropriate education" for all special education students.

• Federal manager. Despite the Tea Party win, the Keynesian administration and Senate remain in charge. That means the federal government will not shrink and, for non-star employees, the federal government, compliments of the taxpayer, continues to offer the best deal in town: surprisingly high salary and unsurprisingly excellent benefits, holidays, vacation, retirement, and job security. At this moment, there are 190 U.S. federal manager positions advertised on usajobs.gov. Half of them pay over $100,000.

• Welding. I've often read that this field has shortages, especially stainless-steel welding and welding in tight spaces--for example, inside oil refinery pipes. That's true not just in the U.S. A recent 60 Minutes reported a severe welder shortage in Brazil.

Self-employment ideas

I like these because they require short training and small investment, have high profit margins, are likely to survive a tough economy, and are minimally subject to trend risk--that is, demand is unlikely to wane.

• Parking-lot oil changing. Give an owner of a mall- or large employer parking lot a fee in exchange for allowing you to use a few of their parking spaces for changing oil while the car owners are shopping or at work.
• Gourmet salad and sandwich (including burrito) trucks or carts. I've been touting these for years. Last year, they caught on big-time on the coasts. I believe there's still room in high-foot-traffic locations in non-coastal cities.
• Wellness coaching. I believe the days of the "ten more pushups!" fitness trainer are waning. People are turning to wellness coaches who help them with all aspects of wellness: alcohol, drugs, and smoking, stress reduction, weight control, and yes, "Ten more pushups!"

Have a job search or career change success story?

Do you have a job search or a career change success story that you'd like me to share on my radio show? If so, email me at mnemko@comcast.net