Northeastern researchers got an unexpected boost from Newsweek’s cover story last week.
Saying “guys need to embrace girly jobs” to survive the new economy, Newsweek cited a recent NU study to support its claim that the majority of new jobs in the next decade will be in female-dominated fields such as nursing.
NU’s study on projected labor shortages, however, didn’t address gender.
“It’s true, as Newsweek suggests, these are fields dominated by women,” NU researcher Barry Bluestone said. “So they picked up on that end.”
Bluestone doesn’t plan to study the gender aspect further, but said it’s interesting. “I used to joke with my wife before the Newsweek story that men in a sense are becoming obsolete,” he said. “In the old days, it was helpful to have us around because we tend to be stronger physically and you needed people in the mines, in manufacturing and to cut down trees. We really mechanized all that.
“We were still essential for reproduction but reproductive science eliminated that need. Why keep us around? My wife looked up and said, ‘On good days you’re huggable.’”
