>I remember many years ago, anthropologist, Margaret Mead
>making the same point concerning helping professions.
>As I recall her favorite example was the veterinary profession
>in Great Britain, which suffered a decline in status and
>pay levels when women began to enter it in significant
>numbers.
It's also well-established that professions coded as 'caring' pay less than those that don't, because of the feminine connotations. E.g., GPs and shrinks are among the lowest-paid of medical specialties, and pathology among the highest - in the first set, you deal with human beings in a direct way, in the second, you deal with tissue fragments.
Doug