Unequal Work, Unequal Pay for Women

While I applaud the Glenn Sacks (“Is Pay a Function of Gender Bias,” May 12) for breaking with traditional gender roles, his assessment of gender and work is wrong on several counts. Numerous comparable worth studies have revealed that, controlling for hours spent on the job, women still earn less than men in the same occupational categories. Moreover, while some women have breached glass ceilings, worldwide they hold only 1% of chief executive positions. Men do tend to be concentrated in the “most dangerous jobs,” in large part because for years women were systematically excluded from careers in firefighting, law enforcement and other high-risk jobs.

Most important, Sacks’ narrow definition of “work” excludes the hours of unpaid labor performed by women responsible for the “care” economy: housework, home management, childbearing and child-rearing, transportation, volunteer work and the emotional work of raising a family. On average, women in the United States work more hours per week than do men.

Finally, Sacks failed to mention that most families in the United States and the overwhelming majority worldwide cannot afford to buy “a nice home with a big yard,” even with both partners working full time at waged labor. For many women, this translates into a triple shift: full-time waged work, unpaid work at home and often a third job cleaning the houses of folks like the Sacks family.

Judi Kessler

Department of Sociology

UC San Diego