Gob-Smacking, Sometimes

The NY Times ran a story about the reluctance of men to take jobs in traditionally-female occupations. As part of the story, they said this:

The two occupations predicted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to decline most quickly from 2014 to 2024 are locomotive firers, shrinking 70 percent, and vehicle electronics installers and repairers, down 50 percent.

True enough, but when you go look at the actual numbers, there are only 1,700 locomotive firemen left, and that's projected to drop to 500.

I would suspect that almost all of that drop will be by attrition. The job of fireman went away from the major railroads ages ago.

More to the point: A job classification that employs less than two thousand people nationwide isn't even a rounding error in the category of employment statistics.