essay working women's problems

Essay on Problems of Working Women

Students are often asked to write an essay on Problems of Working Women in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

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100 Words Essay on Problems of Working Women

The challenges faced.

Working women encounter several issues daily. They juggle between personal life, professional life, and societal expectations. This balancing act can be stressful.

Work-Life Balance

Women often struggle to maintain a balance between work and home. They’re expected to excel at work and manage the household, which can be overwhelming.

Gender Inequality

Despite progress, gender inequality persists. Women might face discrimination, lower pay, or fewer opportunities at work.

Harassment at Workplace

Workplace harassment is another issue women face. It can lead to emotional stress and a hostile work environment.

Addressing these issues is crucial for a fair and productive society.

250 Words Essay on Problems of Working Women

The duality of roles.

Working women face a unique set of challenges and difficulties, primarily stemming from the duality of their roles. They are expected to excel in their professional lives while simultaneously managing their domestic responsibilities. This often results in a precarious balance, leading to stress and burnout.

Gender Discrimination

Despite the legal provisions for equality, gender discrimination is still prevalent in the workplace. Women are often paid less than their male counterparts for the same work, a phenomenon known as the gender pay gap. They are also frequently overlooked for promotions, with leadership positions predominantly occupied by men.

Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment is another pervasive issue faced by working women. It creates a hostile work environment, affecting their mental health and job performance. Although laws and regulations exist to combat this problem, their enforcement is often inadequate.

Work-Life Imbalance

The societal expectation for women to manage both their professional and domestic lives often leads to a work-life imbalance. This can have severe implications on their physical and mental health, affecting their overall productivity and job satisfaction.

The Glass Ceiling Effect

The glass ceiling effect refers to the invisible barrier that prevents women from advancing to senior leadership roles. Despite having the necessary qualifications and experience, women often find it challenging to break through this barrier due to inherent biases and stereotypes.

In conclusion, the problems faced by working women are multifaceted and complex. Addressing these issues requires a collective effort from society, organizations, and individuals to create a more inclusive and equitable work environment.

500 Words Essay on Problems of Working Women

Introduction.

The term ‘working woman’ is a testament to the changing societal structure, where women have broken the shackles of traditional roles and stepped into the professional world. Despite these advancements, working women face numerous challenges that hinder their professional growth and personal well-being.

Gender Wage Gap

One of the most pervasive issues is the gender wage gap. Despite performing the same tasks as their male counterparts, women often receive lower remuneration. The International Labor Organization reports that women globally earn approximately 20% less than men. This disparity is not only unjust but also demotivating for working women, undermining their financial independence and professional worth.

Striking a healthy work-life balance is another significant challenge for working women, particularly those with families. The societal expectation of women as primary caregivers often leads to a ‘double burden’ scenario, where they are responsible for both professional duties and domestic chores. This lack of balance can result in physical exhaustion, mental stress, and reduced productivity at work.

Discrimination and Harassment

Workplace discrimination and harassment remain persistent problems. Women are frequently overlooked for promotions or high-responsibility roles due to gender biases. Moreover, many face sexual harassment at work, creating a hostile environment that can lead to psychological trauma and decreased job satisfaction.

Lack of Representation

Despite making up a significant portion of the workforce, women remain underrepresented in leadership positions. This lack of representation not only limits their career advancement but also reduces the diversity of thought and innovation within organizations.

Societal Pressure and Stereotypes

Working women often face societal pressure and stereotypes that question their commitment to family and traditional roles. This societal scrutiny can lead to guilt, anxiety, and a feeling of inadequacy, affecting their mental health and overall well-being.

While society has made strides towards gender equality, the problems faced by working women are far from resolved. Addressing these issues requires systemic changes in organizational policies, societal attitudes, and legislative measures. It is vital to create an equitable and inclusive work environment that acknowledges and respects women’s contributions, ensuring their professional growth and personal well-being.

In conclusion, the challenges faced by working women are multifaceted and deeply rooted in societal norms and structures. Recognizing and addressing these issues is an imperative step towards achieving gender equality and empowering women in the workforce.

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Why has COVID-19 been especially harmful for working women?

After decades of struggle, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution gave women in the United States the right to vote. This hard-won right foretold the increasing presence of women not only in the voting booth, but also in the workplace. By the beginning of this year, the centennial of the 19th Amendment’s ratification, women’s labor force participation stood at 58% , nearly a three-fold increase since 1920. Without the increasing participation of women in the workforce, household income growth of the middle class would have remained largely stagnant since the late 1970’s .

While there is much to celebrate, the 19th Amendment’s centennial anniversary also coincides with a major threat to the gains women have made in the workplace: the COVID-19 pandemic. Social distancing measures required to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus have had staggering economic and social impacts, hitting women particularly hard.

COVID-19 is hard on women because the U.S. economy is hard on women, and this virus excels at taking existing tensions and ratcheting them up. Millions of women were already supporting themselves and their families on meager wages before coronavirus-mitigation lockdowns sent unemployment rates skyrocketing and millions of jobs disappeared. And working mothers were already shouldering the majority of family caregiving responsibilities in the face of a childcare system that is wholly inadequate for a society in which most parents work outside the home. Of course, the disruptions to daycare centers, schools, and afterschool programs have been hard on working fathers, but evidence shows working mothers have taken on more of the resulting childcare responsibilities , and are more frequently reducing their hours or leaving their jobs entirely in response.

Problems facing women in the labor market have never been hidden, but they have been inconvenient to address because they are so entrenched in the basic operations of our economy and society. The low wages associated with “pink collar” occupations have long contributed to the feminization of poverty, and the chronic shortage of affordable, high-quality childcare reflects outdated notions of women’s societal roles, how the economy functions, and child development. COVID-19’s massive disruption to employment, childcare, and school routines has crippled the economy and pushed millions of women and families to the financial brink. This moment provides an important opening to rethink how policy supports women’s roles as financial providers and parents.

Women are disproportionately represented in low-wage jobs

Based on our own analysis of 2018 American Community Survey data, before COVID-19, nearly half of all working women—46% or 28 million—worked in jobs paying low wages, with median earnings of only $10.93 per hour. The share of workers earning low wages is higher among Black women (54%) and Hispanic or Latina women (64%) than among white women (40%), reflecting the structural racism that has limited options in education, housing, and employment for people of color.

For some women, jobs paying low wages don’t present economic hardship—think of someone with a higher earning spouse or early in their career. But a substantial number of women support themselves and their families by working in low-wage jobs. Fifteen percent are single parents, 63% are in their prime working years (ages 25-54), and 57% work full time year-round, indicating the position is not a side activity. Forty-one percent live in households below 200% of the federal poverty level (equivalent to about $43,000 for a family of 3) a common measure capturing the working poor. More than one quarter receive safety net benefits like SNAP, Medicaid, Social Security, or other public assistance income.

Women are much more likely than men to work in low-paying jobs: 37% of working men earn low hourly wages, nearly 10 percentage points lower than women. Some of the difference between men and women is explained by personal choice—for example women often pursue education in lower paying majors, fields, and occupations than men. Some women also prioritize work flexibility over wages.

But, an extensive body of evidence shows women also face discrimination in the labor market. Even when women make the “right” choices—completing education and pursuing employment in high wage industries and occupations—they are underpaid relative to men, earning 92 cents to the dollar according to one recent analysis . While this underpayment doesn’t necessarily push women into low wages, the earnings disparity illustrates the devaluation of women’s contributions to the labor force. Occupations dominated by women and people of color, particularly care and domestic workers like home care aides, have been systematically and intentionally excluded from federal labor and employment protections, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act’s guarantee of minimum wage and overtime pay , and offer very low wages. Evidence also demonstrates that as an occupation becomes more female-dominated, median wages decline .

Our childcare and school systems don’t meet the needs of working mothers

The majority of women between ages 18 and 64 work. One in four working women, 15.5 million, has a child under the age of 14 at home. Some of these women work part time or have a family member on whom they can rely to provide supervision for their young and school-aged children. But more than 10 million (17% of all working women) rely on childcare and schools to keep their children safe while they work. These women are working at least half time and do not live with a potential caregiver at home—another adult who is either out of the labor force or working less than half time. In comparison, 12% of all working men are reliant on schools and childcare.

There simply are not enough affordable, high-quality childcare options to meet this demand, disproportionately harming working mothers, especially low- and middle-income mothers and mothers of color . The childcare that is available is often unaffordable. A 2018 analysis found that average childcare costs in every state exceed the federal definition of affordability —7% of annual household income. The same analysis found center-based childcare for an infant costs an average of more than $1,200 per month and about $900 per month for a toddler. As childcare becomes more difficult to access, women are more likely to stay out of or leave the workforce; one analysis found maternal labor force participation rates are 3 percentage points lower in childcare deserts than in areas with adequate childcare supply . The childcare system also relies on an underpaid, primarily female workforce —so not only is it a bad system for those it serves, but it undervalues those it employs.

As children get older, the public school system offers some reprieve from the costly and sometimes difficult to access childcare system. Even in normal times, though, parents who work outside of the 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. school schedule are left to piece together supervision before school, after school, and during the summer. High income parents can often navigate this misalignment with quality childcare, afterschool programs, and summer camps. For lower income parents, this lack of alignment can be a real burden . And with fewer dollars to spend filling in the gaps between the school day and work schedules, low-income parents are more likely to rely on informal care arrangements, older siblings, and unlicensed home care providers.

COVID-19 has upended the labor market, with disastrous consequences for working women and their families

As we know, COVID-19 has massively disrupted American life. Beginning in March, non-essential businesses closed their doors, workers were furloughed or laid off, and schools and daycares sent children home. At its peak, 95% of the U.S. population was under stay at home orders .

Although necessary for public health, these closures resulted in an unprecedented number of unemployment claims as millions of workers were simultaneously furloughed or laid off. A stunning 39% of people living in low-income households reported a job loss in March , and while there are signs the economy is slowly improving, many people remain without work.

Because of their concentration in low-wage and face-to-face jobs, these layoffs hit women especially hard. While many higher wage jobs could transition from an in-person to remote work environment, that is not the case for the majority of low-wage jobs that rely on interaction between customers and workers, such as retail sales and hospitality , two of the most common occupations among low-wage women. The unemployment rate for women jumped by more than 12 percentage points between February and April while the rate for men increased by less than 10 percentage points. The losses for women without college degrees is even more staggering. Between March and early April, their employment rate dropped 15 percentage points compared to a drop of 11 percentage points among non-college educated men .

