Introduction

Advancements in technology, artificial intelligence, automation, and growing globalization continue to rapidly change the nature of work and who does it, with the potential of displacing an estimated 85 million jobs around the world by 2025. One trend is clear: The work of the care economy is growing in demand as societies around the globe age, and technology can’t easily replace that caring work. Home health and personal care aides are among the fastest in the United States, with a projected growth of 34 percent from 2019–2029 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And jobs in child care, elder care, and education are some of the most future-proof jobs as they, too, require human touch and interaction. While some have considered using robots to take over simple goal-oriented tasks like the routine administration of medication, most care work requires empathy, warmth, human interaction and responsiveness, creativity, and compassion—all work that would be difficult if not impossible to replace with computer code. Many of these care economy jobs have been deemed essential in the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Yet these fast-growing and essential jobs are not only dominated by women, they are also low-paying and often precarious. Nine out of 10 home health aides are women, 62 percent are people of color and about one third are immigrants. They often have inconsistent work, unpredictable schedules, and make about $11.52 an hour. Of the 5.8 million people working in healthcare jobs that pay less than $30,000 a year, 83 percent are women and half are nonwhite. Early care and education teachers and child care workers—almost exclusively women and 40 percent people of color—make poverty wages, with about half qualifying for public support like food stamps or Medicaid, as do home health aides.

That there are so few men in these caring professions and that these are such poorly paid and unstable jobs is not surprising in a society that has long associated care work as “women’s work” and undervalued it as an unproductive “labor of love.” And having so few men in care professions also means that men both enjoy unique benefits and face often demoralizing challenges solely because of their gender. In a sign of how much more men and men’s work is valued in the United States, professional caregiving men tend to earn more than their female counterparts—male registered nurses, for instance, earn about $7,300 more a year than female RNs. And men in female-dominated fields like nursing and teaching benefit as clients and managers tend to assume they hold leadership positions. Men in early care and education are often pushed out of the classroom and into administration. They can get special treatment, and are treated as pursuing careers rather than holding jobs. Yet men can also face stigma and stereotyping that can push them out of these caring professions, or dampen their interest in pursuing care work in the first place. Men in these fields tend to downplay the “feminine” or caring nature of their work. Sometimes clients refuse to accept care from a nurse because they are male. In a study on Black men in nursing, sociologist Adia Harvey Wingfield found that stigma and pressure, not men’s choices, are what prevent Black men from entering the nursing field, and that the stigma stems from racist and sexist assumptions by colleagues and patients about Black men.

Still, Black and Latino men are a fast-growing demographic in care economy jobs like home health aides and nursing assistants. It is critical to better understand the experience of men in these caring and future-proof professions in order to learn how to draw more men to them and retain them, and, at the same time, work to make these fast-growing care jobs good jobs for people of all genders. This question comes at a pivotal time, as the unemployment rate due to the unprecedented global pandemic remains high, as men’s disengagement from the workforce has been described as a crisis, and as economists and others predict that automation will replace the repetitive, manual tasks common in many professions dominated by men like manufacturing and truck driving.

This report is part of the Better Life Lab’s multi-year project to better understand the experiences, attitudes, and beliefs of men who provide paid and unpaid care—the channels that enable them to do it, and the barriers that keep them from it. This is the only report in the series to explore the experiences of professional caregiving men. For the project, we partnered with the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago (NORC) to conduct a nationally representative survey of 2,996 American adults and used 20|20 Research’s QualBoard facilitation platform to host five online focus group discussions. Both the survey and focus group data were collected before the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

NORC also conducted a non-scientific sample of 331 men employed in caregiving professions, including doctors, home health workers, nurses, physician’s assistants and other health occupations, as well as early childhood education. But because the sample is not representative—the majority were white college graduates over age 45 making $100,000 a year or more—we concentrated our analysis in this report on the in-depth focus group discussion of 13 professional caregiving men who worked as nurses, home health aides or early care and learning educators, in addition to two other focus groups—a general population group of men over 18 and a general population group of women over 18. We changed the names of focus group participants to protect their anonymity. We did not change their ages, professions, geographic locations nor information about race or ethnicity.

Although the data was collected prior to the global pandemic, it can serve as both a baseline to measure change as well as a useful guide in understanding professional caregiving men’s experience, what keeps men from entering or thriving in these fast-growing professions, and the changes in workplace culture, public policy, and cultural attitudes that are needed to both attract and retain more men in caring professions and to transform these undervalued jobs into decent, dignified and respected work for people of all genders.