Where Occupational Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Last week, I blogged about metropolitan areas where the health-care industry dominates. I looked at the trends in the average earnings of health-care professionals in those metros and, for comparison, the trends for health-care professionals nationwide. I found that the Great Recession had no effect on nationwide earnings—they continued to increase at a steady pace—but in the metros where health-care professionals are concentrated, these workers’ earnings took a noticeable dip during the recession years.

I thought it would be interesting to look at some other occupational categories and see how their experiences compared. So I turned to the same database, the Occupational Employment Survey, and identified the metros where occupations in education exceeded 10 percent of the wage-and-salary workforce; where computer and mathematical occupations exceeded 5 percent; and where engineering occupations exceeded 4 percent.

Here are the metros where these occupations dominate:

Metro Area	Education Occupations
Ithaca, NY	15.5%
Gainesville, FL	13.3%
Hinesville-Fort Stewart, GA	13.2%
Champaign-Urbana, IL	12.9%
Corvallis, OR	12.8%
Blacksburg-Christiansburg-Radford, VA	12.3%
Merced, CA	11.7%
Lafayette, IN	11.5%
College Station-Bryan, TX	10.8%
Auburn-Opelika, AL	10.7%
Ann Arbor, MI	10.6%
Athens-Clarke County, GA	10.5%
Yuba City, CA	10.4%
McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, TX	10.4%

Metro Area	Computer & Mathematical Occupations
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA	11.6%
Washington-Arlington-Alexandria, DC-VA-MD-WV	7.4%
Boulder, CO	6.7%
Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA	6.6%
Huntsville, AL	6.5%
Durham-Chapel Hill, NC	6.2%
Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos, TX	5.7%
Trenton-Ewing, NJ	5.5%
San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA	5.5%
Madison, WI	5.5%
Raleigh-Cary, NC	5.2%
Colorado Springs, CO	5.1%

Metro Area	Engineering Occupations
Huntsville, AL	8.3%
Columbus, IN	8.1%
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA	5.7%
Warner Robins, GA	5.2%
Norwich-New London, CT-RI	5.0%
Bremerton-Silverdale, WA	5.0%
Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, WA	4.8%
Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville, FL	4.5%
Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI	4.4%
Holland-Grand Haven, MI	4.3%

Next, I graphed the 2007–2014 earnings of professionals in the metros where they are concentrated and also nationwide. Here’s what I found:

 

 




The most obvious common element is that the workers in all of the occupationally-concentrated metros experienced earnings downturns during the recession years, whereas across the nation the same kinds of workers experienced no such downturns. Therefore, it appears that what I found for health-care workers last week is not unique to them. Perhaps any concentration of a particular type of worker (and therefore of an industry) increases the wage instability of a metro area.

But I found one interesting way in which the experiences of these occupations differed: For health-care and education professionals, average wages were higher nationwide than in the metros where the workers are concentrated. On the other hand, for computer and engineering professionals, areas where the workers are concentrated offer higher wages.

This finding is consistent with what the urban theorist Richard Florida has written about the “creative class”: Highly creative workers, such as engineering and computer professionals, tend to be most productive where they can work collaboratively. That is why, even with the marvels of 21^st-century communication, the industries that employ creative workers tend to concentrate geographically. Thus we find Silicon Valley for high tech, Hollywood for movies, and Nashville for music. And where these workers are concentrated and more productive, they earn more. The same does not seem to be true for educators and health-care professionals.

I’m not saying that educators and health-care professionals are not creative, but the nature of their work does not demand constant creativity to the degree that engineering and computer careers do. As a result, concentration of these workers may actually lower wages by increasing competition.

Employment Trends for Engineers

As the “E” in “STEM,” engineering is an important field of knowledge that is vital to the American economy. I thought it would be interesting to see how employment in this field was affected during recent years of recession and recovery, so I created the following graph (from BLS figures):

My main takeaway from this chart is that employment in engineering occupations tends to be reasonably stable. Apart from the 2007–2008 employment decline of 26 percent for aerospace engineers, only one occupation saw a double-digit decline between any two years: the 12 percent 2008–2009 decline for computer hardware engineers. On the other hand, these occupations did not show great growth over this period either—with the exception of petroleum engineers, which grew by 127 percent. Their average growth over the 2007–2012 period is only 3 percent, if you remove petroleum engineers.

