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As the saying goes, “A woman’s work is never done.”
Unlike a “real” job, there are no boundaries to the domestic tasks typically expected of women. There’s no clocking in at 9:00 AM before you start making breakfast and there’s no clocking out at 5:00 PM so you can have a nice dinner to yourself.
Women’s work is all-encompassing and all-consuming, it involves taking the lioness’ share of domestic work even if you have a traditional job. As easy as it is to blame women’s partners, the conditioning that goes into teaching both men and women this unequal status quo starts early, far before any individual woman starts living with a S/O.
In fact, it starts so early that for a lot of women, their first experience of being conditioned for women’s work is through play. Toys both exist for fun and as a vehicle for gender socialization. As children, it teaches us what the society around us values and expects of us.
To young girls, toys communicate that their beauty, nurturing instincts, and capacity for domestic work are what’s prized in them. Sometimes, the conditioning isn’t a hint, it’s an explicit command about what you should do and shouldn’t do by virtue of being a woman.
While gendered toys are ubiquitous in nearly every modern society, countries like the United States rank highly on giving equal opportunities for employment to women, even though the U.S. ranks below the top 10 which is dominated by Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. But women’s issues around unpaid work aren’t restricted to the U.S. nor does the U.S. ranking mean that women are entirely worry-free.
A Woman’s Work Is Never Paid
Mohadese Mirzaee is an exceptional woman, both in terms of skill and the fact that she’s a statistical exception. In the U.S., women account for only 4.6% of airline transport pilots with the number being a little higher in India at 12.4%. Mirzaee is even rarer than that. She was the first female commercial airline pilot in Afghanistan.
Earlier this year, she was one of two female pilots of Afghanistan’s first all-female flight. The then 22-year-old Mirzaee, together with Veronica Borysova, flew a Boeing 737 from Kabul to Herat.
What seemed like the start of something new for Afghan women in February 2021 was reduced to ashes just months later when the Taliban took over Kabul, the starting point of Mirzaee’s journey.
“It was a huge accomplishment for Afghanistan and for the male-dominated aviation industry in general,” Mirzaee told the Guardian. “I was hopeful that a window had opened. I was approached by many young women who also dreamed of becoming a pilot.”
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That window is gone.
Since the takeover, Afghan women have been systematically pushed out of public life, from women MPs forced to evacuate to Athens to girls’ educations being delayed in the interest of “protecting” them, there are fewer and fewer spaces for Afghan women to exist outside their homes.
“When I was studying, my mum always told me to come back to Afghanistan and work for my country. I shared her conviction. But today, even though I’d like to go back, I can’t. There is no space for women like me in Afghanistan anymore. I lost my job, my home, my crew – everything.”
There’s still room in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan for women. Just not the kind of women who aren’t solely tied to women’s work.
Though women have been employed for centuries in one way or another, traditional women’s work, the kind that’s expected yet under thanked, doesn’t come with monetary compensation.
There have been attempts to assign a dollar value to the domestic work that women do. If we go by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’ computations, that dollar value equals the GDP of the state of New York.
FRED based their estimate on the number of women over the age of 16 and multiplied this by the hours of unpaid domestic work that women provide per week on average. From there, it’s just a matter of multiplying it by the number of weeks in a year and the federal minimum wage. Yes, the minimum wage. Not the actual wages paid for these women’s professional counterparts such as care workers.
It’s true that many women choose the path of a homemaker and for that, kudos to them. They’re living life the way they want to. But time and time again, the lack of financial acknowledgment for women’s work has also meant that it’s invisible and isn’t counted as professional experience.
A Woman’s Work Is Never Seen
Of course, there’s a professional training gap between homemakers who perform less formal versions of paid work and what professional chefs, caregivers, and teachers do. I say homemakers because by “women’s work,” I mean the type of work done, not the worker themselves. Granted, it’s often still women who do what’s called invisible work.
Invisible work is exactly what it says on the tin: work that goes unseen because it isn’t work you can slap on a resume.
