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Michael Dunne: From KLCC Studios, this is Oregon on the Record. I'm Michael Dunne. It's always a little strange when a thing can be both good and bad at the same time. For example, the stimulus checks issued during COVID helped save the economy, but the money pouring in also helped drive up record inflation. Another aspect of the economy that fits this mold is the employment rate for women. Women have seen amazing gains in employment over the years, both in terms of sheer numbers and in fields that were once almost exclusively the domain of men, and that's certainly great news. But as today's guest tells it, some of those gains have occurred because many jobs and professions have been degraded to the point that men don't want to do them anymore. A New York Times reporter on workplace issues joins us to explain. That's next on Oregon on the Record.
Noam Scheiber is a workplace reporter at The New York Times and the author of the recent book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. Noam, thanks so much for taking some time to talk with us.
Noam Scheiber: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Dunne: I really enjoyed your piece. I thought it was very provocative. You recently wrote for the Times, and the headline was “In Trump's Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That's Not an Entirely Good Thing.” What's going on here? What's going on in this workplace dynamic we find ourselves in?
Scheiber: The standard story people tell, and it has a lot of truth to it, is that over the past 50 years or so, women have made extraordinary gains in the workforce. Back in 1970, men outnumbered women in the workforce two to one, and just this year, I believe women actually outnumbered men for the first time. So it's a huge expansion of women in the workforce. As I said, anytime a group that's historically been excluded gains access to jobs over a period of years and decades, that's a good thing. I don't want to downplay that.
But when sociologists and economists have unpacked the details of what that's looked like, it paints a more complicated picture. In the story, I focus specifically on a book by two sociologists, Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos. They wrote it in 1990: “Job Queues, Gender Queues.” What they found is that if you look at a very high altitude, yes, women beginning in the '70s were making inroads into fields that had traditionally been male. But once you unpack that, you see that men were fleeing jobs that had fallen in status or become degraded somehow, whether the pay was lower or opportunities for promotion had vanished. Men were leaving these occupations as they got degraded, and women were entering them, and not just entering these more degraded fields but getting stuck there. The term they used was “ghettoized.” Unfortunately, we've seen that even as women have continued to make these strides over the past several decades, they continue to get ghettoized in these lower-status or more degraded jobs. That's been a persistent problem, even as they're now a majority of the workforce.
Dunne: Yeah, and is it in some ways a vicious cycle? Women got here because of the degradation of a job, and then once more women start filling those roles, the men still in those positions look around and say, “This is now a woman's job. I must vacate.”
Scheiber: Yeah, that's a well-documented phenomenon. Economists have studied this closely. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin at Harvard has a famous paper where she compares this to pollution. The women are the pollutants, and once a certain number of women enter the field, the men consider it polluted and exit. Another economist has compared it to residential segregation and resegregation, where the women come in, and once they reach a certain threshold, the whole field tips in a certain direction, the way a neighborhood might, for a similar reason: the men suddenly conclude it's less desirable. So you get these reinforcing cycles, and it all sums to women getting stuck in lower-status, lower-paying, often more insecure jobs.
Even in very high-status professions, you still see that pattern replicated. It's almost like a fractal situation: however deep you drill, whatever niche you go into, you see this replicate itself. If you look at law firms, the partners are still overwhelmingly male, even though we've gotten much closer to parity among lawyers overall. If you look at Fortune 500 companies, something like 80 to 90 percent still have male CEOs, even as many more women now graduate from business school and occupy middle-management positions. You see this play out over and over again in a whole variety of professional niches.
Dunne: Yeah, and you even point out that in medicine, it's great that a lot of women are now general practitioners and family doctors, but the brain surgeons still tend to be men, right?
Scheiber: That's right. If you look at data put out every year by a group called Doximity, kind of the LinkedIn for doctors, they list the top 20 highest-paying medical subspecialties and the lowest-paying. Something like nine out of the top 20 are surgical, and men overwhelmingly dominate those surgical subspecialties. The 20 lowest-paying are dominated by pediatrics, pediatric specialties, general practice and primary care. Women either dominate those, like the pediatric specialties, or are making big gains in general practice and primary care, but those are among the lowest-paying. You see this replicated even in these very high-status professions.
Dunne: If you're just joining us, we're talking with Noam Scheiber. He's a workplace reporter at The New York Times and author of the recent book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. You start your article, interestingly, by talking about a great stride: the first woman to call a Major League Baseball game. It's high time someone got that job, but talk about how baseball umpiring is changing, and how that fits in with what you've discovered in your piece.
