Here’s another reason why expensive housing will remain the norm: not enough employees.
Last summer, Kojo’s founder and CEO told CNBC that there were “about 650,000 workers missing from the construction industry,” with backlogs at “a four-year high.” The previous fall, a McKinsey & Company report concluded that even though wages in the profession were “growing at the fastest rates since the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis,” America’s “construction labor shortage … will likely get worse.” Brian Turmail, an Associated General Contractors of America vice president, recently lamented that the “biggest challenge that the construction industry is facing … is that people don’t want their babies to grow up to be construction workers.”
Sounds mighty odd. How can this shortage be a genuine problem, in a nation ruled by “girl power”? For decades, American females have been told that they’re just as good — if not better — than males, at everything. Ladies already claim a majority of college degrees, and “now make up 35% of workers in the United States’ 10 highest-paying occupations — up from 13% in 1980.” Why haven’t they stepped in to swing hammers, pour concrete, make cabinets, and set tile?
Oh, right — women don’t want careers in construction.
According to the feds, just 2.9 percent of electricians are women. The portions are lower for heating, air conditioning, and refrigeration mechanics and installers (2.3 percent), plumbers, pipefitters, and steamfitters (2.2 percent) brickmasons, blockmasons, and stonemasons (1.5 percent), and construction equipment operators (1.0 percent).
Dirty, dangerous work — frequently conducted outdoors, using one’s hands and/or big, noisy machines — isn’t popular with the gals, no matter how many times guidance counselors and washed-up starlets hector them to pursue traditionally male jobs.
In 2022, researchers from the University of Missouri and the University of Essex published fresh statistics about a fundamental truth. David Geary and Gijsbert Stoet
analyzed the occupational aspirations of nearly half a million 15- and 16-year-olds across 80 developing and developed nations that participated in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of mathematics, science, and reading competencies. In this assessment, students were asked to answer the question, “What kind of job do you expect to have when you are about 30 years old?” which we termed occupational aspirations. PISA staff classified occupations using the International Standard Classification of Occupations. We then classified these as things-oriented, people-oriented, or other (i.e., neither clearly things- nor people-oriented), based on the well-documented sex differences in interest in things versus people.
To anyone who’s been on this planet for a few hours — and isn’t a woke wacko — the results were hardly shocking. In “every country (without exception), more girls than boys aspired to a people-oriented occupation, and more boys than girls aspired to a things-oriented or STEM occupation.” At the median, there “were about 4 boys for every girl aspiring to a things-oriented occupation, and about 3 girls for every boy aspiring to a people-oriented occupation.” And in a brutal blow to feminists, the ratios “were larger in wealthy, gender-equal countries.”
Geary and Stoet confirmed research that began long ago:
These patterns mirror those found in a 1918 survey of almost 1,700 U.S. adolescents. That survey found that there were almost 12 boys to every girl with interests in occupations that involved working with engines (blue-collar and white-collar), and 12 girls to every boy interested in teaching. A similar study conducted about 15 years later revealed the same sex differences, that is, boys, in general, were more interested in occupations that involved working with things, and girls in occupations that involved working with people. In other words, the sex differences in interest in people and things is not only found throughout the world today, as we and others have found, but stretches back at least a century.
“[S]ex differences in occupational aspirations and choices” are “universal,” the scholars concluded, and nothing “short of draconian social engineering will change these patterns.”
Okay. Not much hope for a female solution to construction’s staffing gap. Will young men answer the call?
Production/nonsupervisory positions in construction pay an average hourly wage of $34.92. Not bad, for an able-bodied fella seeking a racket with strong demand and ample opportunities for advancement. And the intangibles? Pretty sweet. “In general,” George Gilder observed, many years ago, “men are happiest working with other men in challenging and virile activity.”
Well, that was then. Today’s lads are not healthy, not chasing girls, and not ambitious. And they’re offing themselves at an alarming rate.
Got some spare cash to invest? Two words for you: construction robots.
I agree. My twins had all kinds of toys available to them and my son could turn anything into a pistol while my daughter wanted to dress up and play with Barbies. I was a tomboy, but less of a risktaker than my brothers. I also observed that when they got in trouble when they were children, it was because my son usually went overboard while my daughter was devious.