Women’s jobs are really for men

Gender roles are a tricky thing.

Angela Davis criticizes the idea of women not receiving any compensation for housework. I’d like to take it one step further.

As David defines it, housework consists of “cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping.” Yet, in almost every case, the professional equivalent of these duties are performed by men. We’ll take them one at a time.

On a simple Google Image search term of “famous chefs” 34 images of male chefs come up before a single one of a woman. Then 21 more before a second picture, and in both cases that woman is Julia Child.

Additionally, as of September 2014, the nine Three Michelin Star restaurants in America all have male executive chefs. In that same restaurant, the person who washes the dishes is referred to as a busboy, another duty typically allocated to women that in the professional setting is allocated to a man. So what does it say about us as a society if a job that a women is ‘supposed’ to have at home isn’t actually a realistic career for her in an actual job market? Surely this is just a coincidence, and it’s just the food industry that does this?

Of course not.

Fashion is considered a women’s world — but the clothing is typically not actually made by women. Of the fifteen wealthiest people in the fashion industry, thirteen are men, according to Forbes.

Women are supposed to do the cleaning? Then why is it that men make up 60.7% of janitors and building cleaners according to the United States’ Bureau of Labor Statistics?

As of 2010, 67.6% of all physicians are male, even though nurturing is supposed to be “women’s work” by our societal standards.

I could continue to find statistics in multiple industries that show this problem, or we can skip to the important part: the discussion. Our society puts women in a tricky situation. We tell them that they are supposed to cook and clean in the home, but set them up for failure when those same skill sets are attributed to men in professional settings. If women can’t dominate the industries they’ve been told they’re supposed to, why are they still being told they’re supposed to? Women do not get monetary compensation for doing their partner’s or children’s laundry, making dinner for the family, or keeping a clean home. And they do not get the opportunity to gain monetary compensation for doing this in a professional setting, either.

In 2010 a woman earned an average of 79 cents for every dollar a man earned. Further more, men with Bachelor’s degrees made more money then women with Master’s degrees with data from 2012.

To accurately discuss the wage gap, we must understand the real issue at hand: that women’s work is only important to us as a society when they are doing it for free. The moment those very same duties transcend into the professional world, they become men’s jobs.

What do women have, then?