Essentially all women work. Some are artists, politicians, assistants, farmers, soldiers, teachers, parents, spouses, architects, or dishwashers. Some find their work enjoyable, and some are working out of necessity. Economists today separate paid and unpaid work with the terms “productive” and “unproductive” work. This distinction is essential when we’re exploring many women’s everyday struggle to balance their daily lives. With this definition, anyone who spends their days making meals, doing dishes, folding laundry, ironing, carpooling, feeding the dogs, cleaning the cat box, helping with homework, setting up play dates, getting kids to soccer practice, and grocery shopping is not involved in “productive work.”
In recent decades, women have entered the workforce and obtained jobs that were once reserved for men. However, most paid jobs in the United States are still divided by gender lines. In 2019, 57.4 percent of all women participated in the labor force while the labor force participation rate for men was 69.2 percent. Women accounted for 51.8 percent of all workers employed in management, professional, and related occupations in 2019, somewhat more than their share of total employment (47.0 percent). By industry, women accounted for more than half of all workers within several sectors in 2019: education and health services (74.8 percent), financial activities (52.6 percent), and leisure and hospitality (51.2 percent). However, women were substantially underrepresented (relative to their share of total employment) in manufacturing (29.4 percent), agriculture (26.2 percent), transportation and utilities (24.1 percent), mining (15.8 percent), and construction (10.3 percent).266
Women continue to dominate in positions in supportive or service areas. These types of jobs would include being secretaries, assistants, health aids, servers, day-care workers, elderly caregivers, and in other people’s homes. In these types of positions, women are often treated as expendable and replaceable in their positions. This treatment also places the people in these occupations are greater risk for labor and wage exploitation. In her book Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, sociologist Pierrette Hondagneu- Sotelo shares the voices, experiences, and views of Mexican and Central American women who care for other people's children and homes. In it, she describes how paid domestic work has largely become the domain of disenfranchised immigrant women of color. Many of these workers were not earning a living wage, and some employers even exercise great pains not to flaunt their affluence. In one telling moment, Hondagneu-Sotelo writes:
Some employers try to snip off the price tags on new clothing and home furnishings before the Latina domestic workers read them because they fear the women will compare the prices of those items with their wages - which they invariably do. While some employers often feel guilty about 'having so much' around someone who 'has so little,' the women who do the work resent not their affluence but the job arrangements, which generally afford the workers little in the way of respect and living wages.267
Women in professional jobs tend to dominate occupations like teaching (76%),268 social work (83%),269 and nursing (89%).270 There is a definite emphasis on care-giving or serving others in women’s professions. But there is another difference between women’s and men’s work, and that comes in the form of their wages. “You don’t have to look to Venus or Mars to find the difference in men and women. Just look at their paychecks.”271
266 U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics (2021). Women in the labor force: a databook. https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/wom.../2020/home.htm
267 Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2007). Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence. University of California Press. Pg 11-12.
268 National Center for Education Statistics. (2022). Characteristics of Public School Teachers. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. Retrieved [August 2022], from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr.
269 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2021). Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey. https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm
270 Jennifer Cheeseman Day and Cheridan Christnacht, “Your Health Care is in Women’s Hands,” US Census Bureau, August 14, 2019.
271 Tucker, Cynthia. 1996. Women’s practical vote for Clinton. Chicago Tribune. Page 3
