Concluding Thoughts on Essay Series 7

Women have always worked and have always taken responsibility for their families’ emotional, physical, and financial well-being. They have done this while working for pay and doing unpaid emotional, domestic, and logistical labor. Women also do non-promotable work for their employers. The unpaid labor I did as the mother who worked full-time and had a traveling husband affected my work and family life. My ex-husband benefited because I managed our household and raised our children, much of the time completely alone. In addition, my income supported our family when my ex-husband started his own business.

Employment opportunities for women have varied over time, during and after war, by race and ethnicity, and by region of the country. Women have kept the home front going successfully during the U.S. wars. They fed the country during World War I and poured into factories to build the war machines the United States and the Allies needed during World War II.

Laws and court cases have progressively made employment opportunities more available to women. (Please see Timeline of Employment Law and Court Decisions following this conclusion for more information.) As a result, women have started catching up to men in terms of education and pay when doing equivalent jobs. However, they lag substantially behind men in terms of participation in the financially rewarding STEM jobs and upper-level management positions. And the overall pay gap between women and men remains large.

Obstacles to women’s success remain in the United States and are getting worse. For example, when I was in undergraduate and graduate schools, education costs were low and financial assistance was available at little cost. This is no longer the case. Other obstacles include inadequate family and medical leave and lack of affordable child care. These situations apply to men too.

Problems women face, which most men don’t, range from safety gear that isn’t built to fit women to sexual harassment at work to artificial intelligence that uses data based on men’s experiences. Women also face more unpaid labor pressures than men do.

Women and men in power have responsibility for helping women achieve their best in education and work by expanding leadership opportunities for women, ensuring job conditions work for women, and providing financial investment to women on the same basis as men.

Finally, as the number of traditional men’s jobs has declined, men have largely stayed out of service-related employment. Initiatives to encourage them to overcome sexist notions about appropriate men’s work could help them enter these professions. This would enable many men to gain more financial stability and to contribute more to their partners’ and families’ finances.