Those low-wage women who did not suffer job losses were primarily in frontline occupations, such as healthcare support and grocery workers. These women continued working, often with inadequate access to appropriate personal protective equipment, putting their health and the health of their loved ones at risk.

COVID-19 is hard on women because the U.S. economy is hard on women, and this virus excels at taking existing tensions and ratcheting them up.

COVID-19 has also increased the pressure on working mothers, low-wage and otherwise. In a survey from May and June , one out of four women who became unemployed during the pandemic reported the job loss was due to a lack of childcare, twice the rate of men surveyed. A more recent survey shows the losses have not slowed down: between February and August mothers of children 12 years old and younger lost 2.2 million jobs compared to 870,000 jobs lost among fathers .

Balancing work and family obligations has long been the reality for women in the United States. Historically, women have been the primary caregivers in their families. This has remained true even as most women work outside the home and provide important contributions to household income. Mothers working full-time spend 50% more time each day caring for children than fathers working full-time. But COVID-19 and the uncertainty around childcare and in-person instruction for school-aged children this fall has further increased this burden. July estimates show employment levels in child care services are 20% below levels from the same period last year, indicating a persistent reduction in available childcare. Millions of daycare slots may be permanently lost without further intervention. For schools, reopening has largely been determined at the district level, with diverse approaches and varying levels of success . Furthermore, in-person instruction for students and the reopening of daycares is not a one-and-done proposition. So, while parents, but especially women who have taken on even more during the pandemic , may get a temporary reprieve, outbreaks may force children and their families to quarantine , schools or daycares to close temporarily, or more long-term moves to online instruction .

As the pandemic persists, women will continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of its burden. While there has been some recovery in the labor market, there is still a long way to go to reach pre-pandemic employment highs; low-wage jobs will be the first to disappear again if there is a severe resurgence of the virus this fall. For those women who have been able to keep their jobs, many will continue to balance competing priorities. To earn a paycheck, those who cannot telework must show up physically to work, potentially posing health risks to themselves and their families, and requiring them to find alternative care arrangements for their children if school or daycare are unavailable. Those who can work from home must also care for or help teach their children in the case of inaccessible childcare or limited in-person instruction at schools.

Solutions should do more than provide temporary support to working women

These realities have the potential to set back the labor force participation and wage gains women have made in the labor market over the last several decades.

Solutions to improve the conditions of working women should address both aspects driving the disproportionate harm they have borne as a result of COVID-19’s economic impacts: an overreliance on an inadequate childcare system and their concentration in low wage jobs.

While the role of women in our economy has shifted over the last 100 years, our systems have not similarly evolved to support them. Because these conditions have been longstanding, the solutions put in place should not exclusively focus on short term COVID-19 recovery, but should also make long-lasting changes that aim to close the wage gap, improve working conditions and family leave options, and better align the childcare and school systems to the needs of working parents so mothers who want to work can do so. Policy needs to reflect that women have fundamental roles in both the workplace and in families, and to support women in those roles.

Of course, short-term interventions to address the current crisis are necessary and welcome. The Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) provided 12 weeks of parental paid leave through the end of the year and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act) provided enhanced unemployment benefits that reduced poverty rates . The CARES Act also provided direct aid to states to address immediate problems in education budgets and infused the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) with $3.5 billion to keep childcare providers afloat. But many of the most important provisions of these two pieces of legislation have expired, will expire soon, or were inadequate. The status of another relief package is totally unclear given the latest communications from the White House, and it seems unlikely these systems will receive any additional reprieve this fall.

In addition to the temporary fixes enacted by the FFCRA and the CARES Act, a permanent federal paid parental leave policy and a sustained funding increase for the CCDBG would go a long way in reducing the cost of childcare and working mothers’ overreliance on it. Other policies that could increase women’s labor force participation, close the wage gap, and make work more accessible for mothers include policies that incentivize or fund predictable work scheduling, guaranteed number of work hours , and extended school-day or before and after school programs . We are long overdue in realigning our labor market policies, schools, and daycare system with the modern reality faced by working parents; these interventions should be considered as part of the solution.

Beyond making work more accessible for mothers, the labor market also needs to more fairly compensate women for their work. Improving wage equality and reducing discrimination in the labor market is no easy task. Potential solutions include raising the federal minimum wage and eliminating the tipped minimum wage . Policies to incentivize wage transparency at the firm level can also decrease the gender wage gap.

A women’s place is in the family and the workforce, if they so choose. We can’t bounce back from the COVID-19 recession without interventions to support them in both roles. But we also need to recognize that although the pandemic created an acute and visible crisis, the lack of support for families and workers was a pre-existing condition. Even with the progress made since the passage of the 19th Amendment, our economy was doing a disservice to millions of working women before COVID-19 hit. Returning to the status quo should not be the goal. Instead, we should aim higher—for an economy that compensates women fairly for their work, improves access to jobs through family-friendly policies, and supports women in their chosen roles as breadwinners, mothers, or some combination of the two.

Thank you to Julia Du and Caroline George for research assistance.

This piece is part of 19A: The Brookings Gender Equality Series.  Learn more about the series and read published work »

About the Authors

Nicole bateman, research analyst – metropolitan policy program, martha ross, senior fellow – metropolitan policy program, more from bateman and ross, working parents are key to covid-19 recovery.

For working parents, the uncertainty surrounding child care and in-person instruction for school-aged children is unprecedented, with a cascading set of consequences on family life, education, and earnings.

We can’t recover from a coronavirus recession without helping young workers

As we approach another nationwide recession, we are about to see history repeat itself by hitting young adults and those with lower levels of education especially hard.

Coronavirus makes it impossible to ignore the economic insecurity built into our labor market 

In addition to the dire risk to individual health, side effects of the coronavirus pandemic are sure to include widespread economic hardship and uncertainty. If you experience these symptoms, you’re mostly on your own—as the virus reveals a grossly inadequate safety net and willfully ineffective political system that are poised to leave our most vulnerable […]

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Research Roundup: How Women Experience the Workplace Today

• Dagny Dukach

New studies on what happens when women reach the top, the barriers they still face, and the (sometimes hidden) stresses they deal with.

What will it take to make gender equity in the workplace a reality? It’s a complicated question, with no easy answers — but research from a wide array of academic disciplines aims to expand our understanding of the unique challenges and opportunities women face today. In this research roundup, we share highlights from several new and forthcoming studies that explore the many facets of gender at work.

In 2021, the gender gap in U.S. workforce participation hit an all-time low . But of course, substantial gender disparities persist in pay, leadership representation, access to resources, and many other key metrics. How can we make sense of all these different dimensions of gender equity in the workplace?

• Dagny Dukach is a former associate editor at Harvard Business Review.

Partner Center

Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality Report (Assessment)

Women in the workforce.

In this post, I consider a particular aspect of gender inequality: the issue of the unbalanced distribution of paid and unpaid work. I examine the idea of work-and-life balance that is proposed as a solution to the problem of having a family and career at the same time and point out the fact that it is typically discussed concerning women. This issue is supported by the statistics, which proves that women are loaded with unpaid work to a greater extent.

I conclude by suggesting that the tipped balance affects the career opportunities of women and also consider the impact that this typical discriminatory practice has on the process of promoting equality in the modern world. I provide examples and references for the facts that are cited in the post.

Nowadays, diversity and tolerance courses are exceptionally popular and even required at schools and universities, but they do not appear to produce the expected effect. Education should form attitudes of generations, and inequality is not supposed to have survived by now, but it persists. An example is the issue of gender inequality; in particular, that related to women in the workforce. Inequality is a very complex issue, and I cannot explain its persistence exhaustively, but here, I will attempt to take a look at some of its reasons by examining the concept of work-and-life balance.

In effect, a lot is being made to close the nearly 20-percent wage gap 1 between women and men in Canada (Zamon, 2015), and one of such activities is described in the article by Alonso-Almeida (2014). This activity can be called the maintenance of the work-and-life balance, and this idea keeps receiving praise from researchers. 2 However, I believe that this method was planted on the soil of discriminatory, sexist society, and its positive effects are limited.

The balance is most often used concerning women. Consider the words of Jennifer Reynolds, chief executive officer of Women in Capital Markets of Canada: “work-life balance is not specifically a women’s issue, but it is one that needs to be talked about more openly because it does hold women back” (Freeman, 2015, para. 12). There is a very clear explanation for the fact that the family holds women back: family and home-making are still the “prerogatives” of women.

Most of us like children, clean houses, and homemade meals. However, according to statistics, a particular group of particular sex typically exploits the opposite one to attain these goods. Nowadays, there exists a distinction between the paid (profession-related) and unpaid (clean house, fed children) work. The work-and-life balance is the practice that is meant to deal with paid work (Kimura, 2016). To ridicule, no employer will create a schedule of house chores for you; they are a part of the “life” side of the balance. At the same time, according to official statistics, women in Canada spend 1.5 times 3 more hours on this unpaid work (Milan, Keown, & Urquijo, 2015, para. 51).

In other words, the work-and-life balance is tipped differently for women: they are loaded with the unpaid work to a greater extent than men, and this issue is connected to the fact that less than 60% 4 of the working-age women were employed in 2009 (Ferrao, 2015, para. 1). It is difficult to find a balance when there are some extra weights on the scale, and it is not surprising that many women simply do not try, settling for low-wage jobs or none at all.

I am not implying that everyone must be pursuing career opportunities, but this issue of unbalanced scales does exist. Given this tendency that remains typical in modern society, it is not surprising that diversity courses produce dissatisfactory results, and inequality persists: it simply begins at home.

Alonso-Almeida, M. (2014). Women (and mothers) in the workforce: Worldwide factors . Women’s Studies International Forum , 44 , 164-171. Web.

Ferrao, V. (2015). Paid Work . Web.

Freeman, S. (2015). For Working Women, A More Attainable Goal (If Their Families Will Allow It). Huffington Post . Web.

Kimura, D. (2016). Work and Life Balance “If We Are Not Happy Both in Work and out of Work, We Cannot Provide Happiness to Others” . Frontiers In Pediatrics , 4 , 1-2. Web.

Milan, A., Keown, L.-A., & Urquijo, C. R. (2015). Families, Living Arrangements and Unpaid Work . Web.

Zamon, R. (2015). The Gender Pay Gap In Canada Is Twice The Global Average. Huffington Post . Web.

