"Honestly, it is my sense that women's exclusion from forms of work that are considered "important" (read "men's work"), often due to the social construction of suitability, has historically been the basis for continuing a wage system that still disadvantages women in the workplace. A statistically significant wage differential persists in spite of sustained legislative efforts to eliminate it. If some work is done by men and other work is done by women then it remains relatively facile to assert that men, as workers, do stuff that is somehow harder as well as more important. Men then "deserve" to be paid more than women who do: other work.
"Clearly workers who have been involved in doing construction work will welcome the creation of new jobs in their field of work and it might even raise wages in that employment sector. There are enormous numbers of displaced workers -- not construction workers; both women and men who will likely feel that this bill has not created new jobs for them. This is not the result, primarily, of intrinsic gendering of jobs but rather a variety of factors, not least of which is class.
"Just a few thoughts."
I asked permission to post the above and the very touching response followed. Thank you, Robyn!
"Of course you may share this as you wish. My only reluctance might be that since I chose deliberately to write you privately, not in a public comment, there is not even a prefatory acknowledgment of your own certainly brave and clearly groundbreaking engagement with the issue in real life. I continue to admire you greatly for what you have done in your own life. I would be uncomfortable being critical. When it mattered you were on the right side of history. I wrote to comment largely because I thought what you said in your blog post was much at odds with that history."
