When Jen Pawol took the field in 2025 as the first woman to umpire a regular-season Major League Baseball game, it capped a long run of firsts for women in American professional life. Women already referee NFL and NBA games, earn the majority of college degrees, and make up roughly 40 percent of lawyers and physicians. Even the Trump administration's masculinist rhetoric hasn't slowed the trend: of the more than half a million jobs added since Trump returned to office, about 85 percent have gone to women.
Yet Pawol's debut arrived at a suggestive moment. It followed MLB's expansion of an automated system allowing players to challenge calls — fueling talk of robot umpires — and coincided with a wave of umpire retirements. The sequence fits a pattern scholars have traced through two centuries of labor history: occupations often don't feminize because they improve. They feminize because they get worse.
The logic of feminization
The pattern recurs: when a job's pay, prestige, autonomy, or promotion prospects erode, men tend to walk away, and employers turn to women to fill the ranks. "You have to basically get a different labor force," said Mar Hicks, a historian at the University of Virginia, because a secure, stable one won't accept the degraded deal.
The dynamic has appeared in textile mills, restaurants, and real estate brokerages, and continues in universities, where women make up a majority of the non-tenure-track instructors institutions increasingly rely on. It also reframes the standard story of women's progress since 1970, when women held just over a third of U.S. jobs and now hold a majority. Those same decades saw work broadly degraded — union membership collapsed, wage growth stalled, outsourcing spread, and tools like noncompete clauses stripped workers of leverage. Women didn't simply climb the ladder; in many cases, the ladder lost its value as they climbed.
From male career track to "girl's job"
Few roles illustrate the cycle better than the secretary. In the 1800s, secretaries were mostly men — part aide, part executive-in-training, with a genuine path upward. As the modern corporation emerged around 1900, the role became a dead end, and it feminized. Over the following decades, companies splintered it into typing pools, reception desks, and data-entry clerks, also mostly women. When feminism opened a path in the 1970s for some college-educated women into middle management, the grunt work traveled with the title — the new managers, as labor historian Jason Resnikoff put it, did more of their own typing and filing. Today, almost no one has an assistant.
Sociologists Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos documented the same dynamic across the 1970s in their 1990 book *Job Queues, Gender Queues*. In occupations from bus driver and baker to typesetter, book editor, real estate agent, and PR specialist, women's shares surged only after employers made the work less attractive — cutting pay, shifting salaries to commissions, stripping security and advancement. Women's numerical gains, they concluded, masked confinement to lower-paying, lower-prestige niches.
Insurance adjusters show the mechanics. Into the 1960s, an adjuster cruised a metro area in a company car handling a modest caseload, with a real shot at management. Under 1970s cost-cutting, firms moved adjusters indoors to grind through claims by phone and terminal; promotions vanished; men left.
Reskin and Roos's explanation: the labor market works like a queue. Employers rank candidates, and sexism places men at the front. When men spurn a job, employers hire the next group in line — women. The shift then reinforces itself: once women enter in number, remaining men read the job as lower status and exit. As one male typesetter put it, "It's a girl's job now."
The pattern holds — healthcare is the clearest X-ray
It's tempting to assume 2026 has outgrown this blunt ranking, and women have made real strides in high-status fields. But disaggregated data show men still holding the most prestigious, best-paid roles while women cluster in degraded versions. And in a 2018 paper, Roos noted a new twist: some low-paid, low-status jobs — cooks, crossing guards — were "masculinizing," filled disproportionately by immigrants and nonwhite workers.
Health care displays the split starkly. Brain surgeons and cardiologists, averaging over half a million dollars a year, remain overwhelmingly male. Pediatricians and family doctors, among the lowest-paid physicians, skew female. Women are now a majority of pharmacists — a field whose conditions have eroded with consolidation — and of nurse practitioners, the fastest-growing role in health care. Nurse practitioners earn about $130,000 and perform high-status work such as diagnosing and prescribing, but in practice, many facilities use them as a cheaper stand-in for physicians. "Doctors cost a lot of money and nurse practitioners don't," a staffing executive told The Wall Street Journal.
AI could rerun the script
Now artificial intelligence threatens to hollow out the white-collar work in which women have advanced — and the link between automation and feminization is old. In *Programmed Inequality*, Hicks shows that Britain's early computer programmers were mostly women, whom managers framed as machine operators rather than intellectuals; when programming's pay and prestige rose in the 1960s, men moved in.
If AI reverses that prestige, Roos speculates, the gender flow could reverse too. Should tech split into highly paid software architects and low-paid cleaners of robot-generated code, the lower tier will likely feminize. The same sorting could hit lawyers, journalists, architects, and copywriters — divided into well-paid strategists and poorly paid machine-minders. Without intervention, women land on the wrong side of the split. "It would be history repeating itself," Roos said.
The unsettling question, then, is whether women have spent decades reaching for a prize only to find it tarnished by the time they finally grasp it.