• Based on the data from Catalyst Canada statistics (Zamon, 2015).
• See Alonso-Almeida (2014) and Kimura (2016) for more information.
• Based on official data from Statistics Canada (Milan et al., 2015).
• Based on the official data from Statistics Canada (Ferrao, 2015).
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, January 28). Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-in-the-workplace-gender-inequality/

"Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality." IvyPanda , 28 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/women-in-the-workplace-gender-inequality/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality'. 28 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality." January 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-in-the-workplace-gender-inequality/.

1. IvyPanda . "Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality." January 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-in-the-workplace-gender-inequality/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Women in the Workplace: Gender Inequality." January 28, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/women-in-the-workplace-gender-inequality/.

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What does gender equality look like today?

Date: Wednesday, 6 October 2021

Progress towards gender equality is looking bleak. But it doesn’t need to.

A new global analysis of progress on gender equality and women’s rights shows women and girls remain disproportionately affected by the socioeconomic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, struggling with disproportionately high job and livelihood losses, education disruptions and increased burdens of unpaid care work. Women’s health services, poorly funded even before the pandemic, faced major disruptions, undermining women’s sexual and reproductive health. And despite women’s central role in responding to COVID-19, including as front-line health workers, they are still largely bypassed for leadership positions they deserve.

UN Women’s latest report, together with UN DESA, Progress on the Sustainable Development Goals: The Gender Snapshot 2021 presents the latest data on gender equality across all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. The report highlights the progress made since 2015 but also the continued alarm over the COVID-19 pandemic, its immediate effect on women’s well-being and the threat it poses to future generations.

We’re breaking down some of the findings from the report, and calling for the action needed to accelerate progress.

The pandemic is making matters worse

One and a half years since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, the toll on the poorest and most vulnerable people remains devastating and disproportionate. The combined impact of conflict, extreme weather events and COVID-19 has deprived women and girls of even basic needs such as food security. Without urgent action to stem rising poverty, hunger and inequality, especially in countries affected by conflict and other acute forms of crisis, millions will continue to suffer.

A global goal by global goal reality check:

Goal 1. Poverty

In 2021, extreme poverty is on the rise and progress towards its elimination has reversed. An estimated 435 million women and girls globally are living in extreme poverty.

And yet we can change this .

Over 150 million women and girls could emerge from poverty by 2030 if governments implement a comprehensive strategy to improve access to education and family planning, achieve equal wages and extend social transfers.

Goal 2. Zero hunger

The global gender gap in food security has risen dramatically during the pandemic, with more women and girls going hungry. Women’s food insecurity levels were 10 per cent higher than men’s in 2020, compared with 6 per cent higher in 2019.

This trend can be reversed , including by supporting women small-scale producers, who typically earn far less than men, through increased funding, training and land rights reforms.

Goal 3. Good health and well-being

Disruptions in essential health services due to COVID-19 are taking a tragic toll on women and girls. In the first year of the pandemic, there were an estimated 1.4 million additional unintended pregnancies in lower and middle-income countries.

We need to do better .

Response to the pandemic must include prioritizing sexual and reproductive health services, ensuring they continue to operate safely now and after the pandemic is long over. In addition, more support is needed to ensure life-saving personal protection equipment, tests, oxygen and especially vaccines are available in rich and poor countries alike as well as to vulnerable population within countries.

Goal 4. Quality education

A year and a half into the pandemic, schools remain partially or fully closed in 42 per cent of the world’s countries and territories. School closures spell lost opportunities for girls and an increased risk of violence, exploitation and early marriage .

Governments can do more to protect girls education .

Measures focused specifically on supporting girls returning to school are urgently needed, including measures focused on girls from marginalized communities who are most at risk.

Goal 5. Gender equality

The pandemic has tested and even reversed progress in expanding women’s rights and opportunities. Reports of violence against women and girls, a “shadow” pandemic to COVID-19, are increasing in many parts of the world. COVID-19 is also intensifying women’s workload at home, forcing many to leave the labour force altogether.

Building forward differently and better will hinge on placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.

Goal 6. Clean water and sanitation

In 2018, nearly 2.3 billion people lived in water-stressed countries. Without safe drinking water, adequate sanitation and menstrual hygiene facilities, women and girls find it harder to lead safe, productive and healthy lives.

Change is possible .

Involve those most impacted in water management processes, including women. Women’s voices are often missing in water management processes. 

Goal 7. Affordable and clean energy

Increased demand for clean energy and low-carbon solutions is driving an unprecedented transformation of the energy sector. But women are being left out. Women hold only 32 per cent of renewable energy jobs.

We can do better .

Expose girls early on to STEM education, provide training and support to women entering the energy field, close the pay gap and increase women’s leadership in the energy sector.

Goal 8. Decent work and economic growth

The number of employed women declined by 54 million in 2020 and 45 million women left the labour market altogether. Women have suffered steeper job losses than men, along with increased unpaid care burdens at home.

We must do more to support women in the workforce .

Guarantee decent work for all, introduce labour laws/reforms, removing legal barriers for married women entering the workforce, support access to affordable/quality childcare.

Goal 9. Industry, innovation and infrastructure

The COVID-19 crisis has spurred striking achievements in medical research and innovation. Women’s contribution has been profound. But still only a little over a third of graduates in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field are female.

We can take action today.

 Quotas mandating that a proportion of research grants are awarded to women-led teams or teams that include women is one concrete way to support women researchers. 

Goal 10. Reduced inequalities

Limited progress for women is being eroded by the pandemic. Women facing multiple forms of discrimination, including women and girls with disabilities, migrant women, women discriminated against because of their race/ethnicity are especially affected.

Commit to end racism and discrimination in all its forms, invest in inclusive, universal, gender responsive social protection systems that support all women. 

Goal 11. Sustainable cities and communities

Globally, more than 1 billion people live in informal settlements and slums. Women and girls, often overrepresented in these densely populated areas, suffer from lack of access to basic water and sanitation, health care and transportation.

The needs of urban poor women must be prioritized .

Increase the provision of durable and adequate housing and equitable access to land; included women in urban planning and development processes.

Goal 12. Sustainable consumption and production; Goal 13. Climate action; Goal 14. Life below water; and Goal 15. Life on land

Women activists, scientists and researchers are working hard to solve the climate crisis but often without the same platforms as men to share their knowledge and skills. Only 29 per cent of featured speakers at international ocean science conferences are women.

 And yet we can change this .

Ensure women activists, scientists and researchers have equal voice, representation and access to forums where these issues are being discussed and debated. 

Goal 16. Peace, justice and strong institutions

The lack of women in decision-making limits the reach and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and other emergency recovery efforts. In conflict-affected countries, 18.9 per cent of parliamentary seats are held by women, much lower than the global average of 25.6 per cent.

This is unacceptable .

It's time for women to have an equal share of power and decision-making at all levels.

Goal 17. Global partnerships for the goals

There are just 9 years left to achieve the Global Goals by 2030, and gender equality cuts across all 17 of them. With COVID-19 slowing progress on women's rights, the time to act is now.

Looking ahead

As it stands today, only one indicator under the global goal for gender equality (SDG5) is ‘close to target’: proportion of seats held by women in local government. In other areas critical to women’s empowerment, equality in time spent on unpaid care and domestic work and decision making regarding sexual and reproductive health the world is far from target. Without a bold commitment to accelerate progress, the global community will fail to achieve gender equality. Building forward differently and better will require placing women and girls at the centre of all aspects of response and recovery, including through gender-responsive laws, policies and budgeting.

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Report | Wages, Incomes, and Wealth

“Women’s work” and the gender pay gap : How discrimination, societal norms, and other forces affect women’s occupational choices—and their pay

Report • By Jessica Schieder and Elise Gould • July 20, 2016

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What this report finds: Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men—despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment. Too often it is assumed that this pay gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves often affected by gender bias. For example, by the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

Why it matters, and how to fix it: The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board by suppressing their earnings and making it harder to balance work and family. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

Introduction and key findings

Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men (Hegewisch and DuMonthier 2016). This is despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment.

Critics of this widely cited statistic claim it is not solid evidence of economic discrimination against women because it is unadjusted for characteristics other than gender that can affect earnings, such as years of education, work experience, and location. Many of these skeptics contend that the gender wage gap is driven not by discrimination, but instead by voluntary choices made by men and women—particularly the choice of occupation in which they work. And occupational differences certainly do matter—occupation and industry account for about half of the overall gender wage gap (Blau and Kahn 2016).

To isolate the impact of overt gender discrimination—such as a woman being paid less than her male coworker for doing the exact same job—it is typical to adjust for such characteristics. But these adjusted statistics can radically understate the potential for gender discrimination to suppress women’s earnings. This is because gender discrimination does not occur only in employers’ pay-setting practices. It can happen at every stage leading to women’s labor market outcomes.

Take one key example: occupation of employment. While controlling for occupation does indeed reduce the measured gender wage gap, the sorting of genders into different occupations can itself be driven (at least in part) by discrimination. By the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

This paper explains why gender occupational sorting is itself part of the discrimination women face, examines how this sorting is shaped by societal and economic forces, and explains that gender pay gaps are present even  within  occupations.

Key points include:

• Gender pay gaps within occupations persist, even after accounting for years of experience, hours worked, and education.
• Decisions women make about their occupation and career do not happen in a vacuum—they are also shaped by society.
• The long hours required by the highest-paid occupations can make it difficult for women to succeed, since women tend to shoulder the majority of family caretaking duties.
• Many professions dominated by women are low paid, and professions that have become female-dominated have become lower paid.

This report examines wages on an hourly basis. Technically, this is an adjusted gender wage gap measure. As opposed to weekly or annual earnings, hourly earnings ignore the fact that men work more hours on average throughout a week or year. Thus, the hourly gender wage gap is a bit smaller than the 79 percent figure cited earlier. This minor adjustment allows for a comparison of women’s and men’s wages without assuming that women, who still shoulder a disproportionate amount of responsibilities at home, would be able or willing to work as many hours as their male counterparts. Examining the hourly gender wage gap allows for a more thorough conversation about how many factors create the wage gap women experience when they cash their paychecks.

Within-occupation gender wage gaps are large—and persist after controlling for education and other factors

Those keen on downplaying the gender wage gap often claim women voluntarily choose lower pay by disproportionately going into stereotypically female professions or by seeking out lower-paid positions. But even when men and women work in the same occupation—whether as hairdressers, cosmetologists, nurses, teachers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, or construction workers—men make more, on average, than women (CPS microdata 2011–2015).

As a thought experiment, imagine if women’s occupational distribution mirrored men’s. For example, if 2 percent of men are carpenters, suppose 2 percent of women become carpenters. What would this do to the wage gap? After controlling for differences in education and preferences for full-time work, Goldin (2014) finds that 32 percent of the gender pay gap would be closed.

