20: Work

Work is an arena in which gendered processes intersect with multiple social inequalities to influence what jobs people have, how they experience those jobs, and whether those jobs provide them with secure, fulfilling and upwardly mobile careers, or relegate them to insecure, dead-end, dangerous, or even degrading labor. In the US, hard work is supposed to lead to a whole host of social and material rewards (i.e., respect, power, a house, a car, a yacht). The context surrounding hard work, for instance whether that work is paid or unpaid, compensated at a minimum wage or six-figure salary, is gendered in deep and complex ways. For instance, childcare is hard work that is often underpaid or not paid at all and is most often done by women. Furthermore, even if women do not perform most of this work themselves, certain career trajectories are forced on them, and they are placed in lower paying and less prestigious “mommy tracks” whether or not they choose this themselves. We can also see institutionalized labor inequalities at the global scale by looking at who cares for North American children when middle-class mothers take on full-time jobs and hire nannies, typically immigrant women from Eastern Europe and the Global South, to care for their children.

Now, more than ever, women in the US are participating in the labor force in full-time, year-round positions.^[1] This was not always the case. Changes in the economy (namely, the decline of men’s wages), an increase in single-mothers, and education and job opportunities and cultural shifts created by feminist movement politics from the 1960s and 1970s have fueled the increase in women’s labor force participation. Dual-earner homes are much more common than the breadwinner-homemaker model re-popularized in the 1950s, in which women stayed home and did unpaid labor (e.g., laundry, cooking, childcare, cleaning, planning) while men participated in the paid labor force in jobs that would earn them enough money to support a spouse and children. It turns out this popular American fantasy, often spoken of in political “family values” rhetoric, was only ever a reality for some white middle-class people, and for most contemporary households is now completely out of reach.

Though men and women are participating in the labor force, higher education, and paid work in near-equal numbers, a gender wage gap between men and women workers remains. On average, women workers made 84% of what men made in 2023 (Bureau of Labor Statistics 2024), or 84 cents for every dollar made by men. As discussed in a prior chapter, it is important to note the intersection of gender and race here, in which Latina, Native American or Indian, and Black women earn even less. This gap persists even when controlling for educational differences, full-time work versus part-time work, and year-round versus seasonal occupational statuses. Thus, women with similar educational backgrounds who work the same number of hours per year as their male counterparts are making 16% less than similarly situated men. So, how can this gap be explained? Researchers put forth four possible explanations of the gender wage gap: 1) discrimination, 2) occupational segregation, 3) devalued work, and 4) inherent work-family conflicts.

Most people believe discrimination and sexism in the workplace are of the past. Since the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed it has been illegal to discriminate in hiring based on race or gender. However, although companies can no longer say “men only” in their hiring advertisements, they can make efforts to recruit men, such as circulating job ads in men’s social networks and choosing men to interview from the applicant pool. The same companies can also have non-accommodating family-leave provisions that may discourage women, who they assume are disproportionately more likely to be primary caregivers, from applying. In addition, discrimination cases are very difficult to prosecute legally since no government agency monitors general trends and practices, and so individuals must complain about and prove specific instances of discrimination in specific job settings. Hiring discrimination in particular is extremely difficult to prove in a courtroom, and can thus persist largely unchecked. In addition, even when they are hired, women working in male-dominated fields often run into a glass ceiling, in that they face obstacles in being promoted to higher-level positions in the organization.

Gender Discrimination at Walmart

One example of the glass ceiling and gender discrimination is the class action lawsuit between Walmart and its women managerial staff. Although Walmart has hired some women in managerial positions across the country, they also have informal policies at the national level of promoting men faster and paying them at a different wage scale. While only six women at Walmart initiated the suit, the number of women that would be affected in this case numbered over 1.5 million. Walmart fought this legal battle over the course of ten years (2001-2011). The case was finally decided in June 2011 when the US Supreme Court sided with the defendant, Walmart, citing the difficulty of considering all women workers in Walmart’s retail empire as a coherent “class.” They agreed that discrimination against individuals was present, but the fact that it could not be proven that women, as a class, were discriminated against by the Wal-Mart corporation kept them from being found guilty (Walmart Stores Inc. v. Dukes, et al. 2011). Although Walmart did nothing to curb its male managers who were clearly and consistently hiring and promoting men over women, this neglect was not enough to convict Walmart of class-action discrimination. In this example, it becomes apparent that while gender discrimination is illegal it can still happen in patterned and widespread ways. Additionally, there are a series of factors that make it hard to prosecute gender discrimination.

