When Donald Olayer enrolled in nursing school nine years ago, his father took it hard. "He

re's my father, a steelworker, hearing about other steelworkers' sons who were becoming welders or getting football scholarships, "Mr. Olayer recalls. "The thought of his son becoming a nurse was too much."

Today, Mr. Olayer, a registered nurse trained as an anesthetist, earns about $ 30 000 a year at Jameson Memorial Hospital in New Castle, Pennsylvania. His father, he says, has "done an about face". Now he tells the guys he works with that their sons, who can't find jobs even after four years of college, should have become nurses.

That's not an unusual turnabout nowadays. Just as women have gained a footing in nearly every occupation once reserved for men, men can be found today working routinely in a wide variety of jobs once held nearly exclusively by women. The men are working as receptionists and flight attendants, servants, and even "Kelly girls".

The Urban Institute, a research group in Washington, recently estimated that the number of male secretaries rose 24% to 31 000 in 1978 from 25000 in 1972. The number of male telephone operators over the same span rose 38%, and the number of male nurses94 %. Labor experts expect the trend to continue.

For one thing, tightness in the job market seems to have given men an additional incentive to take jobs where they can find them. Although female-dominated office and service jobs for the most part rank lower in pay and status, "they're still there, "says June O'Neill, director of program and policy research at the institute. Traditionally male blue-collar jobs, meanwhile, aren't increasing at all.

At the same time, she says, "The outlooks of young people are different. "Younger men with less rigid views on what constitutes male or female work "may not feel there's such a stigma to working in a female-dominated field".

Although views have softened, men who cross the sexual segregation line in the job market may still face discrimination and ridicule. David Anderson, a 36-year-old former high school teacher, says he found secretarial work "a way out of teaching and into the business world". He had applied for work at 23 employment agencies for "management training jobs that didn't exist", and he discovered that "the best skill I had was being able to type 70 words a minute".

Mr. Anderson's boss was a woman. When she asked him to fetch coffee, the other secretaries' eyebrows went up. Sales executives who came in to see his boss, he says, "couldn't quite believe that I could and would type, take dictation, and answer the phones."

He took a job as a secretary to the marketing director of a New York publishing company. But he says he could feel "a lot of people wondering what I was doing there and if something was wrong with me".

Males sometimes find themselves mistaken for higher-status professionals. Anthony Shee, a flight attendant with U. S. Air Inc. , has been mistaken for a pilot. Mr. Anderson, the secretary, says he found himself being "treated in executive tones whenever I wore a suit".

In fact the men in traditional female jobs often move up the ladder fast. Mr. Anderson actually worked only seven months as a secretary. Then he got a higher-level, better-paying job as a placement counselor at an employment agency. "I got a lot of encouragement to advance, "he says, "including job tips from male executives who couldn't quite see me staying a secretary."

Experts say, for example, that while men make up only a small fraction of elementary school teachers, a disproportionate number of elementary principals are men. Barbara Bergmann, an economist at the University of Maryland who has studied sex segregation at work believes that's partly because of "sexism in the occupational structure" and partly because men have bee

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