Why Women’s Careers Are So Often Built Around Caring for Everyone Else
Anne Wallen is a respected figure in women’s health with over 30 years of experience and is a leading voice on global change in maternity care, particularly for those at greatest risk.
There is an industry holding society together that rarely gets recognized as an industry at all. Women raise children, teach classrooms, care for the sick, comfort the dying, support mothers through pregnancy and birth, tend to aging parents, manage households, counsel families, remember appointments, notice emotional changes, and anticipate what other people need before those needs are spoken.
Then millions of those same women go to work and do it professionally. They become nurses, teachers, social workers, therapists, childcare providers, doulas, midwives, home health aides, counselors, care coordinators, and support professionals.
We might call this the Nurture Industry. It is the vast network of paid and unpaid labor that keeps human beings alive, healthy, educated, regulated, connected, and cared for.
It raises an uncomfortable question, "Why does society depend so heavily on women’s capacity to nurture, yet so often undervalue the women doing the nurturing?"
Women protect and provide, too
For generations, Western culture has associated the word "provider" primarily with men. The father provides. The mother nurtures. But that definition of provision is painfully narrow.
Provision is not simply earning income. Who provides the meals, the emotional security, the medical care, the education, the breastfeeding support, the clean clothing, the doctor’s appointments, and the thousands of small acts that turn survival into human well-being?
Women provide every day. Women protect, too.
Men aren’t the only ones who can protect, and protection is not simply a physical concept, either. Sometimes protection looks like physical defense. Sometimes it looks like recognizing that a child is frightened, noticing that an elderly parent is becoming confused, questioning a medication error, advocating for a laboring mother, or realizing that someone in the family is quietly unraveling.
The feminine drive to protect and provide frequently expresses itself through relationships, vigilance, empathy, and care.
Research supports at least part of this observation. A 2023 study in Scientific Reports found that women demonstrated higher empathy, compassion, and prosocial giving in a naturalistic social task, although the researchers appropriately cautioned that findings about gender and social abilities are complex. Biology, personality, socialization, and cultural expectations are difficult to separate cleanly.
That distinction matters. Women are not genetically destined to become caregivers, and men are certainly capable of profound nurture and empathy. We should be careful not to replace one limiting stereotype with another. But neither should we ignore observable patterns simply because discussing differences has become uncomfortable.
Follow the care, and you will find women
The workforce tells the story.
In 2024, women represented 75% of healthcare practitioners and technical workers and 72.3% of education, training, and library professionals in the United States. Women also made up approximately 84.6% of healthcare support workers, and among home health aides, the proportion was almost 89%.
These are not fringe professions. These are the people teaching our children, administering medications, caring for disabled adults, helping families navigate illness, tending to older people, and supporting human beings during some of the most vulnerable moments of life.
Then many women go home and begin another shift.
The International Labour Organization reports that women perform 76.2% of unpaid care work worldwide, spending more than three times as many hours on it as men. The most recent American Time Use Survey shows the same pattern in the United States. In households with children under six, women spent an average of 2.8 hours per day providing primary childcare in 2025, compared with 1.7 hours for men.
In other words, women participate in the care economy twice, first for wages, and then for free. The larger economy quietly depends upon both.
A surgeon can perform surgery because someone cared for the surgeon’s child. A Chief Executive Officer (CEO) can remain in a twelve-hour strategy session because someone else remembered the pediatric appointment, bought groceries, or checked on an aging parent.
Care is not separate from the economy. Care is the infrastructure underneath it.
We praise women’s care, then discount its value
This is where the contradiction becomes harder to explain away.
We call nurses heroes. We tell teachers they shape the future. We say childcare workers care for our greatest treasures. We describe motherhood as priceless.
Sometimes, "priceless" becomes a remarkably convenient way of avoiding putting an adequate price on women’s labor.
Women still earned approximately 85 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2024, based on median hourly earnings analyzed by Pew Research Center. Among workers ages 25 to 34, the gap was smaller, but it remained.
Even within heavily female caregiving professions, differences appear.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that in 2024, female home health aides had median weekly earnings of $696, compared with $765 for male home health aides. Female nursing assistants earned a median of $743 per week, compared with $850 for men in the same occupation.
These raw comparisons do not prove that every difference results from discrimination. Hours, experience, geography, scheduling, and other variables can affect earnings. However, they certainly justify asking why the people carrying so much of society’s care burden continue to experience economic disadvantage.
Sex discrimination in employment has been illegal for decades. The Equal Pay Act requires equal pay for substantially equal work, and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits sex discrimination in employment.
Yet making discrimination illegal did not magically erase every structure, expectation, or cultural assumption created during centuries when women had dramatically less economic and political power.
The glass ceiling still has fingerprints on it
Women have entered professions, universities, and management at rates previous generations could scarcely have imagined. But follow power upward, and the numbers begin thinning. In the 2026 Fortune 500, only about 11% of America’s largest companies were led by women, even though that figure represented a record high. A record can represent progress and inequality at the same time.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously said, “Women belong in all places where decisions are being made.” We are still working on the "all" part.
