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Essay on Men Paid more than women in the workforce
Cost-effective, demographic and normative shifts all point in the course of more comparable time allocation patterns for men and women today as compared to 40 years ago. The extensive entry of women into market work ever since the 1960s has challenged the presumption that women's primary adult role is that of caretaker for the home and family. At the same time as, the erosion of wages for men over the past 25 years has challenged the ability of men to be the sole family breadwinner. Demographic trends of delayed marriage and reduced fertility mean that men and women are remaining single longer, and when they do marry, spending a smaller proportion of their prime working years caring for small children.
Norms governing appropriate adult roles for men and women have also changed, with increased acceptance of married women working for pay and substantial involvement of men in family life now the normative ideal. Nonetheless, two competing claims about changing gender differences in time use have been advanced in the literature. On the one hand, there are contentions that men's and women's paid and unpaid work time is converging because men are doing less paid and more unpaid work and women are doing less unpaid and more paid work. On the other hand, there are claims that men have increased unpaid work time only slightly while women have increased paid work time substantially, meaning women are doing a "second shift" of unpaid work and thus have less leisure time.
Women have an immense amount of experience in not being paid for all or much of the work they do. For many women, earning a wage--any wage--is progress, providing a glimpse of the kind of self-determination that income derived from work makes possible. For most feminists, it is progress when women "enter the labor market......
