Women Surge in Professions, Not Trades

American women with college degrees surged into professional and executive occupations over the last decade, but those with less education were locked out of many male-dominated blue-collar jobs, new census figures show.

Women fared particularly well in the Washington area, more than doubling their representation in the region’s plentiful executive and managerial jobs, according to the figures. Even more than in other parts of the country, it is common here to see women physicians, lawyers, computer scientists, economists and pharmacists.

But in this region and across the nation, less-educated women often remain in low-paying jobs in child care and office work. Two decades after women first broke into male-dominated trades such as construction and auto repair, they hold a tiny minority of those well-paid jobs, unable to overcome remarkably stubborn barriers.

Women hold just less than 3% of jobs in the nation’s construction trades, barely changed from 1980, and just more than 4% of repair jobs. Women gained in other types of blue-collar employment. They doubled their share of jobs as postal carriers and now make up nearly half of all bus drivers and dispatchers.

Some experts say that jobs such as firefighting and construction may be less attractive to women because of strong group cultures that can encourage hostility and harassment from men. There was more movement by women into jobs such as postal delivery and meter reading, perhaps because people in those jobs work alone.

Census data for 1980 and 1990, compiled for the Washington Post by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, provide the most detailed look in a decade at the status of women in the workplace. More than simply documenting the number of female doctors, for instance, or plumbers, they offer a window into the enormous upheaval brought about as one field after another has confronted issues of child care, sexual harassment and the glass ceiling.

Experts say that the greater presence of women in highly paid professions such as law is a result of pressure brought by women’s organizations and the civil rights movement to get more female students into the educational pipeline. Advocates wielded the powerful weapons of congressional hearings and civil rights lawsuits, threatening the loss of millions in federal funds for schools that discriminated against women.

Now, a third or more of medical, law and business school graduates are women. Women represent 46% of the nation’s financial managers, 42% of biologists, 21% of physicians and 39% of math professors.

By contrast, unfriendly craft unions and tradition-minded job counselors still control access to apprenticeships and training programs that lead to jobs in the blue-collar world, women’s advocates say. Weakened federal enforcement of job discrimination laws over the last decade also hurt, they say.

In some cases--manufacturing and coal mining, for example--women began pressing for equity just as overall employment declined.

And the picture may have become worse since these statistics were compiled for the 1990 census: As the last-hired workers, women were also likely the first to be laid off when the recession deepened in the early ‘90s.

Within the ranks of blue-collar workers, specialists say, women have found a warmer welcome from the government and companies with large central hiring pools--utilities and bus companies, for example--than from industries, such as construction, with many small contractors.