The issue feels particularly urgent as diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives face continued political and institutional rollback in the United States. In August 2026, Reuters reported that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was moving toward ending a longstanding requirement for many large employers to report workforce demographic information by sex, race, and job category.
Supporters of the change argue that such reporting can enable improper preference systems, while critics, including employers and former officials, argue that the information is important for identifying inequities and evaluating compliance.
Whatever one’s opinion of specific DEI programs, eliminating discrimination and eliminating the measurement of disparities are not the same thing. You cannot declare the playing field level simply because you stop measuring the slope.
Patriarchy versus matriarchy misses the better question
The word "patriarchy" can instantly make people defensive, but patriarchy does not mean “men are bad.” It describes social structures in which authority, property, political power, and institutional decision-making have historically rested disproportionately with men.
That history is indisputable. Women were once legally excluded from voting, many professions, educational institutions, and meaningful economic independence. We have dismantled many of those barriers, but their cultural shadows remain.
Replacing patriarchy with an equally rigid matriarchy is not the answer, either. Women do not need to dominate men. Humanity needs balance. After centuries in which leadership was overwhelmingly shaped by male experience, balance necessarily requires more women at the table.
That does not mean every woman is peaceful, every female leader is compassionate, or women are morally superior to men. It means that excluding half the human population from meaningful power inevitably narrows the experiences represented when decisions are made.
There is evidence that women’s participation can change outcomes. Research examining peace processes has found that women’s participation is associated with agreements that are more likely to endure. One widely cited analysis found that women’s participation increased the probability of a peace agreement lasting at least two years by 20% and lasting fifteen years by 35%.
Perhaps the lesson is not simply that we need more women leaders. Perhaps we need more of the qualities women have historically been expected to provide everywhere except the halls of power, empathy, relationships, protection of children, community stability, human dignity, and long-term thinking.
Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern challenged the idea that compassionate leadership is weak, saying she was “proudly focused on empathy, because you can be both empathetic and strong.” That may be one of the most important leadership lessons of our time.
Stop asking women to care for the world at a discount
Women do not need to abandon nurturing careers to become equal. That would be a tragic interpretation of empowerment. We need nurses. We need teachers. We need midwives and doulas. We need therapists, counselors, mothers, caregivers, childcare professionals, and community builders. We also need women running companies, governments, hospitals, universities, and institutions.
Women should not have to become less nurturing in order to become more powerful. Society needs to stop confusing nurture with lesser value.
The real problem was never that women entered professions built around caring. The problem is that society became extraordinarily comfortable benefiting from women’s care while discounting its economic and political worth.
Perhaps the future should be neither patriarchal nor matriarchal. Perhaps it should be a world in which strength and empathy finally sit at the same table. It should be a world that understands that protecting children is leadership, supporting mothers is infrastructure, caring for vulnerable people is skilled work, and nurturing humanity is not a secondary contribution to civilization. It is how civilization survives.
After generations of women caring for the people who run the world, perhaps it is time for more women to help run it.
If we want healthier families, safer mothers, supported children, and stronger communities, we must invest in the people who provide the care that makes those outcomes possible.
MaternityWise International prepares doulas and maternal health professionals to turn compassion into competent, evidence-informed action while advocating for families through pregnancy, birth, and postpartum.
Nurture is not weakness. Care is not secondary work. The people who hold society together deserve a meaningful voice in shaping where society goes next.
Learn more about professional doula education and MaternityWise International here.
Anne Wallen, Director & Founder of MaternityWise International
Anne Wallen is a respected figure in women’s health with over 30 years of experience and is a leading voice on global change in maternity care, particularly for those at greatest risk. She continues to educate and empower birth professionals in more than 20 countries, contributes to a variety of curricula, and shapes the future of maternal health through her impactful role as a speaker and mentor. Anne is the Director and founder of MaternityWise International, and her legacy lies in inspiring generational changes and elevating women's healthcare worldwide.
References:
McDonald, B., & Kanske, P. “Gender differences in empathy, compassion, and prosocial donations, but not theory of mind in a naturalistic social task .” Scientific Reports, 2023.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Women in the Labor Force, 2024: Occupation Employment Profiles of Women and Men by Age .
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity, 2024 .
International Labour Organization. Research on unpaid care work and the global care economy, reporting that women perform 76.2% of unpaid care work worldwide.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. American Time Use Survey: 2025 Results . June 2026.
Fry, R., & Aragão, C. “Gender pay gap in the U.S. has narrowed slightly over 2 decades .” Pew Research Center, March 4, 2025.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2024.
U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Equal Pay/Compensation Discrimination and Sex Discrimination.
Fortune. Reporting on women CEOs in the 2026 Fortune 500. June 2026.
Council on Foreign Relations. Women’s Participation in Peace Processes.
Reuters. Reporting on proposed changes to federal employer demographic reporting requirements, August 26, 2026. (URL not provided.)
Blackwell, G. “Jacinda Ardern: Political leaders can be both empathetic and strong .” The Guardian, May 31, 2020.
