Last week, the father of a young boy sent an email to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency:



At my child’s government school, there are zero male senior staff and very few male staff generally. Last year there was one senior male staff, and this is a pattern that appears in other schools around the state. In traditionally male-dominated fields such as IT, there are plans in place to improve gender diversity – and this is a great thing for us all. It is not considered acceptable for the organisation to lament a lack of suitable candidates applying for roles. They must develop and execute a plan to improve gender diversity in hiring and through mentoring and support in the job. Now, I really struggle to understand how in this day and age of equal opportunity, at my child’s school there is a situation where there are no senior role model males working alongside senior role model females.

Like this father, I too struggle to comprehend this reality. It is not acceptable that boys do not see male role models over the course of their education. So it is concerning to see data showing that between 1995 and 2015, the proportion of men working in education and training has declined.

We have seen a great deal of focus recently on the need to attract more women into scientific and technical roles. Encouraging men into female-dominated roles is equally important. Just like the male-dominated STEM-based industries, these female-dominated industries will benefit from improved diversity. There is overwhelming research that gender diversity within the workplace encourages different thinking and problem solving and drives innovation, productivity and performance. That’s not to mention ensuring our children experience diversity in their classroom role models.

Just as in education and training, the proportion of men in healthcare and social assistance, the only other female-dominated industry, has decreased. But as the population in Australia ages and with the roll out of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the demands on this workforce are going to grow. It goes without saying that maximising productivity, efficiency and innovation through diversity would be the smart thing to do.

Yet in Australia, only one in 10 nurses is male – a trend that looks set to continue based on educational enrolment patterns. The health department has projected that in the medium to long term, Australia’s demand for nurses will significantly exceed supply with a projected shortfall of about 123,000 nurses by 2030.

So it’s clear that gender needs to be part of the conversation when it comes to workforce planning in this sector so that we see more men like Ethan Watters, a registered nurse working in the emergency department of St Vincent’s hospital in Sydney.

It is rare to hear of men being encouraged to undertake caring-based work that has traditionally been the domain of women. Perhaps we assume that men are not interested in careers with a caring component, or that they are motivated by money and want higher-paid roles.

While it is true that male-dominated industries are more highly paid than female-dominated industries overall, there are many great and satisfying career paths for men in female-dominated industries.

Furthermore recent US research suggests that improving gender diversity could also be key to improving wages in female-dominated roles. A recent study found that over time, when a job began to attract more men, wages increased. For example, the study found that computer programming, once a female-dominated role, started paying more when male programmers began to outnumber female ones.

In contrast, as women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less, even after taking into account education, work experience, skills, race and geography.

But we also need to tackle stereotypes about men not being suitable for traditionally female “caring” roles. Think back to the 2004 film Meet the Fockers: the masculinity of Ben Stiller’s character was called into question because he was a male nurse. It is exactly these sort of outdated attitudes that discourage some men from pursuing non-traditional careers.

Last week the Workplace Gender Equality Agency launched Women’s work│men’s work: great careers are for everyone, a series of educational resources profiling women and men working in non-traditional fields. We want to inspire the next generation of employees to take up careers they may not have considered, so that their choices are not constrained by gender stereotypes.

Gender stereotypes affect the career choices of both genders – and it’s time we acknowledged that.