Men in Female-Dominated Vocations: a Rationale for Academic Study and Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue on men in female-dominated vocations provides a rationale for examining this topic. To date, this topic has garnered relatively little research attention even though work is often identified as a central aspect of men’s identity. Although millions of men perform “women’s work” in a broad range of fields, the extant database around the world focuses primarily on male nurses and teachers and tends to focus on ways to recruit and retain men in these professions. We argue that studying men in female-dominated vocations is important because it furthers our understanding of the workplace in general, as well as the ways in which men experience, understand, and navigate challenges to their masculinity. Moreover, expanding our knowledge of men in female-dominated vocations has important theoretical implications for theories addressing gender-based equality and power dynamics, the psychology of men and masculinity, and intersecting identities (or intersectionality). After a brief overview of the literature and establishing this rationale, we introduce the articles in the special issue. The majority of the papers in this special issue are based on U.S. samples, with one exception from the U.K.