"[W]hat surprised me most was that nearly all of Lucy’s co-workers and former mortuary classmates are women, specifically young women in their twenties and thirties."

"'There were only three guys in our class and one of them was a trans man. There were a lot of queer people,' she explains. I’d assumed she would be a quirky outlier in a class of gaunt, poorly socialized men, but as a tattooed lesbian with a warm Midwestern disposition, Lucy actually represents a growing majority. A quiet changeover has taken place in mortuary science—one largely obscured by the shroud separating the death industry from polite society. Over the past four decades, female enrollment in mortuary programs has grown from five percent to roughly 75 percent of recent graduating classes. As a journalist who came up during the peak of girlbossery, I’d been pitched all manner of 'female first' stories—'Would you like to interview Chobani’s first female yogurt sommelier?'—but this felt more substantial than a corporate puff piece. So why this generational shift? And why now?"

From "Keeping Up Appearances/The women taking over the funeral industry" (LA Review of Books).

Is this about... makeup?

In the life of a mortician, the greatest high-wire act of emotional dexterity happens when presenting a loved one to the family.... "Sometimes they have notes on the cosmetics.” The “cakey look” is a frequent battleground. Jane alludes to a common culprit: “Most people go hard on the first layer of makeup to cover the discoloration. Not to be sexist, but most guys don’t look at the details—they just pound it on.” When families are unhappy, Jane collaborates with them, working in painstaking layers to adjust color, contour, or texture until the decedent looks like themselves again. 

Advances in the cosmetics industry have given morticians more sophisticated tools for restoration and, Jane believes, helped usher more women into mortuary school. “A lot of people [born] in the early 1990s and 2000s got into makeup because of social media and YouTube. When you get a cosmetics degree, you take special effects classes, and [mortuaries] started to get people that started in the cosmetics industry.” Zooming out to examine the trend overall, she repeats, “Not to be sexist or whatever, but women are compassionate, empathetic and their attention to detail is phenomenal. We just set the tone a lot differently for a funeral than a male does.”