Days

Days of Future Past

One of the frustrations we experience in the field of career information is that we are trying to help people make decisions and plans about their futures, but the only information we have to offer them is about the past--or based on the past.

We try to make projections about future economic conditions: industries that will grow or shrink, technologies that will mature, cohorts of degree-holders who will enter the workforce, types of credentials that will be accepted by employers. But, of course, these projections have validity only if they are based on what we can measure, and once something has been measured it recedes into the past.

I became especially aware of this paradox while working on 150 Best Recession-Proof Jobs, because the book depended on my identifying a pool of occupations that are more likely than most to resist job cuts during economic downturns.

I followed the ratings of a Department of Labor economist, who based his ratings on past performance of occupations. I modified his ratings slightly based on my own analysis of several years of economic data. But both of us had only past data to work with, conscious all the time that each recession is caused by different economic forces and therefore affects the workforces of occupations differently.

For example, I'm sure that our current recession has had a greater impact on workers in the financial industry than did previous downturns. Nevertheless, it remains true that the financial industry is sensitive to all recessions, and therefore no occupations heavily concentrated in this industry got included in the book's 150.

I am also reminded of the past/future paradox of career information any time that I am working on a book and include a list of occupations with the highest concentrations of men or women. Such lists are regularly included in books in the Best Jobs series, and we always preface these lists with a lot of caveats. We point out that readers are free to use the information either as a warning or as an opportunity

For example, knowing that your sex is poorly represented in an occupation may warn you of the potential difficulty of succeeding in this occupation. Isn't it good to know in advance as much as possible about your chances of success, even when the cause is unfair or illegal? On the other hand, in some occupations or businesses with a gender imbalance, recruiters are on the lookout for nontraditional workers, and pioneers are welcome. So you may see a low representation of your sex as an opportunity for you to be a pioneer.

The same caveats are true for occupational mobility as well. Men and women historically have had different experiences of moving from one job to a better one. Job mobility has been thwarted so often because of sex discrimination that the phrase "glass ceiling" has entered the language.

I thought of this recently when I attended a presentation about career ladders that was based on labor market data gathered from 2000 to 2006 in Alaska. I recalled an analysis that my research team did at Educational Testing Service in the 1980s, using Census data to see what patterns we could perceive among people changing occupations. We found a large number of people moving among occupations such as dental assistant, secretary, and child care worker, from which we concluded that this cluster of occupations actually represented "pink-collar" careers--those in which women have traditionally worked--rather than those sharing a common set of skills, knowledges, or educational backgrounds. It made us realize that historical data--the way things are--may be discouraging to people planning their futures.

It's significant to note that in career information from JIST Publishing we have avoided producing lists or percentage figures that indicate the racial makeup of occupations, even though such figures are readily available from the Department of Labor. We had the same policy at Educational Testing Service, where the SIGI career information system reported percentage of female workers, but not minority-group workers, for each occupation.

You may be wondering, Why draw the line at race rather than at sex? If bad news about racial discrimination would be ugly to read, isn't bad news about sex discrimination equally devastating? (You might even argue that this year's presidential election has shown that the glass ceiling for sex is more impenetrable than the one for color.)

I'm not sure I have a good answer to that question, but I think it's possible that most of us are more disturbed by racial imbalance than by gender imbalance in occupations because we believe that gender imbalance is more likely to be the result of women's choices, rather than the result of discrimination. When people choose an occupation freely, without the constraints of discrimination, they base the decision on various preferences--for using certain skills, for using certain kinds of knowledge, for being in (or avoiding) certain work environments, for gaining certain satisfactions such as leadership or helping others, for performing certain physical tasks--and all of these preferences tend to vary between men and women.

For example, at ETS we did research on the work-related values of men and women and found that men tend to be strivers, valuing leadership, income, and prestige, whereas women tend to be nurturers, valuing helping others. To be sure, in each group there was a significant minority who favored the constellation of values that characterized the opposite sex; but the stereotype was much more characteristic.

This research suggests that even if sexual discrimination did not exist, we could expect continued male dominance of occupations such as stockbroker, architect, or computer systems administrator, and continued female dominance of occupations such as nurse, daycare center worker, or massage therapist. The gender imbalances might be considerably less than we find today, but some imbalances probably would remain.

Research has shown some work-related values differences between races, but not as profound or as stereotypical as those between the sexes. That, I believe, is why most of us would not like to see information about race in career profiles but can accept information about gender. A racial imbalance is more likely to be as the result of discrimination and therefore to be perceived as a warning and not as an opportunity.