6 Gender, Work, and the Economy

Paid and unpaid work

Work includes both paid employment and unpaid activities such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for children or relatives. These activities sustain households and make paid work possible, so the distinction between paid and unpaid work is not a distinction between productive and unproductive activity. For example, caring for a child at home and caring for a child in a paid childcare center involve related tasks, although only the latter is normally counted as employment.

Unpaid work is often excluded from conventional measures of economic output, which can make its contribution less visible. Time-use surveys help show who performs this work and how it is divided. The International Labour Organization estimates that women perform 76.2% of total unpaid care-work hours worldwide. Its 2024 estimates also report that 708 million women were outside the labor force because of care responsibilities. These global figures do not describe every household or country.

Care and the household–workplace connection

Care work includes direct activities such as feeding, teaching, or assisting someone, along with supporting tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and arranging appointments. It may be unpaid within families or paid in jobs such as childcare, home care, and nursing. Paid care work is essential, but care occupations are often low-paid or insecure relative to their social importance.

When one person takes on a larger share of unpaid care, they may have less time for paid hours, overtime, travel, or training. This can affect earnings and career progression. Employers’ assumptions about who is responsible for care can also reinforce unequal treatment. Care responsibilities therefore connect private family arrangements to labor-market outcomes; they are not merely personal matters. The organization of care, gender inequality in households, and the quality of care jobs are linked.

Occupational patterns and workplace inequality

Occupational segregation describes the unequal distribution of groups across jobs or fields. Horizontal segregation refers to concentration in different kinds of occupations—for example, women being more represented in education and health care and men in construction or engineering. Vertical segregation refers to unequal access to senior, higher-paid, or more powerful positions within an occupation or organization.

These patterns can reflect interacting forces, including educational and training opportunities, hiring and promotion practices, workplace cultures, social expectations, and unequal availability of time for paid work. They should not be explained simply as the result of individual preferences. Explanations focused on workers’ choices and qualifications can be considered alongside those focused on employer behavior, labor-market structures, and discrimination.

Workplace inequality can involve pay, job security, scheduling, benefits, access to training, and promotion. The gender pay gap is a summary comparison of earnings between groups; it does not by itself measure unequal pay for the same work. Occupation, hours, seniority, and work interruptions can affect the gap, while discrimination and the undervaluation of work in female-dominated fields may also contribute.

In the United States, 2024 Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that women and men were distributed differently across major occupational groups. Such comparisons describe patterns but do not establish the cause of any particular difference.

Economic change and insecure work

Economic change reshapes where work happens and what kinds of jobs are available. Industrialization expanded wage employment outside the home, while the growth of service economies increased demand in fields such as health, education, retail, and hospitality. Globalization and migration have linked care and other service work across borders. Automation, digital platforms, and remote work are also changing job tasks and working arrangements.

These shifts can create opportunities, but they do not automatically remove inequality. Access to new jobs, stable hours, benefits, and advancement can remain uneven. Informal and precarious work also matters: the International Labour Organization describes informal employment as a major part of employment worldwide. Where workers lack reliable social protection, illness, caregiving, or job loss can carry greater economic costs.

Understanding gender and the economy therefore involves looking beyond formal workplaces to household labor, informal employment, migration, technology, and public policy.

Approaches to understanding gender and work

Different theoretical approaches help explain gendered patterns in work. They are complementary tools rather than one-size-fits-all explanations, and together they encourage analysis of individual choices alongside social norms, employers, families, labor markets, and public institutions.

• Human-capital approaches examine how education, training, experience, and work interruptions relate to earnings and job placement. They can help describe some differences, but cannot by themselves explain how access to training or workplace opportunities is shaped.

• Labor-market segmentation and discrimination approaches focus on how employers, hiring systems, occupational divisions, and workplace rules can channel workers into different jobs or reward comparable work differently. They direct attention to institutions as well as individual qualifications.

• Feminist political economy and social-reproduction approaches connect paid production to the unpaid work that maintains households and workers. They ask who performs this work, who benefits from it, and how institutions distribute its costs and rewards.

• Intersectional approaches examine how gender interacts with race, class, migration, disability, and other social positions. They help explain why people grouped under a broad label such as “women” may experience very different opportunities and constraints.

Connecting the patterns

Paid employment and unpaid labor are interdependent parts of the economy. Gendered divisions of care can shape access to paid work, while occupational segregation and workplace practices influence pay, security, and advancement. Economic change—from the growth of services to digital work—can alter these patterns without necessarily eliminating them.

Analyzing inequality requires attention to institutions and power as well as workers’ experiences. It also requires attention to differences within gender groups, not only differences between them, because gender interacts with other aspects of social position.

• Paid labor