Who's Afraid of the Professional-Managerial Class?

Occupational ghettoization by gender and race is more complicated than you think.

Reese Witherspoon as Tracy Flick in “Election” (1999).

In 1977, Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the term “professional-managerial class” (PMC) to describe “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production” and whose boundaries with the ruling class above and the working class below are “fuzzy.” This class does not, for the most part, inhabit the one percent in the income distribution, but rather the top five percent. A midcentury Jewish mother would have said of a prospective PMC son-in-law, “He makes a nice living.”

Today that Jewish mother would more likely say, “She makes a nice living,” because, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 56.5 percent of all workers in the PMC (“professionals and related occupations”) are women. That reflects, among other things, the greater tendency of women than men to hold college or other advanced degrees.

Women’s conquest of the PMC helps explain today’s toxic politics. When working-class Trump supporters, who are disproportionately male, express their resentment of elites, they don’t really mean the most elite, which are the one percent; rather, they mean the more familiar elite with whom they’re more likely to interact, which is the PMC. That’s why they love the billionaire Donald Trump and loathe the less-wealthy attorney Hillary Clinton. It’s probably not a coincidence that Trump is a man and Clinton a woman. That women represent a majority of PMC workers, and have for at least 20 years, surely goes a long way toward explaining why MAGA-world (whose own alt-PMC fulminates hatefully about something called “gynocracy”) despises it. When MAGA-world thinks about the PMC, I imagine that it thinks about Tracy Flick, the grade-grubbing climber in Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election, or someone like her.

Women’s disproportionate representation within the PMC also shows up when you look through the other end of the telescope at which occupations have the highest proportion of females. The “most female” occupation is skincare specialist, 99 percent of whom are women. Median pay for skincare specialists is $38,060, or about one-third less than median pay for the “most male” job of construction equipment operator (99 percent of whom are men). But the fourth and fifth “most female” occupations are dental hygienist and speech-language pathologist, both of which enjoy a median wage that exceeds any of the “most male” occupations.

Occupational ghettoization can work to a group’s financial advantage (69 percent of chief executives are male) or disadvantage (65 percent of all manicurists and pedicurists are Asian). There is more occupational ghettoization by gender than by race or ethnic group, and among races and ethnic groups, occupational ghettoization is greatest for Asians and Latinos and smallest for Blacks and whites, with the caveat that the main reason whites are less overrepresented in certain jobs is arithmetic, i.e., whites represent fully 77 percent of the workforce overall. What’s clear from the government’s latest statistics is that there’s still enough occupational ghettoization in America that the Supreme Court’s calling time on affirmative action was extremely premature. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic article. You can find it here.

(Barbara and John Ehrenreich, incidentally, revisited the subject of the PMC in 2013 and concluded it was in eclipse, potentially bad news for women over the long term. This is a familiar historic pattern: break one glass ceiling and another miraculously appears. But that’s a story for another day.)