Which careers open doors for both women and men? These 16 stand out

Monday, January 25, 2021
Zoey Gold was a philosophy major in college, specializing in formal logic. Kevin Quezada’s career journey started as a sales clerk at Foot Locker. Their beginnings couldn’t have been more different.

Yet Gold and Quezada have converged on the same job choice. Each wanted to solve problems, work with key corporate customers, gather market intelligence – and help those customers use their companies’ products more effectively.

Both are customer success managers, a line of work that’s among the most gender-equal in the United States. Among last year’s U.S. hires for customer success specialists, 44% were male and 56% were non-male, as tracked by LinkedIn’s Economic Graph team.

Where else can you find career opportunities where strong gender balance is the norm? The table below highlights a wide range of specific titles within the 15 job categories recently featured as part of LinkedIn’s Jobs on the Rise. (That analysis was based on surging job listings and an upturn in hiring last year, despite the overall economic chaos)

Jobs on the rise: the titles approaching gender parity
Each career field is its own story, and many job titles remain filled predominantly by one gender. LinkedIn research shows that as many as 86% of last year’s hires of elementary school teachers were female, for example. By contrast, 80% of warehouse team leads were male.

All the same, gender parity is becoming more common in many fields, as shown by previous LinkedIn research. A wealth of academic research in the past 15 years has found that greater diversity in many situations is associated with positive business outcomes such as higher productivity, faster innovation and improved profitability.

What kinds of job titles are most likely to show up on these new lists? Broadly, they divide into three categories, as follows

Many industries that used to be mostly male have gradually transformed over decades, as women’s roles began to rise several generations ago. Steady, incremental gains have led to today’s near parity. Examples highlighted by LinkedIn research include dentists, loan representatives, psychiatrists, pathologists and school superintendents.

Back in the 1960s, for example, women’s share among graduates of U.S. medical schools was less than 10%. In the early 1980s, that number topped 30% and has kept climbing, perhaps half a percentage point a year, ever since. Currently, women are slightly more than half of all U.S. medical students.

Industries known for diverse hiring of both men and women continue to do so across similar functions -- although their version of diversity has sometimes co-existed with different pay levels and working conditions by gender.

The call-center industry’s overall statistics have shown strong male and female involvement, but not always on the same terms. Researchers have found that individual call centers might skew heavily toward male or female, with hiring practices that tend to reinforce those differences. Meanwhile, women often get paid less for the same work.

Newer industries, particularly in the tech sector, aren’t as burdened by historical practices. That’s because they are either relatively new -- or have grown so rapidly in recent years that the workplace culture is fully defined by today’s norms. Examples range from digital marketing to user experience and podcasting.

Count customer success as a prime example of a tech-related job that’s burst into prominence so quickly that it has been able to establish a gender-balanced work culture, right from the start.

As this 2018 article explains, the customer-success function evolved from earlier, sales-support jobs known as “account management.” But those earlier routines of checking in with customers were upended by the rise of software as a service (SaaS), which created far more flexibility -- and power -- in the ways that these customer-facing specialists could do their jobs.

Full Article @ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/which-careers-open-doors-both-women-men-16-stand-out-george-anders/?trackingId=z5Ycn2%2FpQWusChJRRLBEpg%3D%3D