Well said, i am so frustrated for how much value american culture puts on work but not life for men. I think all Americans could benefit from a better balance between the two...
I've always been off-put by the fact that the hyper-focus on getting women into higher paying jobs isn't paired with a cultural push to not see traditionally women-dominated occupations (nurses, teachers, caretakers) as lesser ones, a big reason IMO that men self-select away from them
Obviously economic power is tied closely with overall respect, power, and influence, but it seems to me that more work (heh) should be done challenging the assumed correlation of economic value and human value. Instead we see an accelerating of capitalism's implicit devaluing of all value that isn't financial, by unconsciously further denigrating the (again, imo) important but lower-paid jobs traditionally occupied by women.
I find it strange that the occupations you mentioned (nurses, teachers, caretakers) are lowely paid. Let's take nursing as an example. I keep hearing there is a shortage of nurses, and if that is so, shouldn't nursing salaries skyrocket? It's basic economics. A shortage of supply in a particular industry coupled with increasing demand should result in higher salaries. In fact, I've seen a similar phenomenon in a number of other industries (caretaking is one of them), where there is not an adequate supply of labor yet salaries are still low. Few people seem to raise this point, and I would love to know what is going on.
Back 15 years ago the spouse of one of my coworkers was a registered nurse and there was a shortage and I think nurses could compensation higher than an average software engineer. But later on, he said there was a lot of recruitment of nurses from the Philippines which brought the salaries down. Atleast that is what he used to tell me.
Say what? Why should increasing opportunity for one person imply some sort of diminution for another? Seems pretty sadly zero-sum to me, and the very opposite of a capitalist society.