Scheiber: This is a person named Jen Pawol. She's the first woman to umpire major league games, as you say. She did that in 2025 and has since umpired more games this year, in '26. There's a sense, though it's not confirmed or final, that she could be the first regular, day-to-day female umpire in Major League Baseball next year, in the 2027 season. It's a huge milestone, a major accomplishment.
I'll note that Major League Baseball has, over the past few years, made real efforts to diversify its umpire pool. They rolled out an initiative in 2022 to expand the pool of people going into umpiring and give them free development training. So they've made some efforts here, no question, and this is a hugely important milestone.
But it's happening just as a lot of umpires would argue the job is being degraded. There's much more automation now. Major League Baseball rolled out the automatic balls-and-strikes challenge system at the major league level this year. A couple of times a game, a player can challenge an umpire by going to this computerized appeal system. I think there's a sense, though umpires are reluctant to say this on the record, that if you read some of the coverage, you do detect anxiety about moving toward a much more automated world.
In fact, when Major League Baseball first began experimenting with this in the minor leagues, in the Florida State League in 2022, the following year saw the largest number of umpire retirements since the 1990s: 10 umpires retired the season after that experiment was rolled out. No one in Major League Baseball, and the umpires' association, would comment on this. But you do see it follow the historical pattern: the job gets degraded or automated or loses status, the men who traditionally did the job start to lose interest, and at the same time, women begin to make strides into that profession.
Dunne: Yeah, and you even talk about the corporate world, and how compensation has changed. When a man was doing the job, the pay was good, and then when more women got into it, things like quotas or commissions started to appear. Talk a little more about that degrading of the job itself.
Scheiber: Absolutely. We tend to see a decline in wages, or if not an outright decline, then an increase in volatility of wages that men tend to shrink from. That opening is often filled by women. We saw this a lot in the '60s, '70s and '80s, with fields like insurance. It used to be a steady, pretty good-paying job with a lot of upward mobility, and then in the '70s, a lot of insurance sales went to commission. It became harder to move up. It broke down into a million little pieces, so there was less of a sense that you were in control of the process from start to finish. That really did coincide with women entering the profession.
One other wrinkle here has to do with compensation, and again we see it in insurance, in real estate and other fields: the pay gets squeezed or made more volatile, and employers, sometimes explicitly but often implicitly, turned to women, because especially in those days, in the '60s, '70s and '80s, women were often a second source of income for a family. That income was often very important, but they weren't the sole breadwinner the way men were. I think employers sometimes tried to subtly signal that, yes, your income may be more volatile, but it's additive to your family income, not the only source. Obviously, that's gendered, and it shouldn't happen. Women should be entitled to the same pay and the same income security as men, and vice versa. But that was, I think, subtly the signal sent in the '70s and '80s when this pay was made more volatile.
Dunne: Yeah, and you go back much further. This was fascinating to me: the position of secretary. In the 1800s, you said, the secretary for the CEO or the boss was more like an aide-de-camp, a real advisor. Now, in the last century or so, we think of it as more of a support role than a real advisor, and we see that shift as the job became less robust. The vast majority of secretaries were once men.
Scheiber: That's right. In the 19th century, in the early days of American capitalism, the secretary was very much an aide-de-camp, or a sort of executive in training. They did a lot of grunt work: they handled correspondence, clerical duties, bookkeeping. But they were also apprentices, executives in training.
The job evolves in a few stages. First, right around the turn of the 20th century, it ceases to be a position you could ascend out of. They eliminate the upward mobility, and you're just stuck in the position. At that point, it starts to become more female, but it's still a fairly prestigious position. In the piece, I compare it to a noncommissioned officer: someone with authority and responsibility but limited upward mobility.
Then, over a period of decades, the job gets broken up and deskilled, so we get typing pools, receptionists and data-entry workers. It gets broken into a million different pieces and loses the cachet it had even at the turn of the century, when there wasn't much upward mobility but there was still a lot of responsibility.
At the very end of the process, into the '70s, a lot of women enter the role. That was partly due to organizing and advocacy by the feminist movement. Suddenly there's a change in the corporate ranks, and for the first time women are hired into middle management in large numbers. What happens there is interesting too, because it ends up being the real death knell for the secretary or the assistant. The bargain corporations strike is, in so many words: We're now going to promote women into middle management, but they're going to take the grunt work with them. So they write their own correspondence and file their own documents, and middle managers across the board begin to take on a lot of the roles secretaries used to do. Pretty soon they got personal computers to help them with that. It was a real evolution over a period of 100 to 150 years, but the upshot was, over time, less responsibility, less status, less upward mobility, and much more feminine at the same time.
Dunne: We're going to take a break. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. When we come back, more of our conversation with New York Times reporter Noam Scheiber.
And we're back. I'm Michael Dunne, and you're listening to Oregon on the Record. Let's get back to our conversation with New York Times workforce and employment reporter Noam Scheiber.