However, leaving women in their current occupations and just closing the gaps between women and their male counterparts within occupations (e.g., if male and female civil engineers made the same per hour) would close 68 percent of the gap. This means examining why waiters and waitresses, for example, with the same education and work experience do not make the same amount per hour. To quote Goldin:

Another way to measure the effect of occupation is to ask what would happen to the aggregate gender gap if one equalized earnings by gender within each occupation or, instead, evened their proportions for each occupation. The answer is that equalizing earnings within each occupation matters far more than equalizing the proportions by each occupation. (Goldin 2014)

This phenomenon is not limited to low-skilled occupations, and women cannot educate themselves out of the gender wage gap (at least in terms of broad formal credentials). Indeed, women’s educational attainment outpaces men’s; 37.0 percent of women have a college or advanced degree, as compared with 32.5 percent of men (CPS ORG 2015). Furthermore, women earn less per hour at every education level, on average. As shown in Figure A , men with a college degree make more per hour than women with an advanced degree. Likewise, men with a high school degree make more per hour than women who attended college but did not graduate. Even straight out of college, women make $4 less per hour than men—a gap that has grown since 2000 (Kroeger, Cooke, and Gould 2016).

Women earn less than men at every education level : Average hourly wages, by gender and education, 2015

The data below can be saved or copied directly into Excel.

The data underlying the figure.

Source :  EPI analysis of Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata

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Steering women to certain educational and professional career paths—as well as outright discrimination—can lead to different occupational outcomes

The gender pay gap is driven at least in part by the cumulative impact of many instances over the course of women’s lives when they are treated differently than their male peers. Girls can be steered toward gender-normative careers from a very early age. At a time when parental influence is key, parents are often more likely to expect their sons, rather than their daughters, to work in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields, even when their daughters perform at the same level in mathematics (OECD 2015).

Expectations can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 study found third-grade girls rated their math competency scores much lower than boys’, even when these girls’ performance did not lag behind that of their male counterparts (Herbert and Stipek 2005). Similarly, in states where people were more likely to say that “women [are] better suited for home” and “math is for boys,” girls were more likely to have lower math scores and higher reading scores (Pope and Sydnor 2010). While this only establishes a correlation, there is no reason to believe gender aptitude in reading and math would otherwise be related to geography. Parental expectations can impact performance by influencing their children’s self-confidence because self-confidence is associated with higher test scores (OECD 2015).

By the time young women graduate from high school and enter college, they already evaluate their career opportunities differently than young men do. Figure B shows college freshmen’s intended majors by gender. While women have increasingly gone into medical school and continue to dominate the nursing field, women are significantly less likely to arrive at college interested in engineering, computer science, or physics, as compared with their male counterparts.

Women arrive at college less interested in STEM fields as compared with their male counterparts : Intent of first-year college students to major in select STEM fields, by gender, 2014

Source:  EPI adaptation of Corbett and Hill (2015) analysis of Eagan et al. (2014)

These decisions to allow doors to lucrative job opportunities to close do not take place in a vacuum. Many factors might make it difficult for a young woman to see herself working in computer science or a similarly remunerative field. A particularly depressing example is the well-publicized evidence of sexism in the tech industry (Hewlett et al. 2008). Unfortunately, tech isn’t the only STEM field with this problem.

Young women may be discouraged from certain career paths because of industry culture. Even for women who go against the grain and pursue STEM careers, if employers in the industry foster an environment hostile to women’s participation, the share of women in these occupations will be limited. One 2008 study found that “52 percent of highly qualified females working for SET [science, technology, and engineering] companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures” (Hewlett et al. 2008). Extreme job pressures are defined as working more than 100 hours per week, needing to be available 24/7, working with or managing colleagues in multiple time zones, and feeling pressure to put in extensive face time (Hewlett et al. 2008). As compared with men, more than twice as many women engage in housework on a daily basis, and women spend twice as much time caring for other household members (BLS 2015). Because of these cultural norms, women are less likely to be able to handle these extreme work pressures. In addition, 63 percent of women in SET workplaces experience sexual harassment (Hewlett et al. 2008). To make matters worse, 51 percent abandon their SET training when they quit their job. All of these factors play a role in steering women away from highly paid occupations, particularly in STEM fields.

The long hours required for some of the highest-paid occupations are incompatible with historically gendered family responsibilities

Those seeking to downplay the gender wage gap often suggest that women who work hard enough and reach the apex of their field will see the full fruits of their labor. In reality, however, the gender wage gap is wider for those with higher earnings. Women in the top 95th percentile of the wage distribution experience a much larger gender pay gap than lower-paid women.

Again, this large gender pay gap between the highest earners is partially driven by gender bias. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin (2014) posits that high-wage firms have adopted pay-setting practices that disproportionately reward individuals who work very long and very particular hours. This means that even if men and women are equally productive per hour, individuals—disproportionately men—who are more likely to work excessive hours and be available at particular off-hours are paid more highly (Hersch and Stratton 2002; Goldin 2014; Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor 1996).

It is clear why this disadvantages women. Social norms and expectations exert pressure on women to bear a disproportionate share of domestic work—particularly caring for children and elderly parents. This can make it particularly difficult for them (relative to their male peers) to be available at the drop of a hat on a Sunday evening after working a 60-hour week. To the extent that availability to work long and particular hours makes the difference between getting a promotion or seeing one’s career stagnate, women are disadvantaged.

And this disadvantage is reinforced in a vicious circle. Imagine a household where both members of a male–female couple have similarly demanding jobs. One partner’s career is likely to be prioritized if a grandparent is hospitalized or a child’s babysitter is sick. If the past history of employer pay-setting practices that disadvantage women has led to an already-existing gender wage gap for this couple, it can be seen as “rational” for this couple to prioritize the male’s career. This perpetuates the expectation that it always makes sense for women to shoulder the majority of domestic work, and further exacerbates the gender wage gap.

Female-dominated professions pay less, but it’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon

Many women do go into low-paying female-dominated industries. Home health aides, for example, are much more likely to be women. But research suggests that women are making a logical choice, given existing constraints . This is because they will likely not see a significant pay boost if they try to buck convention and enter male-dominated occupations. Exceptions certainly exist, particularly in the civil service or in unionized workplaces (Anderson, Hegewisch, and Hayes 2015). However, if women in female-dominated occupations were to go into male-dominated occupations, they would often have similar or lower expected wages as compared with their female counterparts in female-dominated occupations (Pitts 2002). Thus, many women going into female-dominated occupations are actually situating themselves to earn higher wages. These choices thereby maximize their wages (Pitts 2002). This holds true for all categories of women except for the most educated, who are more likely to earn more in a male profession than a female profession. There is also evidence that if it becomes more lucrative for women to move into male-dominated professions, women will do exactly this (Pitts 2002). In short, occupational choice is heavily influenced by existing constraints based on gender and pay-setting across occupations.

To make matters worse, when women increasingly enter a field, the average pay in that field tends to decline, relative to other fields. Levanon, England, and Allison (2009) found that when more women entered an industry, the relative pay of that industry 10 years later was lower. Specifically, they found evidence of devaluation—meaning the proportion of women in an occupation impacts the pay for that industry because work done by women is devalued.

Computer programming is an example of a field that has shifted from being a very mixed profession, often associated with secretarial work in the past, to being a lucrative, male-dominated profession (Miller 2016; Oldenziel 1999). While computer programming has evolved into a more technically demanding occupation in recent decades, there is no skills-based reason why the field needed to become such a male-dominated profession. When men flooded the field, pay went up. In contrast, when women became park rangers, pay in that field went down (Miller 2016).

Further compounding this problem is that many professions where pay is set too low by market forces, but which clearly provide enormous social benefits when done well, are female-dominated. Key examples range from home health workers who care for seniors, to teachers and child care workers who educate today’s children. If closing gender pay differences can help boost pay and professionalism in these key sectors, it would be a huge win for the economy and society.

The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board. Too often it is assumed that this gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves affected by gender bias. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

— This paper was made possible by a grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

— The authors wish to thank Josh Bivens, Barbara Gault, and Heidi Hartman for their helpful comments.

About the authors

Jessica Schieder joined EPI in 2015. As a research assistant, she supports the research of EPI’s economists on topics such as the labor market, wage trends, executive compensation, and inequality. Prior to joining EPI, Jessica worked at the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) as a revenue and spending policies analyst, where she examined how budget and tax policy decisions impact working families. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international political economy from Georgetown University.

Elise Gould , senior economist, joined EPI in 2003. Her research areas include wages, poverty, economic mobility, and health care. She is a co-author of The State of Working America, 12th Edition . In the past, she has authored a chapter on health in The State of Working America 2008/09; co-authored a book on health insurance coverage in retirement; published in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education ,  Challenge Magazine , and Tax Notes; and written for academic journals including Health Economics , Health Affairs, Journal of Aging and Social Policy, Risk Management & Insurance Review, Environmental Health Perspectives , and International Journal of Health Services . She holds a master’s in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Anderson, Julie, Ariane Hegewisch, and Jeff Hayes 2015. The Union Advantage for Women . Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn 2016. The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations . National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 21913.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2015. American Time Use Survey public data series. U.S. Census Bureau.

Corbett, Christianne, and Catherine Hill. 2015. Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing . American Association of University Women (AAUW).

Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata (CPS ORG). 2011–2015. Survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics [ machine-readable microdata file ]. U.S. Census Bureau.

Goldin, Claudia. 2014. “ A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter .” American Economic Review, vol. 104, no. 4, 1091–1119.

Hegewisch, Ariane, and Asha DuMonthier. 2016. The Gender Wage Gap: 2015; Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity . Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Herbert, Jennifer, and Deborah Stipek. 2005. “The Emergence of Gender Difference in Children’s Perceptions of Their Academic Competence.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology , vol. 26, no. 3, 276–295.

Hersch, Joni, and Leslie S. Stratton. 2002. “ Housework and Wages .” The Journal of Human Resources , vol. 37, no. 1, 217–229.

Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, Carolyn Buck Luce, Lisa J. Servon, Laura Sherbin, Peggy Shiller, Eytan Sosnovich, and Karen Sumberg. 2008. The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology . Harvard Business Review.

Kroeger, Teresa, Tanyell Cooke, and Elise Gould. 2016.  The Class of 2016: The Labor Market Is Still Far from Ideal for Young Graduates . Economic Policy Institute.

