Editorial: The decline of the male youth worker
Andy Hillier
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
It's hard to imagine nowadays a time when male youth workers outnumbered female youth workers. But back in the early 1980s it was not unusual for youth services to employ twice as many male youth workers as women.
Changes in women's role in society, their increased participation in higher education and a reluctance among men to pursue a career working with children and young people has led to a reversal of this trend. Now, as our survey on page 14 shows, female entrants on full-status youth work courses outstrip the number of men by a ratio of two to one.
The question this poses is whether having fewer men than women working in youth projects actually impacts negatively upon young people's lives. Youth projects, much like schools, are supposed to be a microcosm of society - places where young people can see first-hand people of different ages, sexes and faiths working together side by side. So by not providing young people with a mixture of male and female youth workers, are young people being deprived of male role models?
Sadly, this is the case for some young people. Divorce, separation and a whole array of other societal factors mean that many young people who attend projects don't have strong male role models in their lives. Instead, as academic Sue Robertson puts it, all they get is "bossy women telling them what to do".
Perhaps it's time that skills councils, youth agencies and employers started to think proactively about the steps they can take to make youth work more attractive to men. If they don't, the danger is youth work could end up being viewed purely as a job for the girls.