Although employment in the occupations changed within relatively modest boundaries, the fluctuations show quite distinct paths. Employment for most of them bottomed out in 2010, evidently the delayed result of the recession as employers ran out of rainy-day funds and needed to lay off workers.

Here’s another chart, with the same set of occupations, showing projected employment growth between 2012 and 2022:

Petroleum engineers is the standout occupation here, again. The recent upward slope of civil engineers resembles that of many of the other specializations, but the growth of this occupation really takes off in the decade ahead. The Occupational Outlook Handbook reports, “As infrastructure continues to age, civil engineers will be needed to manage projects to rebuild bridges, repair roads, and upgrade levees and dams. Moreover, a growing population means that new water systems will be required while the aging, existing water systems must be maintained to reduce or eliminate leaks of drinkable water.” By comparison, the projected growth for mechanical and industrial engineers is modest.

Over the course of a career, engineers tend to find advancement by going into management (for example, project management) rather than by becoming increasingly specialized. Employers often are reluctant to increase the pay of seasoned engineers when they can hire young graduates of engineering schools who are conversant with the latest technologies. Sales engineering is another potential route for career development, especially for those who have good people skills and are not averse to frequent travel. Technical writing is another possibility, but it is much less lucrative.

Why Do Women Leave Careers in Science and Engineering?

Recently I was intrigued to come upon an article in which an economist explained why women drop out of careers in science and engineering. The topic is of special interest to me because it’s only a month since, working with Dave Anderson of JIST, I finished a manuscript about careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and another manuscript about nontraditional careers for men and women.

Discussion of the lack of women in STEM careers usually focuses on how girls tend to lose interest in the STEM subjects sometime around high school. Much less attention has been paid to the women who went as far as to get a college degree in a scientific or engineering subject and then walked away from the field. And this economist, Jennifer Hunt of McGill University, unlike almost everyone else studying this problem, decided to use samples that compared scientists and engineers to people in other skilled occupations. Her reasoning was as follows: If the problem with science and engineering is long work hours (as some researchers have concluded), then are women similarly abandoning other careers with long work hours? Or if the problem instead is a heavily male workforce, are women baling out other male-dominated careers at the same rate? In short, what characteristics across various careers cause women to flee?

For her research sample, Hunt looked to the 1993 and 2003 National Surveys of College Graduates, which indicates what students majored in. Those students who reported they were not working in the field of their major (or not working at all) are those she considered as having left their field. These respondents were asked why they left their field, and all workers were asked about the importance they placed on various work conditions and rewards.

She found that science and engineering--and particularly the latter--lose more women than other fields, and that most of these career drop-outs go to work in other fields rather than leave the workforce.

The main reason the women left the field: dissatisfaction over opportunities for pay and promotion. This phenomenon has not been noticed previously because almost the same proportion of men drop out of science and engineering for this reason. But when she looked at other fields, she found women were much less likely than men to drop out for this reason. In other words, for women there’s something about science and engineering that makes perceived lack of opportunities especially discouraging.

She found the opposite phenomenon when she looked at family-related issues as a reason why women left. This factor caused many more women than men to leave science and engineering, but the gender gap was just as wide in other fields. So it was not a discouraging factor for women in science and engineering per se.

The key relationship Hunt found was between the female career drop-out rate and the proportion of men who studied the field. That is to say, fields other than science and engineering with a high proportion of male students also experienced a high rate of losing women after graduation. This finding implied that the male dominance of science and engineering is what caused the women’s dissatisfaction over opportunities for pay and promotion.

Hunt concluded that the way to keep more women in science and engineering is to focus on the immediate effects of gender imbalance and the perception of limited opportunities for earnings and advancement. Specifically, offer women in these careers better mentoring and networking opportunities; commit to a visible campaign against discrimination by male supervisors and co-workers. And extend these reforms to all other male-dominated fields.