Sex bias against male workers in day care

Abstract

There is a continuing and persistent call for more men in early education and day care {Burtt, 1965; Kyselka, 1966; Peltier, 1968; Vairo, 1969; Johnston, 1970; Williams, 1970; Kendall, 1972; Sciarra, 1972; Greenburg, 1977). Men are regarded as having a positive balancing effect in the highly "feminized" worlds of young children {Kyselka, 1966; Peltier, 1968; Johnston, 1970; Robinson & Canaday, 1977}. In recent times the number of males choosing day care as an occupation has increased. However, males in day care have an unusually high turnover rate. They leave day care at a faster rate than either males in other occupations or females in day care {Robinson, 1980}. Some male day care workers report that they are treated as being somewhat odd or incompetent by parents, supervisors, and fellow workers {Robinson, 1980). Johnston {19701 reported that when he expressed interest in working with young children, his potential supervisors questioned everything from his academic training to his moral character. Milgram and Sciarra {1974) noted that some female caregivers admitted skepticism about a male's ability to perform adequately with young children. Such anecdotes parallel the initial evidence of the work-related discrimination many women faced as they moved into male-dominated occupations. One of the simplest strategies for demonstrat ing the presence of bias against working females was the work-sample evaluation technique in which subjects were asked to evaluate identical pieces of work. Half the subjects were told that the work was performed by a male and the other half were told it was done by a female. Using this procedure, Goldberg (1968} found that males usually received evaluations