Since the 1960s, male blue-collar work such as construction, manufacturing, and agriculture had been in decline, shrinking from approximately half of the workforce to less than 30 percent at the end of the 1990s. Over that same period, sectors that employed pink-and white-collar women—areas such as health care, retail, education, finance, and food service—expanded to well over half of the workforce; by 1994, 75 percent of working-age women worked for pay.
