Trading Places: Unemployed challenging gender roles

Trading Places: Unemployed challenging gender roles
In the article, Rubin introduces Mike Oczkowski 48 years old with a passion for graphic arts that in October 2009 was forced to leave his career of choice because it simply was not paying the bills. He therefore stepped into the career of nursing knowing that it would give him a sense of financial certainty. Rubin argues that with unemployment at nearly 9% desperate Americans are willing to cross the gender divide in order to meet their financial needs. It is more than obvious that women made this movement in order to get into careers such as law and medicine, but Rubin claims that women are making their way into more “segregated fields” like information technology, Criminal Justice, and Fire Science. The author of the article uses Coontz is author of the newly published book "A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American women at the dawn of the 1960s.” Coontz states that women have been much more willing to enter the “male “ fields but it has not been like that at all for men until recent years. This tells us that the crossing of a gender divide in the workplace going both ways is something evolutionary.
I certainly believe that this so called evolutionary change is not under the same circumstances. For instance, women cross the gender divide in order to change the identity of a typical stay at home woman. This recent cross in the gender divide for men was really a case of survival of the fittest. I find it interesting how as Americans we still associate certain jobs with each gender. As a society we tend to segregate by identity. Personally, if the need was present I would enter the field necessary to pay the bills, but I naturally would be opposed to something like nursing. When we take this gender crossing into consideration it becomes clear that maybe the economic situation has not had completely devastating consequences. It remains a possibility that Gender Equality in the work force will eventually be a positive outcome of our current economic crisis.
Do you believe the economic situation is severe enough to where a significant percentage of males are entering those fields as Rubin suggests? Will the crossing of the Gender Divide have any negative effects? If you were in the need to cross the divide what area would you cross into?