Work!
Work.
Work?
When the stock market crashed in 2008 in the United States, due to failure of banks in the US, unemployment rates soared through the roof, see Figure 1.
Figure 1. U.S. unemployment rate, in percentages, since 2004, of citizens ages 16 and over, extracted from the United States Department of Labor: Bureau of Labor Statistics as of May 5th 2014.
Between early April and May of 2014, unemployment rate fell from 6.7 to 6.3, which is the lowest it has ever been since 2008, according to NCSL, National Conference of State Legislators. 288,000 jobs were created in April which was above average of 190,000 for the last twelve months (NCSL 2014). As of April 2014, percentages for men and women have declined.
Women have been underrepresented in the work force and their ability to participate in the labor force is constrained due to unpaid labor such as domestic work that includes child rearing and household tasks. Although men participate in house hold work also, discourses and social constructs in gender role exemplify that a woman's job is to maintain the house and take care of the children. Women's mobility in the labor market is very limited because of these discourses.
According to Women, Work, and the Economy: Macroeconomic Gains from Gender Equity, women have a difficult time getting jobs and end up dominating the " 'informal sector, characterized by vulnerability in employment status, a low degree of protection, mostly unskilled work, and unstable earnings' " (Woytek et al., 2013). The gender gap between earnings is still uneven because of gender discourses where women are still expected to take care of their children and as a result they partake in part time jobs in order to take care of their children. Woytek et al. (2013) explains that on average women manage household work twice as much as men and four times as much in childcare. Gaps amongst wages are still occurring. Women at an older age are more likely to be in poverty because of unpaid time off for childcare and continuance of part-time work. According to Figure 2 which represents current unemployment rates for men and women as of 2014, the averages for women are better then men and that may possibly suggest that there are more job opportunities in the informal sector than the formal sector in which males are mostly employed in. Unfortunately, this is just a theory because there is not enough evidence to support this assumption since the information is relatively new.
In The Penguin Atlas of Women in the World, "...men's and women's contribution to household and national productivity reveals work that is done in the informal and unpaid sector, work that is rendered in official work statistics" (Seager, 2009). The information shows energy inputs of men and women doing various tasks, measured in time by hour. The results show that women put more hours in work than men in unpaid labor. The atlas exemplifies these works such as washing dishes, childcare, housework, and water carrying. Although men do not contribute as much hours as women in unpaid labor, the Atlas mentions that men participate in watching television, which is apart of unpaid labor, more than women.