Landers, Renee M., James B. Rebitzer, and Lowell J. Taylor. 1996. “ Rat Race Redux: Adverse Selection in the Determination of Work Hours in Law Firms .” American Economic Review , vol. 86, no. 3, 329–348.

Levanon, Asaf, Paula England, and Paul Allison. 2009. “Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950-2000 U.S. Census Data.” Social Forces, vol. 88, no. 2, 865–892.

Miller, Claire Cain. 2016. “As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops.” New York Times , March 18.

Oldenziel, Ruth. 1999. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2015. The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behavior, Confidence .

Pitts, Melissa M. 2002. Why Choose Women’s Work If It Pays Less? A Structural Model of Occupational Choice. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Working Paper 2002-30.

Pope, Devin G., and Justin R. Sydnor. 2010. “ Geographic Variation in the Gender Differences in Test Scores .” Journal of Economic Perspectives , vol. 24, no. 2, 95–108.

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Work is Worship seems to be gone now a day because of the reason of stress. Stress is a crucial word in organization in the present scenario. Stress is a fundamental component of life, the modern world which is to be a world of achievements and world of stress. The main objective of the study was to understand the problems and issues faced by working women in India. The objectives also included identifying the key socioeconomic attributes contributing to women's status, safety and security, and to study women's involvement in various activities/ organizations for improving of family, community and society. Women have been treated as second class citizen since time immemorial. Discrimination faced by women at the workplace includes unequal pay for equal work, sexual harassment, lack of adequate sanitation facilities, unsafe roads and transportation, denial of promotions, inadequate work-life balance and so on. Hardship of woman in each and every phase of life is always tough to classify as she is the only existence in the world, is facing such kind of changes in her life like birth as a girl child, becoming wife and finally becoming mother. The results of the study showed that different age group of working women have different kinds of problems and challenges and different categories as married, single, divorcee, single parent, separated, have different issues at stake in the workplace. Some problems are definitely common, like mental and physical stress, lack of proper balance between employment and family care, unfair treatment in the workplace, stressful life and work place discrimination etc. But some challenges are age or category specific, like prejudiced and stereo typed thinking, safety and security issues, ego hassles with colleagues, and problem of glass ceiling etc. The main intention of this paper is to focus on stress and challenges faced by working women in today's era and put there solution.

DR YOGENDRA MANN

In the contemporary world, women no longer lag behind in terms of career. They are keeping themselves shoulder to shoulder with opposite sex. However, even today they are expected to do multi tasking. There is no profession today where women are not employed. However, it is true that working women have to face problems by virtue of their sex viz. mental and sexual harassment. India's economy has undergone a substantial transformation since the country's independence in 1947. Agriculture now accounts for only one-third of the gross domestic product (GDP), down from 59 percent in 1950, and a wide range of modern industries and support services now exist. Since the times immemorial, worth of the work done or services rendered by women has not been recognized. India is a multifaceted society where no generalization could apply to the entire nation's various regional, religious, social, and economic groups. Although most women in India work and contribute to the economy in one form or another, much of their work is not documented or accounted for in official statistics. Women plow fields and harvest crops while working on farms, women weave and make handicrafts while working in household industries, women sell food and gather wood while working in the informal sector. In order to combat the problems being faced by the women , the Government of India had ushered in the new millennium by declaring the year 2001 as 'Women's Empowerment Year' to focus on a vision 'where women are equal partners like men'. The most common explanation of 'women's empowerment' is the ability to exercise full control over one's actions. The last decades have witnessed some basic changes in the status and role of women in our society. There has been shift in policy approaches from the concept of 'welfare' in the seventies to 'development' in the eighties and now to 'empowerment' in the nineties. There is no doubt that development of women has always been the central focus of planning since Independence. Empowerment is a major step in this direction but it has to be seen in a relational context. A clear vision is needed to remove the obstacles to the path of women's emancipation both from the government and women themselves. Efforts should be directed towards all round development of each and every section of Indian women by giving them their due share.

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Essay On Problems Faced by Working Women

This essay explores the problems faced by working women in today’s society. It examines the issues such as wage discrimination, lack of career advancement opportunities, and the pressures of balancing family life and work. It highlights the need for greater support and recognition of working women’s efforts and contribution to the economy.

Nowadays, more and more women are entering the workforce. While this is a positive trend, it has also come with its own set of challenges. Working women face many problems which can be both physical and mental. One of the biggest issues facing working women is the lack of equal pay. Even though laws exist to protect women from earning less than men, they often don’t get the same salary for the same job. This can be very discouraging and can lead to a feeling of not being valued. Another problem is the lack of supportive policies. Many companies don’t have policies that are designed to help working mothers. This can make it difficult for women to balance their work and family life. Working women also face the problem of sexual harassment in the workplace. Despite laws against it, many women have to deal with inappropriate comments or behaviors from male co-workers. This can be very damaging to the morale of working women and can lead to a feeling of insecurity. Finally, many women feel that they are not taken seriously in the workplace. In many cases, their ideas and opinions are not given the same consideration as those of their male counterparts. This can lead to frustration and a lack of motivation. These are just some of the problems faced by working women. It is important to recognize these issues and take steps to address them. This will help make the workplace a more equitable and supportive place for everyone.

FAQs Related To Essay On Problems Faced by Working Women

1. what are problems faced by working women.

Working women face a variety of challenges in the workplace, many of which are sadly still present today. These include the gender pay gap, where women are commonly paid less than men for the same job; the glass ceiling, limiting the advancement of women in certain organizations; and the lack of flexible working options that make it difficult for women to balance family and work responsibilities.

2. What advantages do working women have over non-working women?

Working women have several advantages over non-working women, including greater financial independence, improved job security, and access to better healthcare benefits. Financially, working women are able to secure their own income and are less reliant on their partner or family. Working women thus have a number of advantages over non-working women that can lead to improved health and financial stability.

3. What are the most common career choices for working women?

The most common career choices for working women vary greatly depending on their individual interests and skills. Some of the most common options for women include healthcare professions such as nursing, teaching, and social work; business and finance roles such as accounting and marketing; and technology-related positions such as software engineering and web design.

4. What are the legal protections for working women?

Working women have a number of legal protections in the workplace, both on the federal and state level. On the federal level, women are protected from discrimination by the Equal Pay Act, the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, and the Pregnancy Discrimination Act. These laws prohibit discrimination in the workplace based on gender, race, religion, national origin, and pregnancy status. Working women have the legal right to a safe and fair working environment, and these laws help ensure that.

5. What are the common obstacles faced by working women in the workplace?

The working world can be a difficult environment for women to navigate. Women face a variety of obstacles in the workplace, ranging from pay disparities to gender discrimination to a lack of access to top positions. Women are often seen as less competent than men, leading to fewer opportunities for career advancement or promotions.

6. What tips can working women use to promote their career growth?

Working women can use many different tips to promote their career growth and success. First, it’s important to network within your field and cultivate relationships with colleagues and mentors. Professional organizations and conferences can be great resources for networking and staying up-to-date on trends and developments in your field. Second, setting goals and having a clear plan for how to achieve them can help working women stay focused and on track.

7. What strategies can working women use to combat workplace sexism?

Working women can use a variety of strategies to combat workplace sexism. Speaking up for yourself and asserting your rights is an important step in fighting sexism. Building relationships with other women in the workplace and forming a supportive network can provide a platform for sharing experiences and advocating for each other.

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Essay on “Working Women Problems” Complete Essay for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Working Women Problems

POINTS TO DEVELOP 1. Working women are common but their problems have grown.

• Taking just one sector of working women, i.e., urban women in paid employment, there are several problems.
• Problem of getting work one wants.
• Remuneration unequal
• Women workers are expected to work harder
• working mothers have greater problems.
• sexual harassment faced by working women.
• most of the problems are rooted in the social attitude to the position of women..

10.social attitudes must be changed to give women a better deal.

NO eyebrows are raised today at the thought of women going out to work. Plenty of lip service is paid to the idea of equality of men and women. And yet no one would deny that working women. It may be relevant to say here, that when we are talking of working women, we are referring to those who are in paid employment.

          Social attitude to the role of women lags much behind the law. This attitude which considers women fit for certain jobs and not others colors  those who recruit employees. Thus, women find employment easily as nurses, doctors, teachers – the caring and nurturing sectors; as clerks and secretaries or in assembling jobs – the routine submissive sectors. But even if well qualified women engineers or managers or geologists are available, preference will be given to a male of equal qualifications. A gender bias creates  an obstacle at the recruitment stage itself.

          Then comes remuneration. Once again, the law proclaims equality, but it is seldom put into practice. The inbuilt conviction that women are capable of less work than men or are less efficient than men governs this injustice of unequal remuneration for the same job. In the Republic of Korea women’s wages are  only 47 per cent of what men get. In Japan they get only 51 per cent of what their male counterparts receive. And in India, too, there is widespread discrimination in this respect.

          The age old belief of male superiority over women creates several hurdles for women at their palace of work. Women on the  way up the corporate ladder discover that they must be much better than their male colleagues to reach the top. Once at the top, male colleagues and subordinates often expect much greater expertise and efficiency from a woman boss than from a male boss. What is worse, conditioned by social and psychological tradition,  women colleagues, too, do not lend support to their own sex. Working in such conditions inevitably puts a much greater strain on women than what men experience.

          These problems tend to make women less eager to progress in their careers. Indeed , many of them choose less demanding jobs for which they may even be over-qualifies. But such compromises do not work well for many, who become frustrated at jobs, which do not suit their talents, or listless because of the routine drudgery.

          A woman’s work is not merely confined to paid employment. She has to, almost always , shoulder the burden of household chores as well, thankless unpaid work which could easily be put under the maintenance of essential services act.

          Perhaps the problems would appear less burdensome if at least social recognition was given to the invisible input of women in employment. But who cares to notice the routine work which many a woman does as a matter of course- cooking, cleaning, washing, rearing  children and looking after the ill and elderly? If it is noticed, it is dismissed carelessly as a part of her “duty”. While the man can come home from a taxing day at office and relax with  a cup of tea and the newspaper or television, a woman is compelled to merely switch over from one kind of work to another on reaching home.

          It is a much more hectic schedule for a working mother. Besides the regular housework, she is unfairly saddled with the entire responsibility of bringing up the children. In the circumstances, she has to face a high state of nervous tension and worry besides the physical stress.

          A woman could still bear up with these problems if she had control over the money she earns. But in most families even now her salary is handed over in toto to the father, husband or in-laws. So a basic motive for seeking employment- getting economic independence is nullified in many a woman’s case.

