Our Education System is Built on Women’s Unpaid Labor
At every step in our education system, we are expecting women to shoulder the burden of unpaid labor and thankless, invisible work
Teachers
Women make up 76% of teachers in the United States. This number increases the lower you go in grade levels; 89% of K-6 teachers are women. There are some social conventions driving the reason for most male teachers to be at the high school level, but I’m sure we don’t have to stretch too far to realize that high school teachers are paid better and most men simply won’t settle for elementary school pay.
Teaching is already one of the worst-paid professions in the country, when you account for education and training levels, but it gets even worse for women.
First of all, female teachers are paid less than their male counterparts across the board. On average, men are paid almost $2,000 more per year as their base pay; that’s a 3.5% increase just for being a man. But that’s just their base pay. Once you calculate supplemental duties (an additional $2,050 per year on average more than women collect for the same category), merit bonuses (an additional $150 per year on average), and other supplemental income like second jobs or state supplements (an additional $6,130 per year on average), you end up with male teachers taking home more than 10% more than female teachers every single year.
This disparity is even worse in private schools, where men make $14,000 a year more than women.
But let’s just focus on public schools, since that’s where most of us have our children enrolled and have some ability to influence policy with our votes. An additional $6,000 might not sound like a ton of money but remember three things. 1) this is every year for the duration of their careers, 2) this includes side gigs, summer school, bonuses, and any other non-education sector jobs these teachers hold, and 3) benefits like bonuses and retirement are directly tied to salary.
If a man makes $66,000 a year and contributes 5% of his pay to retirement, he’ll have approximately $1,600,000 when he retires. For the same amount of time, the same amount of work, the same 5% contribution to her retirement, a woman making $60,000 will have nearly $200,000 less at retirement. That means, if that man and woman spend their retirements exactly the same, she runs out of money eight years before he does. Considering women will live, on average, five years longer than men… this is a problem.
This problem is compounded by the fact that women are far less likely than men to be promoted within the education sector. Women might make up 76% of teachers, but they’re only 56% of principals. And considering that the principal’s office pays, on average, almost double what classroom teachers make, it becomes very clear that women are doing the bulk of the work and yet not collecting the bulk of the pay in education.
Don’t worry — it gets worse. Female principals are paid, on average, $98,000 a year. Men in the same position collect, on average, $102,000.
Women are much more likely to be English teachers (about 70% of English teachers are women) and English teachers spend more time grading than teachers in any other subject area. It’s tough to find statistics on this (mostly because we’re really bad, as a culture, at properly studying women’s work), but it is common for English teachers to spend 3–4 hours PER DAY grading essays. Anecdotally, I was friends with an English teacher who finished with classes at 3 pm every day and made a rule for herself one year to force herself to go home at 6 pm and leave the essays for the next day. She never left her desk empty except on the last day of each term that year, and there were plenty of days when she didn’t go home at 6 pm.
So women are far more likely than men to be English teachers — the job at school with the most unpaid after-hours work — and men are much more likely to coach “lucrative” sports. Coaching is one way teachers supplement their incomes, but sports like football and boys’ basketball usually pay better (with the mistaken assumption that these programs are profitable). Even huge campuses with wildly successful sports programs only generate about 10% of their budget from ticket sales. 64% of coaches overall are men, and football coaches generally are men and generally make more money than other sports; there isn’t even a girls’ football option on American high school campuses.
Again, this is one single story, but our school district had a full-time football coach at one campus. That was his only job. He didn’t teach classes, he didn’t help with any administrative work, he didn’t run the athletics department. He collected a full-time salary for a job that was around 500 hours per year; he effectively was paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $125 an hour. When he was informed that he would have to take on some additional duties to justify his salary, he quit.
It wasn’t worth his time to “work for free”.
Support Systems
If it’s tough to find statistics on after-hours work completed by teachers, it’s even more difficult to find concrete statistics on the systems that support education and teachers. Most notable among the support systems are, of course, the PTA (or PTO) and teachers’ unions. PTAs (Parent Teacher Associations) or PTOs (Parent Teacher Organizations; unaffiliated with the national Association) are usually run by women. This is by no means scientific, but a peek at the “notable members” of historical PTA groups is a list of women’s names and only women’s names.
As a parent and as a teacher, I’ve never seen a man in a PTO meeting, unless it was the school principal checking in on things, or a male high school teacher was taking his turn in the rotation. The leadership has always been exclusively female, the teachers who stay in instead of rotating out are exclusively female, and the parents who show up to plan events are exclusively female. Men show up to actually run those events, usually in the form of grilling food or hauling a trailer, or setting up big, heavy manly things like stages and lighting.
PTOs are often responsible for fundraising, for supporting sports teams. Sometimes those are a splinter group, like a Booster Club, but it’s the same thing, really: a group of parents and teachers working together to get the extra work done. Or, more accurately: a group of mothers and teachers working together to get the extra work done.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that PTA membership has dropped by half since the late 1970s; during the same time period, the percentage of married women employed outside the home nearly doubled and the number of children living in a single-parent household nearly tripled. When mothers started working outside the home or parenting on their own, PTA enrollment plummeted. This is not a criticism of working women or single parents: it’s an observation that the PTA is unpaid work and it is unpaid work that has been done largely by women, so when women aren’t available to do it for free anymore, it simply isn’t getting done.