The Trump administration, which many characterize as very hypermasculine, exemplified by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Given that, what are we seeing here? As you mentioned, women are making a lot of job gains, and part of that, we can extrapolate, is because the Trump administration is devaluing so many traditionally male positions. Women are, I guess, reaping a benefit in some ways in terms of getting employment, but getting degraded positions.
Scheiber: I think there are a couple of things going on. One is just long-term growth in the jobs women have been doing. In the piece, I focus on health care as one example. Over many decades, we've created these lower-skill health care positions. Personal health aide has been a position that's grown hugely over the decades; there are now something like 4 million personal and home health aides, and it's overwhelmingly female. Two generations ago, a lot more personal care was delivered by nurses and doctors, but we've pushed it into these lower-skill positions, partly because we have to. With the aging of the baby boomers, there are so many more people who require personal care, and to do that affordably, we had to create positions that were less compensated. But the fact is, we went from a lot of highly compensated, high-status, high-skill positions to many more lower-skill positions in health care. That's a long-term trend that just happens to coincide with the Trump administration being in office.
The interesting wrinkle about the Trump administration is that we've seen a lot of efforts that had been geared toward pushing women beyond that final barrier, getting them into equal numbers in the top ranks of law firms, into partnership, or pushing them from middle management to the executive ranks and to become CEOs. A lot of these efforts, whether in the private or public sector, resided under the rubric of DEI, and the administration has been very hostile to that: shutting down DEI offices within the government and leaning on the private sector to eliminate DEI efforts too.
I think that dovetails with the broader story of women making these gains because they're overrepresented in a lot of growing industries, but at the very top, their gains have stalled out. The Trump administration has tried to sideline efforts to push them into these higher-ranking positions. As you mentioned, Pete Hegseth: We've seen a lot of rhetoric from him about how standards have been weakened on the battlefield, and that we may have to change the standards, and if that results in fewer women in combat, then so be it. He's also pulled promotions that had been in line for certain women into the very senior officer ranks, like generals and admirals. Again, I think you're seeing a similar theme across the administration: skepticism toward efforts designed to get women over that final barrier into these high-ranking, high-status positions. That's gone by the wayside in a lot of respects.
Dunne: If you're just joining us, we're talking with New York Times workplace reporter Noam Scheiber. Noam, let's switch gears, because I think it might relate. Let's talk about your recent book. Maybe start by explaining who the college-educated working class is, and how they're in open revolt.
Scheiber: This is kind of an adjacent topic. It's this idea about people who've gone to college. I talk about how the generation of folks born beginning in the late '80s and early '90s, young millennials and Gen Z, were given the hardest sell of any generation about why they needed to go to college. They did probably more to prepare for college than any generation in history: more homework, longer school days, more SAT prep, more advanced-placement classes. If you look at the data, the number of people taking AP classes shot up roughly tenfold between the 1980s and the 2010s. So they did more than any other generation to prepare, and more of them went to college and took on more debt than ever to do it.
But when they graduated, beginning right after the Great Recession, around 2009 and 2010, and throughout that decade, they found a lousy job market that took many years to recover, and really never did recover for the college-educated. Generally, they found that the return on a college degree, especially once you factored in debt, had stalled out and even turned negative in many cases.
So it's really a generational story about people who went to college expecting it would vault them into the middle class or even the upper middle class, and then encountered a very different reality when they got out of school. That was a radicalizing experience. It began with some of what we saw in Obama's second term, or even the late first term, with Occupy Wall Street, and then Bernie Sanders ran for president. This group, the college-educated working class, was a huge constituency for Sanders. Later in the decade came Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and more recently Zohran Mamdani in New York City. It's a group that's been growing and growing, moving left politically, but also getting more frustrated at the workplace.
To bring it full circle, I do think women are disproportionately represented in this college-educated working class. We know that since about the 1990s, women have outpaced men in college graduation, so the college-educated population generally skews more female. Yet, per the first part of our conversation, they're often getting trapped in jobs that don't provide much upward mobility and aren't high-status. That's very much at odds with the story these folks were told on the way in, when they were going to college.
Dunne: It's a fascinating subject. He's Noam Scheiber, a workplace reporter at The New York Times, and his book, Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class, is out now. Noam, really appreciate your article, and really appreciate you coming on to talk with us.
Scheiber: Thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of Oregon on the Record are available as a podcast at klcc.org. Tomorrow on the show: Do you think cats are untrainable? A new OSU study shows our feline friends are actually very trainable, and active cat training is a true benefit to both cats and their people. I'm Michael Dunne, host of Oregon on the Record. Thanks for listening.
