Council on Contemporary Families Gender Revolution Symposium:

Rejoinder to Responses to "Is the Gender Revolution Over?"

Our Response to the Gender Revolution Commentaries

David A. Cotter, 
Professor and Chair of Sociology, Union College, Schenectady NY
cotter@union.edu / 518 388 6457

Joan M. Hermsen
Associate Professor of Sociology & Chair of Women's & Gender Studies
University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
hermsenj@missouri.edu / 573 884 1420

Reeve Vanneman
Professor and Chair of Sociology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD
reeve@umd.edu / 301 405 6394

It is important to remember that for all the progress made toward integrating occupations, few men have gone into typically female fields.  Men today only make up 13 percent of nurses. To be sure this is more than the three percent in 1950, but not much more than the nine percent in 1980. Similarly, the field of elementary, middle and high-school teaching was less heavily female in 1980 (67 percent) than it was in 2010 (76 percent).  And some fields would appear to have the equivalent of a "no girls allowed" sign on the office door - women made up 2 percent of electricians in 1970 and 2010.

Furthermore, equality is not permanent.  Women are 57 percent of college students today. But they were 47 percent of college students in 1920 - a figure that had fallen to 30 percent in 1950 and only reached 47 percent again in 1976.  -DC, JH, RV / March 6, 2012