          Problems because of gender bias beset women in the industrial sector too. Technological advancement invariably  results in retrenchment of women employees. No one thinks of upgrading their skills. Maternity leave is seldom given; it is much easier to terminate the women’s employment and hire someone else. And trade unions do little to ameliorate the lot of women workers. Women’s issue do not occur on the priority list of these labour organizations.

          Women going to work are often subject to sexual harassment. Public transport systems are overcrowded and men take advantage of the circumstances to physically harass women. Places of work are little better. Colleagues offer unwanted attention which can still be shaken off, but a woman is placed in a predicament if the higher officer demands sexual favors. If refused, the boss can easily take it out on the woman in other ways to make life miserable for her. On the other hand, if a woman is praised for her work or promoted on merit, her colleagues do not hesitate to attribute it to sexual favors conferred by her on the boss! The psychological pressure of all this can easily lead to a woman’s quitting her job.

          In small or big cities, the working woman finds it difficult to get suitable accommodation. House owners are   suspicious and hesitant to rent to young(even old) women on their own. Hostels are rare and not enough to meet the demand. So the woman is forced to seek nontransferable jobs ans is thus restricted in her choice.

          Most of the problems that beset working women are in reality, rooted in the social perspective of the position  of women. Traditionally men are seen as the bread-winners and the women as the house-keepers, child-bearers and child-rearers. This typecast role model continues to put obstacles before the before the working women.

          The law too has hitherto served the interests on one gender(male) at the immense cost and disadvantage of the other(female). The framers, enforcers, and executors of the law are by and large men, and women have little clout to influence the the legal process, which has done pretty little to address even the basic issues pertaining to employed women. Besides, the number of working women is still not significant enough to be able to change their working conditions.

          A fundamental change is required in the attitudes of  the employers, policy-makers, family members and others relatives, and the public at large. Marriage, pregnancy and child bearing / rearing should be regarded by employers as a woman’s important but not her only functions. The policy makers must consider a woman as a distinct personality, not as an appendage of the male relatives. The family members, male or female, must share the indoor work of a woman if she works outdoors like a male. The public must regard and respect working women as significant contributors to the well-being and prosperity of the society. We all must recognize that providing good child care is a national responsibility if the women who work are short of time.

          Flexible working hours would go a long way in easing the burden on the employed women. The system of paternity leave, paid or unpaid, can be introduced so that the father can share the household tasks and parent the new- born babe. There is an urgent need to evolve a comprehensive national maternity and child –care policy incorporating the needs of working women in both the organized or unorganized – industrial , agricultural or service –sectors. Problems of harassment at the workplace need to be seriously addressed. The offenders should be brought to book at the earliest. All efforts should be directed towards making the work environment  congenial for the female employees.

          In the final analysis, a clear-cut state policy, even if it cannot, change attitudes and social perceptions overnight, can play a vital role in influencing and molding social opinions. The important aspect about state policy is that since it has the authority of law and sanction of the state behind it, it can change practices even if it takes time to change attitudes.

          Social attitudes sometimes lag behind social realities in a period of transition. The roles of the primary care-giver in a family need to be redefined to include male members. If the social superstructure does not reflect the current needs then it has to be changed. Perhaps it is time for a few determined pushes to take the first step of reconstructing social structures so that they address modern needs. 

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Home — Essay Samples — Geography & Travel — India — Working women in India

Working Women in India

• Categories: India

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Words: 673 |

Published: Jan 15, 2019

Words: 673 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

• Acceptance As Working Professionals
• Balancing Work-Family Life
• Travelling For Work Is Not Acceptable
• Safety Of Working Women
• Unequal Pay

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The Case for Marrying an Older Man

A woman’s life is all work and little rest. an age gap relationship can help..

In the summer, in the south of France, my husband and I like to play, rather badly, the lottery. We take long, scorching walks to the village — gratuitous beauty, gratuitous heat — kicking up dust and languid debates over how we’d spend such an influx. I purchase scratch-offs, jackpot tickets, scraping the former with euro coins in restaurants too fine for that. I never cash them in, nor do I check the winning numbers. For I already won something like the lotto, with its gifts and its curses, when he married me.

He is ten years older than I am. I chose him on purpose, not by chance. As far as life decisions go, on balance, I recommend it.

When I was 20 and a junior at Harvard College, a series of great ironies began to mock me. I could study all I wanted, prove myself as exceptional as I liked, and still my fiercest advantage remained so universal it deflated my other plans. My youth. The newness of my face and body. Compellingly effortless; cruelly fleeting. I shared it with the average, idle young woman shrugging down the street. The thought, when it descended on me, jolted my perspective, the way a falling leaf can make you look up: I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early.

So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I could not understand why my female classmates did not join me, given their intelligence. Each time I reconsidered the project, it struck me as more reasonable. Why ignore our youth when it amounted to a superpower? Why assume the burdens of womanhood, its too-quick-to-vanish upper hand, but not its brief benefits at least? Perhaps it came easier to avoid the topic wholesale than to accept that women really do have a tragically short window of power, and reason enough to take advantage of that fact while they can. As for me, I liked history, Victorian novels, knew of imminent female pitfalls from all the books I’d read: vampiric boyfriends; labor, at the office and in the hospital, expected simultaneously; a decline in status as we aged, like a looming eclipse. I’d have disliked being called calculating, but I had, like all women, a calculator in my head. I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we really ought to have been preparing.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist , frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened. I resented the callow boys in my class, who lusted after a particular, socially sanctioned type on campus: thin and sexless, emotionally detached and socially connected, the opposite of me. Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later. A second one, where I discovered he was a person, potentially my favorite kind: funny, clear-eyed, brilliant, on intimate terms with the universe.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies. Not him. In those early days, I spoke fondly of my family, stocked the fridge with his favorite pasta, folded his clothes more neatly than I ever have since. I wrote his mother a thank-you note for hosting me in his native France, something befitting a daughter-in-law. It worked; I meant it. After graduation and my fellowship at Oxford, I stayed in Europe for his career and married him at 23.

Of course I just fell in love. Romances have a setting; I had only intervened to place myself well. Mainly, I spotted the precise trouble of being a woman ahead of time, tried to surf it instead of letting it drown me on principle. I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal , and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The reception of a particular age-gap relationship depends on its obviousness. The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one? Would I take it? He is older. Income rises with age, so we assume he has money, at least relative to her; at minimum, more connections and experience. She has supple skin. Energy. Sex. Maybe she gets a Birkin. Maybe he gets a baby long after his prime. The sight of their entwined hands throws a lucid light on the calculations each of us makes, in love, to varying degrees of denial. You could get married in the most romantic place in the world, like I did, and you would still have to sign a contract.

Twenty and 30 is not like 30 and 40; some freshness to my features back then, some clumsiness in my bearing, warped our decade, in the eyes of others, to an uncrossable gulf. Perhaps this explains the anger we felt directed at us at the start of our relationship. People seemed to take us very, very personally. I recall a hellish car ride with a friend of his who began to castigate me in the backseat, in tones so low that only I could hear him. He told me, You wanted a rich boyfriend. You chased and snuck into parties . He spared me the insult of gold digger, but he drew, with other words, the outline for it. Most offended were the single older women, my husband’s classmates. They discussed me in the bathroom at parties when I was in the stall. What does he see in her? What do they talk about? They were concerned about me. They wielded their concern like a bludgeon. They paraphrased without meaning to my favorite line from Nabokov’s Lolita : “You took advantage of my disadvantage,” suspecting me of some weakness he in turn mined. It did not disturb them, so much, to consider that all relationships were trades. The trouble was the trade I’d made struck them as a bad one.

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

When I think of same-age, same-stage relationships, what I tend to picture is a woman who is doing too much for too little.

I’m 27 now, and most women my age have “partners.” These days, girls become partners quite young. A partner is supposed to be a modern answer to the oppression of marriage, the terrible feeling of someone looming over you, head of a household to which you can only ever be the neck. Necks are vulnerable. The problem with a partner, however, is if you’re equal in all things, you compromise in all things. And men are too skilled at taking .

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

I find a post on Reddit where five thousand men try to define “ a woman’s touch .” They describe raised flower beds, blankets, photographs of their loved ones, not hers, sprouting on the mantel overnight. Candles, coasters, side tables. Someone remembering to take lint out of the dryer. To give compliments. I wonder what these women are getting back. I imagine them like Cinderella’s mice, scurrying around, their sole proof of life their contributions to a more central character. On occasion I meet a nice couple, who grew up together. They know each other with a fraternalism tender and alien to me.  But I think of all my friends who failed at this, were failed at this, and I think, No, absolutely not, too risky . Riskier, sometimes, than an age gap.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl. If they break up, she will never see that couch again, and he will forget its story. I tell her when I visit because I like her, though I get in trouble for it: You shouldn’t do so much for him, not for someone who is not stuck with you, not for any boy, not even for my wonderful brother.

Too much work had left my husband, by 30, jaded and uninspired. He’d burned out — but I could reenchant things. I danced at restaurants when they played a song I liked. I turned grocery shopping into an adventure, pleased by what I provided. Ambitious, hungry, he needed someone smart enough to sustain his interest, but flexible enough in her habits to build them around his hours. I could. I do: read myself occupied, make myself free, materialize beside him when he calls for me. In exchange, I left a lucrative but deadening spreadsheet job to write full-time, without having to live like a writer. I learned to cook, a little, and decorate, somewhat poorly. Mostly I get to read, to walk central London and Miami and think in delicious circles, to work hard, when necessary, for free, and write stories for far less than minimum wage when I tally all the hours I take to write them.

At 20, I had felt daunted by the project of becoming my ideal self, couldn’t imagine doing it in tandem with someone, two raw lumps of clay trying to mold one another and only sullying things worse. I’d go on dates with boys my age and leave with the impression they were telling me not about themselves but some person who didn’t exist yet and on whom I was meant to bet regardless. My husband struck me instead as so finished, formed. Analyzable for compatibility. He bore the traces of other women who’d improved him, small but crucial basics like use a coaster ; listen, don’t give advice. Young egos mellow into patience and generosity.

