Administrative Assistant

I'm a guy who's looked at a lot of job postings in my day, and I've seen a lot of postings for the position administrative assistant. As a rookie with no more than a BA to my name, I've considered applying to be an administrative assistant. I figure: I'm qualified, the pay is decent, and maybe I'd get a leg up into a company I'm actually interested.

But my dreams were squashed when I discovered that almost all "administrative assistants" were female, which I am not (although most non-Jewish employers could probably not tell that from my resume). It seems that the term "secretary" is out, "administrative assistant" is in, and they are all women. I'd like to address each point separately.

First of all, what is wrong with the word "secretary"? Perhaps this is like how "stewardess" was changed to "flight attendant" to include males. But as I demonstrated above, that cannot be the case. Is there something derogatory about the word "secretary"? Perhaps this is just the working world trying to make people seem more important. A garbageman is a sanitation engineer. An unemployed college graduate might as well be called an "associate employment opportunist".

But why only women? By the way, I'm basing the assumption that most AA's are women on the following piece of evidence: when I googled "best way to get an administrative assistant job", the first hit was some sort of blog with a conversation going on among various users who all seemed to be or have been AA's. All the names were women's names - Deb, Emma, Donna, Patricia, Brenda. There was one post from Scorpio in Pittsburgh, but I think we can all agree that "Scorpio" is not gender defining.

Some people claim that it is simply that most AA's are meant to be warm, friendly faces in the office. A big part of their job is to be smiley and greet clients and such. These people claim that women are simply more often better suited for this job, which explains the status quo. Still sounds kind of unbalanced if you ask me.

I don't really know who is right. I think they should definitely teach this stuff in college, though. (Job Hunting 101: "Administrative Assitant" means "woman" and Other Tips)