The Sedentary Economy
Many people find it easier to say what they don't want in their jobs than what they do want. My daughter and my sister both feel strongly that they don't want sedentary jobs, and this inspired me to write a book about the best jobs not behind a desk.
In my research for this project I discovered what I already suspected: that the information-based economy, because it is desk-based, is increasingly driving us toward a sedentary economy. You might call it the Dilbertization of the American workforce. Even office jobs are less physical than they were in the days when people pounded at manual typewriters, cranked mimeograph machines, collated reports, smacked staplers, and walked down the hall to talk instead of sending an instant message. This trend means that people who prefer active jobs are going to have fewer opportunities to satisfy their need for moving about on the job and will have to choose their career goals more carefully.
My research also revealed that sedentary work can be hazardous to your health. One Australian study found that men who sit at their desks for more than six hours per day were almost twice as likely to be obese as men who sit for less than 45 minutes. An American study found that women who worked at a sedentary job for 14 years gained 20 pounds more than women who worked in the least sedentary jobs. Some of the obesity of American workers can be blamed on fast food and 500 cable channels, but these studies show that sedentary work accounts for much.
It was fairly easy for me to isolate the nonsedentary occupations by using ratings of on-the-job physical activity from the Department of Labor's O*NET database. O*NET rates occupations for Spending Time Sitting on a 7-point scale.
Please allow me to digress here to congratulate the folks who provide O*NET. We who labor in the vineyards of career information owe them profuse thanks for their many improvements to the O*NET occupational ratings. The ratings for Spending Time Sitting are based partly on the opinions of occupational experts and analysts, and now predominantly (over 80% of occupations) on the answers of job incumbents to a questionnaire item, "How much time in your current job do you spend sitting?"
In early releases of O*NET, ratings were derived entirely from "legacy analysts," and a small but significant fraction of occupations had ratings for Spending Time Sitting and Spending Time Standing that totaled over 7. This was equivalent to requiring more than 100% of the workday to provide time for these two activities. Logically, the total time on the job (represented by 7) should have been divided between these two activities, plus perhaps some other activities such as crouching or climbing. It is heartening to note that in the current release of O*NET only a tiny number of occupations have this problem, all of them scheduled to get ratings from incumbents in a future release.
I subtracted the Sitting rating from 7 and computed the average of this remainder and the rating for Performing General Physical Activities, which is also rated on a 7-point scale. This produced an index of activity that let me sort all occupations that pay better than $20,000 (which represents roughly the lowest quartile of wage-earners) and eliminate the most sedentary 50% of these occupations. Then, as I usually do in books for the Best Jobs™ series, I identified the best of the remaining, active occupations on the basis of their combined rankings on income, employment growth, and number of job openings.
But now comes the interesting part: comparing these 175 occupations to the workforce as a whole. Because income is one of the factors that determined the selection of occupations for the list and the lowest-paying occupations were eliminated from the start, the average income of these best active jobs, $35,258, is respectably higher than the national average of $29,430 (based on May 2005 figures).
But the figures for outlook tell a different story, even though outlook also figured into the selection of these occupations. The mean growth projected for the best active occupations is 13.9 percent, only slightly higher than the average of 13.0 for all occupations; and the average number of projected job openings is not quite 38,000, only slightly more than the average of 35,000 for all occupations. In all the other books in this series, the jobs that were selected for the "best" list greatly outshone the overall pool of occupations on these two measures of outlook. So this tells me that active jobs are indeed going to be harder to find.
But, paradoxically, there is good news for one set of active-job seekers: women who are willing to work in traditionally female occupations. In all the books of this series, I break out a subset of occupations that have more than 70 percent women in the workforce and another subset with more than 70 percent men.
In every other book, the male-dominated occupations have higher average earnings than the female-dominated occupations, but in this book, the reverse is true: The female-dominated active occupations average $39,763 per year, compared to $33,358 for the male-dominated active occupations.
The reason for this discrepancy is the large number of allied health and teaching occupations, especially registered nurses and elementary school teachers, that pay well and have large workforces. (These are weighted averages, so workforce size affects the outcome.) By contrast, the male-dominated active occupations include many manual-labor jobs that do not pay outstanding wages. As in other books in this series, the female jobs also have better job outlooks than the male jobs.
So it appears that, for women who want to be active on the job, a traditionally female occupation is not a dead-end after all. Another way of looking at this is to say that, in our increasingly automated economy, the physical activities that women have traditionally done on the job--providing health care and teaching--are becoming more prized than the physical activities that men have traditionally done--manufacturing things, moving things, operating things.Dr. Shatkin can be reached at laurence@myself.com
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