When Daniel arrived for one job interview, he walked up to the school secretary’s desk and told her he was the job candidate. “Are you Danielle?” the woman said.

“Daniel,” he answered.

The first thing that happens when we encounter a norm violator, says Chris Crandall, is to subtly communicate that they have strayed. What kind of hair is that? Where did you get that outfit? Are you Danielle? The idea is to give you a chance to prove your normalcy after all.

On a tour of one center, preschool administrators showed Daniel the men’s bathroom. It was being used as a storage closet. “We’ve never had a man work here before,” they explained.

For Daniel, it was moments like these—grasping that he would need to alert people not to refill their office supplies whenever he needed to urinate—it really hit him that he was not going to blend in effortlessly. Almost all my interview subjects had a moment like this, one where they personified the Sesame Street song, “One of these things is not like the others.” They felt like a skydiver as the first rush of open atmosphere whips past. They were on their own.

There might be more men finding themselves in Daniel’s position soon. Traditionally manly jobs in factories are disappearing,36 and some of the jobs with the greatest projected growth, like home health aides and nurse practitioners, are historically and overwhelmingly female.

Laid-off, male coal miners and factory-floor workers have been reluctant to take these jobs. Part of it has to do with hang-ups around gender stereotypes: “I’ve always seen a woman in the position of a nurse or some kind of health care worker. I see it as more of a woman’s touch,” is how one laid-off welder put it to the New York Times in 2017.37

Although some research suggests men who enter traditionally female professions are put on a fast track to supervisory positions—a phenomenon called the “glass escalator”—there’s also evidence that men are just not as respected when they’re in roles like nursing or elementary school teaching. In one survey, half of men thought women make better nurses than men, and 16 percent of women thought so, too. Only male patients preferred male nurses, and only when the task the nurse would be doing was something intimate, like giving them a bath or shaving their genitals.38

Some male teachers of young children are similarly stigmatized. A 2002 sociological study39 of male elementary school teachers found they were afraid to let children sit on their laps, something female teachers often allowed. Even when parents were happy their children had male teachers, they sometimes projected stereotypes onto the men. As the sociologist Paul Sargent wrote, one single mom was happy her son would have a male teacher, Javier, because she was concerned her son was getting too interested in art and poetry. Javier, as it happened, loved art and poetry.