“Walmart mall entrance in Pincourt, Quebec, Canada” by Bull-Doser is in the Public Domain, CC0

Second, occupational segregation describes a split labor market in which one group is far more likely to do certain types of work than other groups. Occupational gender segregation describes situations in which women are more likely to do certain jobs and men others. The jobs that women are more likely to work in have been dubbed “pink-collar” jobs. While white collar describes well-paying managerial work and blue collar describes manual labor predominantly done by men with a full range of income levels depending on skill, pink collar describes mostly low-wage, women-dominated positions that involve services and often emotion labor. The term emotion labor, developed by sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983), is used to describe work in which, as part of their job, employees must control and manage their emotions. For instance, a waitress risks being fired by confronting rude and harassing customers with anger; she must both control her own emotions and help to quell the emotions of angry customers in order to keep her job. Any service-based work that involves interacting with customers (from psychiatrists to food service cashiers) also involves emotion work. The top three pink-collar occupations dominated by women workers – secretaries, teachers, and nurses – all involve exceptional amounts of emotion labor.

“An Austrian Airlines flight attendant serving refreshments to passengers” by Austrian Airlines is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Third, feminized work, or work thought to be “women’s work” is not only underpaid, it is also socially undervalued, taken to be worth less than work thought to be “men’s work.” Care work is an area of the service economy that is feminized, involves intense emotion labor, and is consistently undervalued. Caretakers of children and the elderly are predominantly women. Economist Nancy Folbre (2001) has argued that care work is undervalued both because women are more likely to do it and because it is considered to be natural for women to know how to care. Women have traditionally done care work in the home, raising children and caring for sick and dying relatives, usually for free. Perhaps this is because most women bear children and are stereotyped as naturally more emotionally sensitive than men.

Some feel it is wrong to ever pay for these services and that they should be done altruistically even by non-family members. Women are stereotyped as having natural caring instincts, and, if these instincts come naturally, there is no reason to pay well (or pay at all) for this work. In reality, care work requires learned skills like any other type of work. What is interesting is that when men participate in this work, and other pink-collar jobs, they actually tend to be paid better and to advance to higher-level positions faster than comparable women. This phenomenon, in contrast to the glass ceiling, is known as the glass escalator (Williams 1992). However, Adia Harvey Wingfield (2009) has applied an intersectional analysis to the glass escalator concept and found that men of color do not benefit from this system to the extent that white men do.

“This work” by mimikama is in the Public Domain, CC0

Finally, the fourth explanation for the gender wage gap has to do with work-life conflict, the tensions between work and family that women are more likely to have to negotiate than men. For instance, women are much more likely to interrupt their career trajectories to take time off to care for children. This is not an inherent consequence of childbearing. Many countries offer women (and sometimes men) workers paid leave time and the ability to return to their jobs with the same salaries and benefits as when they left them. In contrast, the strongest legal policy protecting people’s jobs in the case of extended leave to care for the sick or elderly, or take personal time for pregnancy and childcare in the US is the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) of 1996. Under this act, most employers are obligated to allow their workers to take up to twelve weeks of unpaid leave. Unfortunately, few people can afford to be away from their jobs for so long without a paycheck and this policy remains underutilized. Additionally, only about half of the US work force is eligible for leave under FMLA, because the act only applies to workers who are employed by companies that have more than 50 employees. On top of that, many employers are unaware of this act or do not inform their workers that they can take this time off. Thus, women are more likely to quit full-time jobs and take on part-time jobs while their children are young. Quitting and rejoining the labor force typically means starting at the bottom in terms of pay and status at a new company, and this negatively impacts women’s overall earnings even when they return to full-time work.