A Moment with Dr. Moore

Low Wages, High Value:
Giving Thanks for Women’s Work

Hard work alone is not enough for many people to support their families and have stable lives. Some of the most crucial professions don’t get the respect and appreciation they deserve. Millions of people in the U.S. hold jobs that offer few rewards but require a great deal of effort. These jobs pay low wages, provide few benefits, demand irregular hours, and take a toll on physical and emotional health. Nearly a third of the people who hold these low-wage jobs are women, especially women of color, and we depend on them to fill our daily needs. The women working in these undervalued and underpaid jobs range from restaurant servers to retail clerks, school bus monitors and ambulance attendants They work in home health care and early childhood education, two fields whose members have long pleaded for recognition of how they change lives.

In 2014, Chicago home health aide Patricia Evans, testified before the U.S. Congress on the ups and downs of her profession. “It’s very emotionally satisfying to care for people this way since we’re helping them stay in their homes and not have to move to nursing homes,” as Patricia explained. “Delaying that move makes seniors and those with disabilities happy and saves the health care system money,” she pointed out. So, Patricia was proud of the work she and her colleagues did. Yet she expressed frustration at the long, irregular hours she put in for pay that was barely above the minimum wage.

“You live in poverty. You work in poverty,” she said. “You retire poor, hoping you will qualify for the services you have provided for so many years to others. Then, you die in poverty, unless you have an employed spouse or other family members and friends who can give you financial help,” support Patricia didn’t have. “So, I struggle to pay my monthly bills, keep a roof over my head and transportation under my feet,” she said. “Yet this is important work, and home health aides like me are people of worth. We make a valuable contribution to society and it’s time for our paychecks to reflect what we do.”

The gap between contributions and compensation is equally wide for early educators, as LiAnne Flakes told Dissent magazine in 2016. For 24 years, the Florida educator had been nurturing young minds, and LiAnne knew the value of her field. “As preschool teachers, we are the ones who are shaping children for the future, a responsibility for which LiAnne had prepared. She worked hard to earn her CDA® and paid out of her own pocket to keep her credential up to date. Yet her experience and expertise didn’t lead to commensurate pay because she only earned $12.25 an hour, and that was at the high end of the scale since LiAnne was a Head Start teacher. “It’s hard to believe that I do a job that’s important to children, families and society, but I only earn $25,000 a year after all this time. I worry about whether I’ll be able to pay my basic expenses like groceries, electricity and rent,” LiAnne said. And her heart also went out to coworkers with children. “How do they manage,” she wondered, “to make their money stretch to cover all the food they need to put on the table?”

Yet the low wages that educators earned didn’t make LiAnne question her worth or that of her colleagues. “I think we’re just as important as elementary school teachers. We’re just as important as high school teachers and college professors,” LiAnne said as she reflected on the impact she had made in her career. “I ran into one of my children recently, and he remembered me from preschool though he’s now 18 years old,” she recalled. “He was so excited to see me, and that was worth a lot to me. It reminded me that children value me and other early childhood teachers. Now it’s time society does too.”

But not much has changed since LiAnne issued her plea for recognition. A decade later, early childhood education remains one of the lowest-paid professions, with a median annual salary of $32,500, still not a livable wage. Home health aides come out a bit better at a median annual salary of $34,900, but they, too, are barely scraping by. And the source of their dilemma goes back to a time way before Patricia and LiAnne spoke out for the value of their profession.

For the most part, work in low-wage, female-dominated professions involves tasks long considered women’s work. It consists of activities such as cooking, cleaning, serving and caring for other people, which have now moved from the private to the public sphere. These activities often demand great stamina, along with strength of body and mind. Yet society has consistently undervalued and underpaid this work, whether workers perform it for children, seniors or adults with disabilities, whether it takes place in a home, institution or center. The undervaluation of care work has roots in the companionship care exemption, which excluded domestic care workers from wage and hours protection extended to other workers when Congress first passed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1974.

The rationale for the exemption was that caring work was an extension of women’s traditional roles. It didn’t require much training, so it didn’t merit much compensation, as lawmakers assumed when they passed the exemption. They also relied on the claim that the emotional rewards of helping others would lead workers to need less financial incentive to do their jobs. Employers, according to this line of thought, could pay women less because caring work was “sacred” work that women should perform out of love and compassion, instead of the wish for fair, livable wages.

The notion that caring work comes naturally to women still has traction despite the passage of many years and a lot of research showing that competent child care requires training and skills. “The job of caring for and educating young children is so hard and so complex,” as Lea Austin, executive director of UC Berkeley’s Center for the Study of Child Care Employment, pointed out four years ago “People understand that it’s low-paid work, but they have no idea how low,” she said. “I’ve found myself in meetings, even with people who work in the sector in various policy roles, and you put out that number, that the median wage for a child care worker is $11.65 across the country, and that more than half of early childhood workers use aid programs, and sometimes there’s an audible gasp. When people make that connection and understand the consequences, they find it egregious and shocking.”

Many people are coming to agree with Austin, and they’re making their opinions heard. Child care is among the top five professions that are undervalued and underpaid, according to a 2023 poll from YouGov that surveyed Americans’ perceptions of 30 jobs in terms of pay and impact. “We pay early childhood teachers like they’re babysitters and expect them to work miracles. But without them, society collapses,” as a reader told internet media company BuzzFeed last year, and that reader wasn’t unique. There’s increasing buzz in the news about how early childhood teachers allow parents to hold jobs, the economy to have the workforce it needs and children to gain the foundation for productive lives This makes child care a contribution to the public good for which educators deserve thanks, according to a recent study from the online language tutoring platform Preply. The study found that child care workers rank in the top three unappreciated professions since nearly 80 percent of Americans had never thanked a child care worker, a lapse that one in five people later came to regret.

Even when people appreciate early learning professionals, they fail to make the broader connection between the work that educators do and its impact on economic progress that affects us all. Like 50 percent of the women who hold low-wage jobs, a figure that appeared this month in ABC News, early childhood educators are largely women of color. A convergence of sexism and racism has long led society to undervalue their work, leading to a vicious cycle that’s hard to break. When people consider a skill to be something that people naturally want to do for free, it keeps wages down. When wages are low, employers must lower job qualifications, which reinforces the notion that the job is unskilled, despite advances in the workforce. Nearly half of early educators now hold credentials or degrees, and growing numbers of state initiatives are funding educators who want to upgrade their education. Still, the small pay bump educators receive when they take advantage of state support remains a consistent roadblock to the progress of the early childhood profession.

We need to build a culture of appreciation that raises up the early childhood profession, and early childhood leaders can do this in two ways. One is on the national and state level by advocating for better funding, better wages and a better workplace environment, macro changes that will take time. In the meanwhile, early childhood leaders can encourage families to work at the micro level by showing that they value early childhood teachers. Writing thank-you notes, giving little gifts and offering words of encouragement are a good start to sparking change. When families take these small steps, other parents will notice, and that can lead to a bigger culture of appreciation for the brilliant work that our educators do.

Every small gesture is a step toward putting the spotlight on a vital connection. So-called women’s work, like early childhood education and home health care, is work on which society depends, and it serves an ideal that lawmakers should keep in mind when they consider giving more support to the members of our nation’s caring professions. “The moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped,” as Vice President Hubert Humphrey once said. The low-wage work that many women do has a high value that serves the public good.