Women are achieving career stability and middle-class wage by securing jobs in healthcare, according to a report by The New York Times.
"We used to think about the men going out with their lunch bucket to their factory, and those were good jobs," Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University who studies work and family issues, told The New York Times. "What's the corresponding job today? It's in the healthcare sector."
Currently, 4.5 million healthcare jobs pay a middle-class wage compared to 1.4 million in 1980, according to the report. The median salary for RNs, an occupation dominated by women, for instance, was $61,000 per year in 2012. That is 55 percent more than the median salary for RNs 30 years prior.
According to the report, economists at the U.S. Department of Laborprojectthat by 2022, the healthcare and social assistance sector will support more than 21 million jobs, five million more than today. This includes 500,000 more RNs.
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