During COVID, I lost a loved one who was only 25 years old and had just given birth to her only child, at a time when hospital visitation was restricted to a single person for only a few hours a day. It was the ECMO nurses who provided the professional care she needed and ensured that her loved ones understood what was happening from day to day. It’s unfortunate that in just five short years, nurses have gone from being the unsung heroes of a global pandemic to having their degrees no longer recognized as professional.
The Administration’s recent proposal to remove professional recognition from several degrees is an assault on women in the workforce. Most of the targeted fields are predominantly led and staffed by women. The devaluation of women-led professions in this country is a problem and an extension of an ongoing opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Nursing remains one of the most female-dominated fields in the country, with roughly 86 to 88 percent of the workforce made up of women. Physician assistants are also majority women, typically ranging from 66 to 71 percent. Physical therapy follows a similar pattern, with about 63 to 70 percent of physical therapists being women. Audiology is one of the most heavily female professions, with an estimated 85 to 90 percent of practitioners being women. These fields require extensive training, education, and testing.
Education, particularly at the K–12 level, is also dominated by women, with approximately 77 to 80 percent of teachers identifying as female, and early childhood education reaching about 94 percent. The education sector is already facing difficulty. Districts across the country struggle to recruit and keep educators.
Reclassifying education degrees to non-professional only makes this worse. It sends a clear message that the work is not valued, and it discourages people from entering or staying in the field. That instability directly harms children. It leads to fewer qualified educators, larger class sizes, and a workforce that turns over faster than schools can replace it. Children lose access to consistent, experienced teachers at the exact moment they need more stability, not less.
Social work also has a strong female majority, with approximately 82 to 85 percent of social workers being women.
The devaluation of professions led by women shows up in lower wages, weaker benefits, limited federal protections, higher burnout, and dismissive policy decisions that trivialize the profession. When policymakers exclude these degrees from “professional” status, it reinforces gender bias, affects immigration and staffing pipelines, limits advancement opportunities, and keeps entire sectors underfunded.
While these fields are not exclusively made up of women, women represent the overwhelming majority of the workforce in many of them. As a result, the consequences of this reclassification fall disproportionately on women, and that pattern is too consistent to dismiss as coincidence.A clear pattern is emerging, where the voices of women are being silenced and their contribution to society “reclassified.”
The care industry has long been defined by a paradox. It requires deep expertise, advanced education, emotional labor, and technical skill, yet it is consistently treated as less than professional. In my role as a policy director, I see every day how professionalism is unevenly assigned. For example, family child care educators across the country hold associate’s degrees, bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, and in some cases PhDs. They develop curriculum, run small businesses, manage compliance, document learning, and provide specialized care. Yet, their degrees do not automatically confer the respect or professional standing they have earned.
This dynamic extends across the care sector. Many of the professions targeted in the proposed reclassification, including nursing, social work, education, public health, and allied health, are care-centered fields where women make up the overwhelming majority of the workforce. These professions carry immense responsibility and require significant training, yet they are routinely undervalued in both policy and practice.
The solution requires redefining and elevating the value of care-centered and women-dominated professions through policy, pay, and public recognition. This includes classifying these degrees as “professional” across federal agencies, raising pay to match the skill and responsibility levels, expanding loan forgiveness and scholarships, strengthening workplace protections, and ensuring these fields have a seat at the policy tables where standards and funding decisions are made.
Shifting public narrative matters. These are fields essential, highly skilled, and central to public well-being. Professional standards, licensure, and advanced degrees already exist; the gap is in how institutions choose to respect and resource them. Fixing that gap is the direct pathway to equity.
Eboni Delaney is Interim Director of Policy and Movement Building at the National Association for Family Child Care, and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project in Partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
