Family Plan Thesis Research(50:17)

Guest: Erin Cech, PhD, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Rice University  Technically speaking, there are not “jobs for men” and “jobs for women” in the American labor force, and yet many fields remain dominated by one gender or another. There are more female teachers and more male engineers, for example.  One explanation for the division is called the “Family Plan Thesis” and it suggests that men gravitate to jobs that will help them provide for a family, while women go into fields that will give them flexibility to care for a future family. The current crop of college students doesn’t seem to be buying that thesis, though.