My husband isn’t my partner. He’s my mentor, my lover, and, only in certain contexts, my friend. I’ll never forget it, how he showed me around our first place like he was introducing me to myself: This is the wine you’ll drink, where you’ll keep your clothes, we vacation here, this is the other language we’ll speak, you’ll learn it, and I did. Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on. I moved into his flat, onto his level, drag and drop, cleaner thrice a week, bills automatic. By opting out of partnership in my 20s, I granted myself a kind of compartmentalized, liberating selfishness none of my friends have managed. I am the work in progress, the party we worry about, a surprising dominance. When I searched for my first job, at 21, we combined our efforts, for my sake. He had wisdom to impart, contacts with whom he arranged coffees; we spent an afternoon, laughing, drawing up earnest lists of my pros and cons (highly sociable; sloppy math). Meanwhile, I took calls from a dear friend who had a boyfriend her age. Both savagely ambitious, hyperclose and entwined in each other’s projects. If each was a start-up , the other was the first hire, an intense dedication I found riveting. Yet every time she called me, I hung up with the distinct feeling that too much was happening at the same time: both learning to please a boss; to forge more adult relationships with their families; to pay bills and taxes and hang prints on the wall. Neither had any advice to give and certainly no stability. I pictured a three-legged race, two people tied together and hobbling toward every milestone.

I don’t fool myself. My marriage has its cons. There are only so many times one can say “thank you” — for splendid scenes, fine dinners — before the phrase starts to grate. I live in an apartment whose rent he pays and that shapes the freedom with which I can ever be angry with him. He doesn’t have to hold it over my head. It just floats there, complicating usual shorthands to explain dissatisfaction like, You aren’t being supportive lately . It’s a Frenchism to say, “Take a decision,” and from time to time I joke: from whom? Occasionally I find myself in some fabulous country at some fabulous party and I think what a long way I have traveled, like a lucky cloud, and it is frightening to think of oneself as vapor.

Mostly I worry that if he ever betrayed me and I had to move on, I would survive, but would find in my humor, preferences, the way I make coffee or the bed nothing that he did not teach, change, mold, recompose, stamp with his initials, the way Renaissance painters hid in their paintings their faces among a crowd. I wonder if when they looked at their paintings, they saw their own faces first. But this is the wrong question, if our aim is happiness. Like the other question on which I’m expected to dwell: Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself? I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.

To be a woman is to race against the clock, in several ways, until there is nothing left to be but run ragged.

We try to put it off, but it will hit us at some point: that we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone. A woman at 20 rarely has to earn her welcome; a boy at 20 will be turned away at the door. A woman at 30 may find a younger woman has taken her seat; a man at 30 will have invited her. I think back to the women in the bathroom, my husband’s classmates. What was my relationship if not an inconvertible sign of this unfairness? What was I doing, in marrying older, if not endorsing it? I had taken advantage of their disadvantage. I had preempted my own. After all, principled women are meant to defy unfairness, to show some integrity or denial, not plan around it, like I had. These were driven women, successful, beautiful, capable. I merely possessed the one thing they had already lost. In getting ahead of the problem, had I pushed them down? If I hadn’t, would it really have made any difference?

When we decided we wanted to be equal to men, we got on men’s time. We worked when they worked, retired when they retired, had to squeeze pregnancy, children, menopause somewhere impossibly in the margins. I have a friend, in her late 20s, who wears a mood ring; these days it is often red, flickering in the air like a siren when she explains her predicament to me. She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one. The same-age partner, equally unsettled in his career, will take only the minimum time off, she guesses, or else pay some cost which will come back to bite her. Everything unfailingly does. If she freezes her eggs to buy time, the decision and its logistics will burden her singly — and perhaps it will not work. Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty? There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan. It’s not that our efforts to have it all were fated for failure. They simply weren’t imaginative enough.

For me, my relationship, with its age gap, has alleviated this rush , permitted me to massage the clock, shift its hands to my benefit. Very soon, we will decide to have children, and I don’t panic over last gasps of fun, because I took so many big breaths of it early: on the holidays of someone who had worked a decade longer than I had, in beautiful places when I was young and beautiful, a symmetry I recommend. If such a thing as maternal energy exists, mine was never depleted. I spent the last nearly seven years supported more than I support and I am still not as old as my husband was when he met me. When I have a child, I will expect more help from him than I would if he were younger, for what does professional tenure earn you if not the right to set more limits on work demands — or, if not, to secure some child care, at the very least? When I return to work after maternal upheaval, he will aid me, as he’s always had, with his ability to put himself aside, as younger men are rarely able.

Above all, the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write. A chance at a destiny that doesn’t adhere rigidly to the routines and timelines of men, but lends itself instead to roomy accommodation, to the very fluidity Betty Friedan dreamed of in 1963 in The Feminine Mystique , but we’ve largely forgotten: some career or style of life that “permits year-to-year variation — a full-time paid job in one community, part-time in another, exercise of the professional skill in serious volunteer work or a period of study during pregnancy or early motherhood when a full-time job is not feasible.” Some things are just not feasible in our current structures. Somewhere along the way we stopped admitting that, and all we did was make women feel like personal failures. I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing. Perhaps men long for this in their own way. Actually I am sure of that.

Once, when we first fell in love, I put my head in his lap on a long car ride; I remember his hands on my face, the sun, the twisting turns of a mountain road, surprising and not surprising us like our romance, and his voice, telling me that it was his biggest regret that I was so young, he feared he would lose me. Last week, we looked back at old photos and agreed we’d given each other our respective best years. Sometimes real equality is not so obvious, sometimes it takes turns, sometimes it takes almost a decade to reveal itself.

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My partner ogles other women and it makes me feel unattractive

It’s not a petty problem, says Philippa Perry, because your feelings matter

The question My partner of three years is a kind, emotionally intelligent, interesting and handsome man. We are in our early 30s, which is possibly too old for the petty problem I am about to come to you with… He is always staring at other women! Whenever we are out and there are attractive women nearby, he will take a good look or worse, keep staring at them while we’re in a pub or something. Meanwhile, our conversation starts to dry up, because his focus is elsewhere.

I understand this is something that men do and have no problem with him doing so when I’m not there. Our relationship is long-distance, so the problem for me is more that he doesn’t think to put this on pause on the occasions we can be together, that I might notice or be upset by it, let alone that I’ve put a lot of work into looking nice for him. I don’t think he would cheat on me, but knowing that men are visual creatures and I am clearly not up to his standards in this department, makes me feel vulnerable to this possibility.

I am going to personal therapy and am trying to tackle decades-long self-esteem issues, but I’m not there yet. I know this is hardly a life-or-death problem, but for some reason it’s like a punch in the gut for me and I don’t want it to fester as I feel resentful.

Do you think it is unreasonable to talk to him about it? I am nervous , because he has suffered quite a lot of difficult life situations and tends to shut down the conversation if I’m talking about an issue he deems is not worth worrying about. In a sense, he’d be right about this, but I’m very stuck worrying about it.

Philippa’s answer It’s not a petty problem, because you feel it like “a punch in the gut”. So no, I don’t think it is unreasonable for you to tell your partner how his behaviour affects you. If you feel it to be worth worrying about, it is, whether or not he deems it so. He is not the arbiter of what feelings you should or should not be having. His propensity to stare at women might not be a habit he is even aware of having and it needs pointing out to him. The other women might not be all that keen about being stared at either.

With your “clearly not up to his standards in this department” statement, I think you are jumping to conclusions. When someone does something it is too easy to assume it means the same to them as it would to us if we did it. This dynamic was first brought to my attention in a couples counselling session when the wife said her husband didn’t love her because she had asked him to bring her some grapes when she was sick and he had forgotten. It didn’t mean he didn’t love her, it meant he had forgotten the grapes. Your boyfriend staring at women doesn’t mean he doesn’t find you attractive, it just means he’s staring at women.

I think your main problem may be your lack of entitlement. I want to give you permission to talk about whatever you want to talk about. We can all tell other people that when they do X, it makes us feel Y and we would prefer it if they did W. It doesn’t mean they’ll stop doing X, it’s just that they will know, if they are aware of doing X, that it is negatively affecting us. Changing a habit takes practice so you may have to remind him more than once that he’s hurting you when he does it.

It’s probably good to have this conversation for the first time when you feel calm and relaxed and not when he is staring at someone, because if you did it then, it might come out angry, which might make him defensive. You can say you know it’s not a crime to notice an attractive person, and looking isn’t like touching and you know he’s not leering in a crude way, so that he doesn’t feel attacked. You can explain how, when he goes beyond just noticing and stares, it makes you feel like you don’t match up, and also makes you feel unlovable, unattractive, insecure and vulnerable. And it doesn’t matter if he defends himself by saying that he does find you attractive, it isn’t convincing to you when he is staring at others.

You’ve told me that your partner is emotionally intelligent, so I’m guessing he is not ogling women because he has been taught some toxic masculinity like “real men treat women badly” and is just doing what he thinks is expected of him. His emotional intelligence needs to go as far as respecting your feelings and if he does, he will say sorry for hurting you and make an effort to stop the staring. If he ignores you, or gets angry, you are in a relationship where he is giving preferential treatment to his own feelings over yours and you might want to think about whether this is what you want long-term. Then you might consider being with someone who brings out the best in you rather than your insecurities.

Philippa Perry will be appearing at the Also Festival, 12-14 July 2024 ( also-festival.com )

Every week Philippa Perry addresses a personal problem sent in by a reader. If you would like advice from Philippa, please send your problem to [email protected] . Submissions are subject to our terms and conditions

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3. problems students are facing at public k-12 schools.

We asked teachers about how students are doing at their school. Overall, many teachers hold negative views about students’ academic performance and behavior.

• 48% say the academic performance of most students at their school is fair or poor; a third say it’s good and only 17% say it’s excellent or very good.
• 49% say students’ behavior at their school is fair or poor; 35% say it’s good and 13% rate it as excellent or very good.

Teachers in elementary, middle and high schools give similar answers when asked about students’ academic performance. But when it comes to students’ behavior, elementary and middle school teachers are more likely than high school teachers to say it’s fair or poor (51% and 54%, respectively, vs. 43%).

Teachers from high-poverty schools are more likely than those in medium- and low-poverty schools to say the academic performance and behavior of most students at their school are fair or poor.

The differences between high- and low-poverty schools are particularly striking. Most teachers from high-poverty schools say the academic performance (73%) and behavior (64%) of most students at their school are fair or poor. Much smaller shares of teachers from low-poverty schools say the same (27% for academic performance and 37% for behavior).

In turn, teachers from low-poverty schools are far more likely than those from high-poverty schools to say the academic performance and behavior of most students at their school are excellent or very good.

Lasting impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

Among those who have been teaching for at least a year, about eight-in-ten teachers say the lasting impact of the pandemic on students’ behavior, academic performance and emotional well-being has been very or somewhat negative. This includes about a third or more saying that the lasting impact has been very negative in each area.

