Member-only story
Women’s Work, Women’s Pay
What pink-collar jobs pay, and what they cost the women who do them.
When I was 26, I went back to school to finish my degrees. I had found a way to transfer credits in from other colleges to save on tuition, so I was taking classes at two community colleges and a university at the same time. At one of the community colleges, I had to take a sociology class to satisfy a general education transfer requirement, and that’s where I learned the term pink-collar for the first time.
I was fresh out of a job I thought I would keep forever. I had been a flight attendant, flying all the time, and it turned out the job wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. But the women are who I remember most. I met some really capable and intelligent women at the airline. Most of us were judged by how pretty we looked in our uniforms rather than for the reason we were hired to be there in the first place, and we did it to each other, too.
One of them was a young mother. She flew with me on one of the legs to New York. Many of us bonded over split duties like stocking the snack baskets and cleaning. On shifts where we worked in the aft galley, we really got to know each other, especially when we’d never flown together before. She told me she cried every time she was assigned a trip. She had been forced to return to work shortly…
