Bryce Covert | The Nation

Maria Fernandez, an employee of United Home Care Services. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky)

It’s pretty well known that while women dominate the fast-growing fields of domestic work and home health work, this is only a partial victory. After all, not only are these jobs low-paid, they come rife with abuse. But women also dominate other quickly growing healthcare jobs such as nursing, making up over 90 percent of that workforce, which are far better paid. Where a home health aide can expect to make just over $20,000 a year at the median, a registered nurse looks forward to nearly $65,000. This should be a great sign. Yet a new report shows that the abuse that plagues those who work in the home follows women even when they work in a hospital.

Paul Ryan speaks on the federal budget, Capitol Hill, 2011. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The latest iteration of Paul Ryan’s budget is out today, and while you might expect it to look very different than the one proposed before he was part of a losing presidential ticket, he seems to have dug in his heels on some of his most extreme proposals, like block granting vital programs, voucherizing Medicare and drastically slashing spending. As with the first rounds of Ryan budgeting, this one would be bad for nearly everyone (except perhaps the wealthy), but it would especially take an enormous toll on the country’s women.

Housekeepers at the Westin Hotel. (Flickr/Douglas Muth)

Our workforce, once dominated by men, is now pretty much equally split between the genders. But a funny thing has happened since women entered it in droves: rather than all workers enjoying the stable, unionized, blue collar jobs men typically held until the latter part of the twentieth century, the jobs held by all workers look more and more like stereotypical “women’s work.” These jobs expect workers not just to make a product, but to do it with a warm attitude. They are less likely to be full-time, but instead modeled after part-time work for “pin money.” And an increasing number of jobs are low-pay, low-benefit work in the service sector, once the purview of women workers. We’re all women workers now, and we’re all suffering for it.

Twenty years ago today, the US passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, finally codifying into law the right for most employees to take time off from work for the birth of a baby or to care for a seriously ill family member. Since then, workers have used it 100 million times to care for themselves and their families.

But this milestone, and all the good it’s done since, hasn’t been enough. We’ve fallen behind our industrialized peers on many key indicators since then. Only about 60 percent of workers have access to paid leave, putting a huge financial burden on new parents and those with sick family members. Our failure hits working families square on. But it’s a problem we all bear, because it’s also threatening our economic edge.

The US holds a dubious distinction: single parents in this country are the worst off compared to 16 other high-income countries, despite the fact that we have the highest rates of single parenthood. There are a variety of factors that go into getting that award—failing to ensure adequate health insurance coverage, long waits for early childhood education to begin, low rates of child support receipt—but an important factor is family leave. We’re the only one without paid leave, and we also fall behind in how much leave we guarantee. As the report notes, “The duration of the job-protected leave entitlement ranges from a low of 12 weeks in the U.S. to a high of 162 weeks in France and Germany.” Here’s how it looks for single mothers in various countries: