It didn’t quite make the same splash as Jackie Robinson’s first game in 1947, but it was nonetheless a big moment when, in 2025, Jen Pawol became the first woman to umpire a regular-season Major League Baseball game.

The debut punctuated a series of professional advances for women, both in sports and beyond. Women had long been refereeing National Football League and National Basketball Association games. They have long graduated from college at higher rates than men. They account for a majority of law school and medical school graduates, and for about 40 percent of lawyers and doctors.

Even the Trump administration’s masculinist rhetoric — about how society has become overly feminine and should re-center male virtues — hasn’t slowed this shift. Of more than half a million jobs that the economy has added since President Trump took office last January, roughly 85 percent went to women.

Yet on closer inspection, Pawol’s triumph hinted at a more complicated story. It was hard not to notice that her opportunity came shortly after baseball began experimenting with an automated review system that allowed minor league players to challenge umpires’ calls, setting off talk of future robot umpires. Major League Baseball had an unusually large number of umpire retirements after the first season of the experiment, and it is on track for another uptick this year, after the review system got the official call-up.

Major League Baseball declined to comment on the reason for the retirements or the timing of the gender breakthrough, other than to note its recent efforts to develop a more diverse pool of umpires. But the sequence does jibe with the historical logic of workplace feminization. The story goes something like this: A job gets worse in some way — say, it pays less or becomes more grueling or monotonous or generally less prestigious — at which point men become less interested in doing it. Employers then turn to women to fill the ranks.

“You have to basically get a different labor force,” said Mar Hicks, a historian at the University of Virginia. “Because the labor force that was secure and stable, they’re not going to do that.”

The pattern has played out across workplaces as different as the textile mills of the early industrial era and the restaurants and real estate brokerages of the 20th century. Some version of it continues in fields like higher education, where women make up a majority of the non-tenure-track instructors on whom universities increasingly rely.

Though we often think of the last 50 years as a steady march of progress for women at work, it was also a period in which work writ large was diminished. Union membership plummeted, wage growth slowed, and employers captured a rising share of productivity growth. More and more companies have outsourced work, and those companies that employ workers directly often use legal arrangements like noncompete clauses to undermine their leverage.

Today, just as women are occupying a majority of U.S. jobs, up from just over one-third in 1970, artificial intelligence is threatening to degrade still more of them. It could soon turn many lawyers, managers and publicists into mere proofreaders for machines. Have women spent decades reaching for the brass ring only to discover that it’s hopelessly tarnished once they finally grasp it?

Long before the “Mad Men” era, secretaries were almost all men. In the 1800s, a secretary was part aide-de-camp, part executive-in-training — someone who handled the boss’s correspondence and bookkeeping, but also learned the business and would eventually ascend to a senior job.

With the rise of the modern corporation around the turn of the 20th century, however, the secretary became more like a noncommissioned officer — a worker with real responsibility but little upward mobility. It was at this point that the position became mostly female. Companies then broke up and degraded the job further over the decades, replacing the secretary with pools of typists, receptionists and data entry personnel, almost all of them women, too.

The final step, amid pressure from the feminist movement in the 1970s, was to allow a small number of college-educated women to ascend from these clerical jobs to the ranks of middle management. But even this came with a loss of status, as managers would have to do more of their own grunt work. “They’re now being promoted, but the clerical tasks are promoted with them,” said Jason Resnikoff, a labor historian. “The middle manager would do more typing, correspondence, more of their own filing.” These days, almost no one has an assistant.

The workplace of the 1970s seemed to produce one feminist victory after another. At the outset of the decade, just over 40 percent of women worked. By 1980, over half did. Newspapers and magazines heralded the development: A front-page story in The New York Times announced, “More Women Work at Traditional Male Jobs.”

But when the sociologists Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos looked carefully in their 1990 book, “Job Queues, Gender Queues,” they became more pessimistic. The percentages of women in jobs as varied as bus driver, baker, typesetter, book editor, real estate agent and public relations specialist had risen sharply. In each instance, however, employers had changed the work in a way that made it less attractive. They lowered pay or made it more volatile — say, by shifting from salaries to commissions. They reduced job security, professional autonomy or opportunities for advancement. They created inferior versions of the traditional male jobs and sought women to fill them. “Women’s numerical gains in feminizing occupations mask their ghettoization in lower-paying, less prestigious occupational subspecialties,” the sociologists wrote.