When I was still doing intake interviews for a psychology clinic in my area, a woman I interviewed shared that she was abused by her ex-husband, a sharp-tempered alcoholic who kept tabs on her 24/7. Perhaps expecting me to ask her why she didn’t just leave, a question that’s all too easy to ask, she said plainly, “I haven’t worked in years. I didn’t mind going hungry, but if I couldn’t get a job, who would support my children?”
So she put up with it and she waited until he died and her children were settled into their careers. It took her decades to set foot in a therapy clinic and even then, it was obvious she was jaded.
For homemakers, financial freedom isn’t just a cute catchphrase for retiring early. It’s the difference between a happy, free life and a lifetime of domestic abuse.
According to “Financial Freedom: Women, Money, and Domestic Abuse” by Dana Harrington Conner, as long as a victim of domestic abuse is reliant on the resources provided by an abuser, the abuser remains in control.
The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence found that 85% of women eventually return to their abuser primarily because they’re unable to support themselves and their children. This is why providing housing, financial support, healthcare, and food security to victims of domestic abuse is vital to freeing them from abuse.
While many joke about how their wives steal money from their husbands through a divorce, statistics show that women are disproportionately affected by the loss of household income. In the United States, divorce results in a 27% decline in standard of living for women and a 10% increase for men.
Of course, this isn’t true for all cases, as a number of men do have a hard time recovering financially from a divorce. But the point is that, through a web of cultural and economic factors, the majority of homemakers who teeter into poverty are women.
As Conner puts it, “Financial inequality is central to the female experience; it has shaped her role within the marital relationship, diminished her autonomy, influenced her place within the labor force, and nurtured her oppression.”
Or, as a well-meaning old woman who had a taste of the 1960s housewife experience once told me, “Never trust money that isn’t your own.”
How Women’s Work Limits Options
When writing for the Chicago Law Review, Cynthia Starnes uses a term that captures the experience of being a homemaker who loses her job. Since traditional women’s work isn’t necessarily paid, the only form of compensation these women receive is through their spouse’s support.
Once the financially dominant partner kicks the bucket, the homemaker spouse becomes what Starnes calls a “displaced homemaker” her sudden loss of financial support makes her something of a refugee.
Starnes posits that the displaced homemaker really only has two options: get a new partner to share her financial burdens with or get back to work. The fair and feminist choice here is the latter, sure, but it also has the same problems that plague older divorced women when they attempt to remarry: their age.
The older a homemaker is, the longer she’s likely been out of the workforce. Though we as a society claim to value the unpaid and unseen work that homemakers put into caring for their homes and their children, our attitudes towards homemakers reentering the workforce could not be more different.
Employers are less likely to hire stay-at-home parents due to understandable concerns about their ability to commit to work and transition back into the professional world. Interestingly, this is one area where cultural expectations of women play to their advantage as stay-at-home mothers have an easier time getting hired than stay-at-home fathers (but not as easy as being a dedicated career woman or, better, a dedicated career man). Stay-at-home dads were seen as even less reliable or committed than their female counterparts because they’re unable to fill the breadwinner role for their families.
In a totally unsurprising turn of events, gender roles hurt everyone.
There’s still a long way to go before womanhood becomes an ideal experience for every woman. But some places are better to be than others and, say what you will about the U.S., it’s one of the better ones.
Women for Afghan Women is a grassroots organization that helps Afghan women in Afghanistan to reclaim their lives through family counseling, education, and vocational training.
WAW also has a New York Community Center in Fresh Meadows, Queens, New York which provides Afghan-Americans and Muslim-Americans with ESL lessons, citizenship classes, and vital legal support that all go towards helping them adapt to their new lives.
Vital Voices, another organization dedicated to protecting survivors of gender-based violence, accepts donations that it uses to give women in 82 countries the opportunity to become community leaders and enable them to use their voices to alleviate key social issues.
If you would like to find other ways to support women around the world, you can check out this link for other organizations to choose from.
