#GAReads | In the Gendered Economy, Women Are Perpetual Debtors

photo credit: Hush Naidoo, via Unsplash

“In the Gendered Economy, Women Are Perpetual Debtors”:

Women make up nearly nine in ten nurses, more than eight in ten home health aides, and more than two-thirds of grocery-store cashiers. In other words, they perform the lion’s share of the vital care that we now call “essential” work. At the same time, since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, women have been laid off at an outsized rate (a reflection of their concentration within the country’s lowest-compensated, least-secure jobs) and have been forced to reduce their paid hours to look after children at nearly twice the rate of their male partners. As the kinds of labor that sustain life have grown deadlier, women have taken on more of the risk. As paid work and the time to perform it become scarcer resources, men are retaining the better part of both.

What conclusions can we draw from the gendered dimensions of the current crisis?

Read Nora Caplan-Bricker’s full article at The New Yorker here…