Women's work

Women's work is a field of labour assumed to be solely the realm of women and associated with specific stereotypical jobs considered as uniquely feminine or domestic duties throughout history. It is most commonly used in reference to the unpaid labor typically performed by that of a mother or wife to upkeep the home and children. ^[1]

Women's work is generally unpaid or paid less than "men's work" and is not as highly valued as "men's work".^[2] Much of women's work is not included in official statistics on labour, making much of the work that women typically do virtually invisible.^[3] For example, throughout much of the 20th century, the women working on a family farm, no matter how much work they did, would be counted in, for example, the US census as being unemployed, whereas the men doing the same or even less work were counted as being employed as farmers.^[4] Similarly, many acts of creativity, such as tapestry, quilting, sewing, and weaving, which are often performed by women, have been traditionally undervalued by the mainstream art world, classified as women's work and thus, until recently, rarely included in art exhibitions, galleries or museums.^[5]