Who is critical? Investigating the gendered features of ‘essential workers’

Who is critical? Investigating the gendered features of ‘essential workers’

For this week, I want you to think about how occupations (jobs) are stratified (organized in hierarchies) according to gender. The two papers for this week (on both care workPreview the document and the glass escalatorPreview the document) should give you an idea of how to tackle this writing assignment. Basically, I want you to think about how gender is associated to the types of ‘essential jobs’ that imply greater someone’s greater exposures to COVID-19.

For this short 600 word essay, you must conduct a little bit of research in steps:

1. Please check the State of California’s definition of Essential Infrastructure Workers (Links to an external site.). Pay particular attention to three categories: Health and Public Health Sector, Food and Agriculture, and Government Operations. For each of these categories, identify 3 critical jobs or occupations (e.g. nurses) for a total of 9 (screenshot below).

Screen Shot 2020-04-30 at 11.01.51 AM.png

2. I then want you to check out the relevant labor force statistics (Links to an external site.) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. As you will able to see, the BLS provides a complete list of the numbers, sexes, and races of people employed across a large number of occupations (see screenshot below).

Screen Shot 2020-04-30 at 11.00.03 AM.png

3. Find the 9 essential occupations you identified in the State of California’s definition of essential workers and write down their information about numbers employed and sex in the form of a table (fictional example below).

Occupation Employed (thousands) Percent women
Nurses 2083 88%
Pharmacists 341 60%
… … …

4. Search for average salaries for these different occupations and classify each as high-wage (more than $85K per year), middle-wage ($36-84K per year) or low-wage (less than $35K per year).

5. Write a 600 word essay addressing the following questions:

a) Is essential care-work gendered (are there more women in essential care-work-related categories)? In what ways?

b) Are wages gendered? (That is, do high status essential occupations have more men on average than low status essential occupations)?

c) Given the type of jobs and activities on your list, are women essential workers more exposed to risks than men essential workers?

Requirements: Essay | 2 pages, Double spaced

Answer preview:

 

word limit:654