Compare: For this week’s blog I chose to talk about the second shift. The second shift is all the work women do at their house unpaid once they come home from their job. This includes everything from cooking food, cleaning, driving kids to school, and changing diapers. In this video Melinda talks about the how we need to recognize re evaluate and redistribute these jobs with the men in our life. She points out how it had to be OK with society to take these jobs otherwise it will not change. In the book pg. 270 it also talks about the feminization of poverty “The economic trend showing that women are more likely than men to live in poverty caused by the gender gap in wages the higher proportion of single mothers compared to single fathers and then increasing cost of childcare”. With this Melinda talks about how women are also paid less and usually if there is a single parent it’s a mother and how we need to understand the unpaid work of the second shift in order to help this.
Summary: In this video Melinda talks about how “poverty is sexist” because the majority of poverty is women and a lot of them are single mothers who also take on the second shift unpaid.In this article the study “estimates women do 2.6 times the amount of unpaid care and domestic work that men do. Childcare, cooking and cleaning, even things like picking kids up from school or taking elderly parents to the doctor — these tasks disproportionately fall to women.” 2.6 is a big number that is a lot of work women are doing with no recognition it’s just expected of them and that’s what needs to change, the attitude of other and what their expectations of women are. In the article Razavi said “If women stopped doing a lot of the work they do unpaid, then the whole economy would collapse,” I think people need to hear that because what would the men do if women took a strike and just stopped cooking and cleaning? They would have to start doing the work and then they would realize how much women do for them.
Words:382
Leave a comment