Up through the 1960s, even workaday jobs were often cushy enough to entice a lot of men. The typical insurance adjuster drove around a metro area in a company car, sorting out a handful of claims each day. Insurance companies frequently promoted them into management positions. But as cost pressures rose in the ’70s, companies wrung savings out of their operations by bringing the adjusters “inside,” where they handled many more claims a day by phone and display terminal. Promotions became hard to come by. It was at this point that men begged off.

To explain why it was almost invariably women who rushed in once the job deteriorated, Reskin and Roos depicted the labor market as a giant ranking exercise. Employers, they argued, essentially arrayed potential workers in a line from most to least desirable, with men generally ahead of women, in large part because of sexism. When men, or at least the most sought-after men, lost interest in a job, employers turned to the next group in line — women — to fill the gap.

The shift also tended to reinforce itself. Once a certain percentage of women entered an occupation, the remaining men deemed it lower status and frequently decamped as well — a process that later scholars alternately analogized to “pollution” or residential resegregation. As a male typesetter told one of the authors, “It’s a girl’s job now.”

It’s tempting to believe that employment in 2026 no longer resembles the blunt ranking system Reskin and Roos described, making it unnecessary for women to wait for men to lose interest before entering an occupation in large numbers. Certainly women have made real strides in high-status fields like law and medicine.

But when you disaggregate the numbers, you begin to see the familiar pattern: men holding on to the most prestigious and highest-paying jobs; a rising number of women in degraded versions of the jobs men once dominated. (The new wrinkle, Roos observed in a 2018 paper she wrote with a colleague, was that a number of low-paid and low-status jobs, like cooks and crossing guards, were “masculinizing,” and were disproportionately filled by nonwhite people and immigrants.)

The health care profession may reveal what ails us. Brain surgeons and cardiologists, who make over half a million dollars a year on average, remain overwhelmingly male, while women are now about two-thirds of pediatricians and nearly half of family doctors, both among the lowest-paid doctors. Women are also now a majority of pharmacists — a field in which consolidation has undermined working conditions — and a majority of nurse practitioners, the fastest-growing health care job in the country. Nurse practitioners typically make about $130,000 a year and perform high-status tasks like diagnosing patients and prescribing medicine. But, as a practical matter, many patients and medical facilities rely on them as a cheaper alternative to doctors. “Doctors cost a lot of money and nurse practitioners don’t,” a staffing company official recently told The Wall Street Journal.

If, in the coming years, artificial intelligence further hollows out the white-collar fields where women have made progress, it will hardly be unprecedented. Historically, employers have often associated automation with women’s work, whether in the factory or in the office. “Managers quickly developed the idea that competence working with machines was a feminine attribute to differentiate it from the supposedly more intellectual work done by male clerks,” Hicks writes in the book “Programmed Inequality,” about the British computing industry.

The early computer programmers were mostly women. But the field became much more attractive to men in the 1960s, as it gained in pay and prestige.

When I asked Roos whether the gender dynamic might reverse again as artificial intelligence bleeds computer programming of status, she stipulated that she was not an expert on A.I. But if the technology causes the tech industry to divide into more and less skilled positions — say, a mix of highly paid software architects and low-paid programmers who clean up after robot coders — “then I still think that’s what will happen,” she said. “Those are the jobs that men will be wanting to be in charge of, and the lower-level positions would then feminize.”

And, she added, the shift would not necessarily be limited to software engineering. She worries that if A.I. accelerates the sorting of lawyers, journalists, architects and advertising copywriters into low-status robot-babysitters and high-status partners and grand strategists, women will end up on the wrong end of the split, absent some intervention from government or elsewhere. “It would be history repeating itself,” she said.

Source images for illustration above: George Marks/Getty Images; H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock, via Getty Images;​ Sigrid Olsson/PhotoAlto, via Getty Images.