In 1967, William Jack Baumol coined the term “pink-collar jobs” to highlight the discrepancies faced by those working in industries historically associated with women. Pink-collar roles include nurses and medical assistants, administrative workers, cosmetologists, social workers, retail and customer service workers, and teachers. These roles span from office (or “white collar”) work to more physically intensive (or “blue collar”) work, but share a few key traits: 

• They have historically (and presently) been primarily staffed by women. 
• They face significant wage disparities compared to their white and blue collar counterparts. 
• They typically involve a significant amount of emotional labor and/or service.  

While some historically women-dominated jobs, such as tobacco manufacturing, are no longer primarily staffed by women, one of the pink-collar fields that has persisted for centuries is education. 

From daycare workers to classroom teachers to language pathologists, those working in education do the critical work of preparing future generations, while being met with the obstacles and inequities that those in all pink-collar industries face. 

To give a quick layout of the education landscape, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, 78% of public-school teachers are women.  

That gender discrepancy skyrockets when you look at teachers of younger students. In 2022, 97% of all preschool and kindergarten teachers were women. With this stark gender imbalance in the field, it is frustrating but unsurprising that there is a massive pay gap between teachers and other comparable industries.   

Most public-school teachers (58%) have a master’s degree, but their median pay is nearly $20,000 lower than other workers with an advanced degree. They are also paid significantly less than other government workers with similar education requirements  

In fact, teachers are paid less than the average employee in every state in the U.S. besides Hawaii. When we consider that 98% of teachers have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to just 38.7% of all U.S. workers, the below average pay for teachers is even more jarring.  

While teachers are making less than most workers of comparable educational attainment, they are expected to do significant amounts of emotional labor that goes far beyond their job descriptions. Many adults can share stories of when a teacher has stepped in to support them in massive ways, from providing emotional support during difficult times, to providing food and helping to secure resources for students from low-income backgrounds.  

This support is being provided to an ever-increasing number of students as classroom sizes balloon, without the teacher workforce being increased to match.  

At the same time, they’ve been thrown under the bus by bad faith actors using classrooms for political games. Teachers have faced extreme harassment for teaching accurate accounts of history, or about the theory of evolution.  

Teachers are not giving the training or resources to be doing this amount of psychological and social services support. It is no wonder that so many teachers report increased levels of anxiety and burnout—something that’s pushing many out of the field and further increasing the strain on those who stay.  

As Connecticut teacher, Elsa Batista phrased it,

“Teaching has become mentally, emotionally and physically exhausting. We are strong, resilient, and creative, but we need support; we need help in our classrooms. Right now, that’s not happening, and we cannot afford to lose more teachers.” 

Teachers deserve to be paid fairly for their work, which is essential to the functioning of any society. They also must be provided with significantly more support, from classroom resources to mental health services. Finally, our elected officials must work to increase the number of students graduating with teaching degrees and relieve the burden on already exhausted teachers.