Classroom volunteers are overwhelmingly mothers, usually, mothers who are full-time stay-at-home or work-at-home parents or else are employed only part-time outside of the home; fathers are much more likely to be employed full-time outside the home. Classroom volunteers show up in classrooms for parties or large projects, but they also will literally take home the extra work that teachers cannot get done and help get it finished on time. Mothers across this country take home stacks of paper to be pre-cut for crafts, worksheets to be stapled together into workbooks, and piles of supplies to be divvied up into individual packets or buckets for students, particularly in K-3 classrooms, where the teacher is almost statistically guaranteed to be a woman.
Field trip chaperones are almost always mothers, too. As a performing arts teacher, I had the pleasure and responsibility of taking musicians to football games, state fair performances, competitions, parades, weekend intensives, and out-of-state trips. A dozen trips each year, and every chaperone was a mother unless it was a married couple coming to do the work together. Dads rarely, if ever, showed up unaccompanied by their wives. We would scramble to get just enough men to come on weekend trips to have the minimum number needed to check boys’ dorms or rooms. Mothers loaded equipment onto the bus, mothers checked everyone’s name off the list before they boarded, mothers wore fanny packs filled with bandaids and hand sanitizer and snacks. Mothers put their homes and lives on hold for three or four days at a time so they could be on weekend trips with us, keeping kids safe and satisfying state laws for chaperone-to-child ratios.
Homework
Homework is notoriously difficult to track, for some obvious reasons. Teachers assign work and have to guess at how long it will take, while also guessing at the resources available to the students. What takes Johnny an hour to do with his high-speed internet at his desk in his quiet house might take Jenny three hours to do, once she accounts for taking a city bus to the library and waiting her turn at a computer. Add in the fact that children are not known for being able to track their time well, and the loathing of homework in general, self-reported timekeeping isn’t exactly reliable.
But suffice it to say that homework is either done by intrinsically motivated kids who can teach themselves to a certain degree, or it is helped along significantly by a parent. And when 27% of mothers stay at home full-time and only 7% of fathers do, it’s again easy to see who is doing the lion’s share of this homework monitoring.
As a teacher, my experience was that mothers were overwhelmingly the ones in charge of communicating with teachers, attending IEP/504 meetings, signing permission forms, buying supplies, running forgotten items up to the school, managing school pick up and drop off, and following up on grades. Fathers rarely responded to my emails; mothers frequently did. Kids routinely said, “My mom is bringing my instrument” or “My mom bought my books, they’ll be here next week” or “My mom wants to know how she can help at the football game.” Rarely — very, very rarely — did dads get mentioned in all of these tasks.
Parents should absolutely be involved in their children’s education. But we’ve built a system that demands parents volunteer an awful lot of time for it to run. Field trips and fundraisers and fun crafts in class simply cannot happen without volunteer hours, and those volunteer hours are being completed by women, more often than not.
Legislation
Schools are regulated by both state and federal governments, with legislative bodies determining what subjects will be taught, how they will be taught, where they will be taught, how much the budget will be, how much teachers are paid, and how many extracurricular activities will be made available.
Women make up 76% of teachers and the vast majority of volunteers in the educational ecosystem, but men are mostly the ones making those regulatory decisions.
Women make up only 30% of state legislators and only 23% of federal legislators. Only 25 members of the U.S. House are mothers and only 16 U.S. Senators are. Only 9 governors are women; only 6 are mothers. When these governing bodies make decisions about schools, they just do not have enough input from women and mothers, the people who will bear the brunt of those decisions.
When governments decide how much money to appropriate to schools, they are determining the big things, of course: how much teachers will be paid, how many teachers can be hired (effectively determining class size), how much maintenance will be done on the buildings, how many support staff will be hired, how the retirement system will be protected. But beyond those big things, they are also determining all the little things that can either make a classroom run smoothly or can force teachers and parents to scramble to fill in the gaps.
Are there enough dry erase markers to get through the year? Or does the teacher need to buy her own, beg for donations from parents, or get “creative” about how to put information up on the board in front of her class?
Do the desks and tables all work properly? Or does the teacher need to spend time repairing them, or finding books to put under the broken leg?
Does the projector work with computers that have been manufactured in the last five years? Or do teachers need to jerry-rig a network of connectors and dongles to make their laptop work with that projector?
Are there updated, relevant educational materials on the walls? Or are teachers expected to pay for those out of pocket? Or are mothers asked to “come up with something”?
Are teachers able to make quality copies often? Or do they count pages, go without, have students share workbooks, or send awkward emails home, asking parents (mothers) to print things out?
Are the novels and textbooks updated? Or are teachers being forced to teach outdated “classics” simply because no one is willing to spend the $600 it would take to buy a new classroom set of novels?
Are there replacement violin strings or clarinet reeds? Is there enough sheet music to perform all year long? Or are you expecting your music teachers to compose and arrange their own pieces, buy supplies for kids out of their own money? Or send parents (mothers) on endless errands around town to find these items?
Public policy drives educational behaviors, and our current system of educational behaviors would be utterly impossible without unpaid work of women all over the country.
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