Here’s Your TDS Headline Of The Year

We had to look twice at this headline in the New York Times to believe it.

“In Trump’s Economy, Job Gains Go to Women. That’s Not an Entirely Good Thing.”

Huh? Is the Times complaining that men are being shut out of the workforce?

Maybe the subhead will clear things up?

Nope. It says “Despite the administration’s best attempts, the diminishing status of many American jobs is driving a spike in women’s employment.”

“Best attempts”? At what? Driving down women’s employment? Is that really something the Trump administration has been putting its “best attempts” to achieve?

The story tries to explain: “Even the Trump administration’s masculinist rhetoric — about how society has become overly feminine and should re-center male virtues — hasn’t slowed this shift. Of more than half a million jobs that the economy has added since President Trump took office last January, roughly 85% went to women.”

OK. But even if you accept this dubious premise that these job gains for women came despite Trump’s “best attempts,” how is this “not an entirely good thing”?

The story begins by highlighting the fact that, last year, Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire a regular-season Major League Baseball game.

But it gainsays this achievement by saying that it really wasn’t anything to brag about, because it only happened after male umpires started retiring in the face of automation.

Then it goes on to say that pretty much the only reason women make gains in the workplace is when men abandon crummy jobs.

“The story goes something like this: A job gets worse in some way — say, it pays less or becomes more grueling or monotonous or generally less prestigious — at which point men become less interested in doing it. Employers then turn to women to fill the ranks,” writes the Times’ Noam Scheiber.

The 1,800-word article goes on to trace the history of the workplace since the industrial age.

We’re not going to quibble with Scheiber’s historical accuracy. Although we will point out that one aspect of the workforce that Scheiber manages to leave out of his account is the fact that the jobs men dominate today are hardly glamorous.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women hold the majority of jobs in three of the five major occupational categories it tracks. The two where men dominate are “Natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations” (which includes jobs such as logging, trades, mining, mechanics, technicians, and are 94.4% occupied by men) and “Production, transportation, and material moving occupations” (which includes jobs like fish processing, tool operators, welders, boiler operators, and are 75.7% male-occupied).

And, as economist Mark Perry has pointed out, men completely dominate every one of the jobs with the highest fatality rates. When he crunched the numbers, Perry found that the average woman would have to work nearly 12 years for every one year of an average man to equalize the gender workplace fatality gap.

But sure. Let’s agree that it’s only when men decide a job sucks that women take over.

What does any of this have to do with “Trump’s economy”?

Absolutely nothing.

At least, nothing Scheiber can point to. In fact, Trump’s name never comes up again after the opening paragraphs.

This reminds us of the classic journalism joke about how major newspapers would cover the end of the world, with the New York Times’ headline reading something like: “World to End Tomorrow: Women and Minorities To Be Hardest Hit.”

For today’s journalists, if something good happens while Trump is in the White House, there must be something wrong with it somewhere.

So, we invite readers to use the Comment section below to dream up other such Trump-era headlines.

We’ll start with one contributed by Tom McArdle: “Under Trump, CDC Announces Cure of All Forms of Cancer. That’s Not an Entirely Good Thing.”

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board

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