Educational Needs of Rural Women
Occupation and Earnings
An available pool of low-wage unorganized labor in rural areas helped to precipitate the decentralization of manufacturing industries from urban to rural areas in the past two decades. This increase in manufacturing (and the concurrent population growth) also created a need for support industries which, in turn, greatly multiplied employment opportunities. And the growth in female employment has occurred primarily in the lowest paying jobs generated by this process: operative jobs in manufacturing, and clerical and service jobs in support industries.
Besides offering low wages, jobs in these sectors offer little advancement either in the acquisition of skills or increased earnings over time. The highly skilled or educated female workers in these jobs are not likely to be using all of their talents. In addition, these occupations are highly sensitive to fluctuations in the economy due to seasonal slowdowns, national economic recession, or international competition. This latter is particularly true in the nondurable good manufacturing industries in which many rural women are employed. The lack of job security in sharply fluctuating industries is reflected in consistently high unemployment rates for women in sharply fluctuating industries.
The pattern of job segregation in rural areas has confined women to the relatively few traditionally "female" occupations. Actually despite women's efforts to enter new and nontraditional fields, there has been an overall increase of women's concentration in clerical and service jobs in the past 20 years. In 1960, 36.5 percent of all nonmetro women worked in clerical and service occupation. In 1978, 48.7 percent worked in these occupations.
In Maine, during the 4 years from 1973 to 1977, female employment in the state's highest paying industry, paper manufacturing, increased from 10 percent of the work force to 12.6 percent. Women brought into this traditionally male industry, however, were given the lowest paying jobs such as clerks and unskilled laborer. The high-paying craftsworker jobs were reserved men - in fact the proportion of women craftsworkers actually fell from 5.1 percent in 1970 to 0.6 percent by 1976. Nor was this phenomenon unique to the paper industry: during this same period (1970-1976) there was a strengthening of male domination in the high-paying craftsworker categories in almost all industries, particularly in the manufacture of paper, in public utilities, and in the construction industry.