Shares ranging from 11% to 15% of teachers say the pandemic has had no lasting impact on these aspects of students’ lives, or that the impact has been neither positive nor negative. Only about 5% say that the pandemic has had a positive lasting impact on these things.

A smaller majority of teachers (55%) say the pandemic has had a negative impact on the way parents interact with teachers, with 18% saying its lasting impact has been very negative.

These results are mostly consistent across teachers of different grade levels and school poverty levels.

Major problems at school

When we asked teachers about a range of problems that may affect students who attend their school, the following issues top the list:

• Poverty (53% say this is a major problem at their school)
• Chronic absenteeism – that is, students missing a substantial number of school days (49%)
• Anxiety and depression (48%)

One-in-five say bullying is a major problem among students at their school. Smaller shares of teachers point to drug use (14%), school fights (12%), alcohol use (4%) and gangs (3%).

Differences by school level

Similar shares of teachers across grade levels say poverty is a major problem at their school, but other problems are more common in middle or high schools:

• 61% of high school teachers say chronic absenteeism is a major problem at their school, compared with 43% of elementary school teachers and 46% of middle school teachers.
• 69% of high school teachers and 57% of middle school teachers say anxiety and depression are a major problem, compared with 29% of elementary school teachers.
• 34% of middle school teachers say bullying is a major problem, compared with 13% of elementary school teachers and 21% of high school teachers.

Not surprisingly, drug use, school fights, alcohol use and gangs are more likely to be viewed as major problems by secondary school teachers than by those teaching in elementary schools.

Differences by poverty level

Teachers’ views on problems students face at their school also vary by school poverty level.

Majorities of teachers in high- and medium-poverty schools say chronic absenteeism is a major problem where they teach (66% and 58%, respectively). A much smaller share of teachers in low-poverty schools say this (34%).

Bullying, school fights and gangs are viewed as major problems by larger shares of teachers in high-poverty schools than in medium- and low-poverty schools.

When it comes to anxiety and depression, a slightly larger share of teachers in low-poverty schools (51%) than in high-poverty schools (44%) say these are a major problem among students where they teach.  

Discipline practices

About two-thirds of teachers (66%) say that the current discipline practices at their school are very or somewhat mild – including 27% who say they’re very mild. Only 2% say the discipline practices at their school are very or somewhat harsh, while 31% say they are neither harsh nor mild.

We also asked teachers about the amount of influence different groups have when it comes to determining discipline practices at their school.

• 67% say teachers themselves don’t have enough influence. Very few (2%) say teachers have too much influence, and 29% say their influence is about right.

• 31% of teachers say school administrators don’t have enough influence, 22% say they have too much, and 45% say their influence is about right.
• On balance, teachers are more likely to say parents, their state government and the local school board have too much influence rather than not enough influence in determining discipline practices at their school. Still, substantial shares say these groups have about the right amount of influence.

Teachers from low- and medium-poverty schools (46% each) are more likely than those in high-poverty schools (36%) to say parents have too much influence over discipline practices.

In turn, teachers from high-poverty schools (34%) are more likely than those from low- and medium-poverty schools (17% and 18%, respectively) to say that parents don’t have enough influence.

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Table of contents, ‘back to school’ means anytime from late july to after labor day, depending on where in the u.s. you live, among many u.s. children, reading for fun has become less common, federal data shows, most european students learn english in school, for u.s. teens today, summer means more schooling and less leisure time than in the past, about one-in-six u.s. teachers work second jobs – and not just in the summer, most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

No glasses? No problem. Three cool ways to safely view the eclipse.

‘pinhole projectors’ will do the trick. so will plants in your backyard..

The April 8 total solar eclipse is finally here — and it’s sure to amaze and delight the millions who see it.

Everyone in the Lower 48 states will be able to view at least a partial solar eclipse, assuming cloud-free skies .

To savor the eclipse, you don’t need special equipment. Even if you can’t get your hands on eclipse glasses , there are old school, low-tech ways to see it. If you’re crafty and canny, the eclipse can still be a memorable experience.

2024 total solar eclipse

Safety first

The first rule of enjoying the eclipse is to avoid looking directly at the sun without eye protection. Even brief glances can cause permanent damage.

The only exception to this rule is for lucky spectators in the path of totality during the few minutes of the total eclipse, when the sun is fully blocked by the moon.

For those witnessing the partial solar eclipse, even when most of the sun’s surface is blocked, the remaining, visible crescent is still intensely bright and cannot be safely viewed without eye protection.

But, if you don’t have eye protection, here are some safe ways to experience the partial eclipse through indirect means:

Make a pinhole projector

A way around looking directly the sun is to make your own eclipse projector using a cereal box. It’s a safe and terrific way to capture the eclipse action.

Clear the kitchen table and find the craft scissors. In addition to the cereal box, you’ll need a piece of aluminum foil, tape and a small nail or pushpin.

First, eat your Froot Loops — or whatever toasted grain you prefer — and keep the box. On a white piece of paper or white cardboard, trace the bottom of the box. Then, clip out the traced rectangle from the paper and put it in the bottom of the opened box. That’s your screen that images of the eclipse will project onto.

Cut out two squares (1.5 inches should suffice) on the lid of the box and then tape the lid back together. For one square, cover the hole in foil and tape it down. Gently put a pushpin or small nail hole through it, as that is the lens that the sun’s light will pass through. The smaller the hole, the sharper the projected image.

When using your personal box theater, turn away from the sun — and let the sun’s rays shine through the tiny pin hole. Look through the other hole in the lid to see the eclipse action — during the eclipse you’ll see the moon biting a chunk from the sun.

Other kinds of small boxes — such as shoe boxes or small package boxes — work well, too. And your kids can decorate them for fun.

Looking to the trees

If you’re not inclined to make a projector box, you can also view the partial phases of the eclipse in the shadows of trees and plants.

The small gaps in between leaves, branches and pine needles act as miniature projectors. When light passes through, a small image of the sun is cast onto the ground. As the partial eclipse progresses, you’ll see the small circles evolve into sickle-shaped crescents, eventually waning to a sliver.

You may consider holding a white piece of paper or poster board beneath a tree or plant to make it easier to spot the shadows.

Gadgets and fingers

Leaves aren’t special — they just happen to be good at producing tiny projections. But realistically, any hole that’s about a quarter inch wide, give or take, will do the trick. That means you could even parade around outside with your pasta colander, cheese grater or serving spoon with holes in it and look at its shadow. Place white paper or poster board on the ground to see the projection more clearly.

You could also just hold your fingers out and crisscross them to make for half a dozen or so small openings between. Just extend your fingers on both hands as if you’re trying to make a W , and then overlap them.

Simple, yet elegant.

A total solar eclipse passed across the United States on Monday, April 8. See photos and videos from the path of totality and read our reporters’ coverage from scenes across the nation .

Looking ahead: Missed this one? The next eclipse visible in the United States won’t be until 2044 — and then we’ll see another shortly after in 2045. If you did watch this eclipse but without proper eyewear, here’s what to do if your eyes hurt .

The science: This eclipse appeared especially dramatic because the sun was at its most active period in two decades. In the past, solar eclipses have helped scientists learn more about the universe . Here’s everything else to know about the solar eclipse.

• Your ultimate guide to the total solar eclipse, its path and how to watch April 8, 2024 Your ultimate guide to the total solar eclipse, its path and how to watch April 8, 2024
• Here’s what not to do to safely watch the total solar eclipse April 5, 2024 Here’s what not to do to safely watch the total solar eclipse April 5, 2024
• Eclipse tourists should plan for overloaded cell networks April 2, 2024 Eclipse tourists should plan for overloaded cell networks April 2, 2024

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How to Claim Your Part of a $45 Million Walmart Settlement

A class-action lawsuit accusing the retail giant of inflating prices of certain weighed foods and produce resulted in a settlement. Customers may be eligible for a payment of up to $500.

By Emmett Lindner

Some Walmart customers may be entitled to claim up to $500 as part of a $45 million settlement that the retail giant is paying to resolve a class-action lawsuit, according to a settlement administrator’s website .

The lawsuit, filed on Oct. 19, 2022, claimed that Walmart overcharged shoppers for in-store purchases of certain weighted grocery items, including poultry and pork, and for bagged citrus. The lawsuit accuses the company of “unfair and deceptive business practices” that resulted in higher costs than what were advertised, according to court documents .

The lawsuit alleges that Walmart falsely inflated product weight, mislabeled products and overcharged for clearance products sold by weight.

The retail giant has denied the allegations, but it agreed to the settlement. “We believe a settlement is in the best interest of both parties,” a Walmart spokeswoman said in a statement.

Think you’re eligible? Here’s what to know:

Walmart is accused of overcharging for some weighted items.

The lawsuit claims that Walmart overcharged for certain items. Prices for weighted products, including meat, poultry, pork and seafood, sometimes differed between the item labels and the labels on the shelves, and customers were charged for the higher prices at checkout, according to the settlement.

Other grocery descriptions are said to have been distorted, too. Some bagged citrus products, including navel oranges, organic oranges, organic grapefruit and tangerines, were labeled with a weight that was lower than what appeared on the shelf tags, and customers were charged for a heavier weight of the products than what they took home.

The lawsuit also included some weighted goods that were near expiration, and displayed a price that was lower than what appeared on the register.

How do I find out if I’m eligible for a payment?

Any customers who shopped in a store at a Walmart retail location in the United States and Puerto Rico between Oct. 19, 2018, and Jan. 19, 2024, and purchased the included weighted goods or bagged citrus can apply for a settlement payment through the administrator’s website or by mail.

The deadline to submit any claim is June 5, 2024.

How do I apply, and how much should I expect?

To apply, either fill out the online form on the administrator’s website , or download a form to print and send by mail to an address provided on the form. The form requires claimants to submit contact information, describe the type and number of items purchased, and select a payment option, and gives them the opportunity to upload receipts.

The amount that claimants receive, if approved, can vary. With proof of purchase, shoppers can take home up to 2 percent of the total amount they paid for weighted goods and bagged citrus, with a cap of $500.

I don’t keep grocery receipts from five years ago …

Fear not, you may still receive a little cash, though less than the $500 cap. If you submit a claim without documentation, you can receive between $10 and $25 , depending on the number of relevant items purchased.

When will I find out if I’m approved?

The final approval hearing is scheduled for June 12, 2024. If you qualify for a payment, money will be transferred to you electronically, or by check if requested. The deadline to object or comment on the settlement is May 22, 2024.

Emmett Lindner writes about breaking and trending news. He has written about international protests, climate change and social media influencers. More about Emmett Lindner

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