Toward gender equality: Progress and bottlenecks

Is the significance of gender declining in America? Are men's and women's lives and rewards becoming more similar? To answer this question, I examine trends in market work and unpaid household work, including child care. I consider whether men's and women's employment and hours in paid work are converging, and examine trends in occupational sex segregation and the sex gap in pay. I also consider trends in men's and women's hours of paid work and household work. The emergent picture is one of convergence within each of the two areas of paid and unpaid work. Yet progress is not continuous and has stalled recently. Sometimes it continues on one front and stops on another. Gender change is also asymmetric in two ways: things have changed in paid work more than in the household, and women have dramatically increased their participation in formerly "male" activities, but men's inroads into traditionally female occupations or household tasks is very limited by comparison.