Here’s What a Day Without Women Would Really Look Like

The organizers of the widely attended Women’s March on Jan. 21 are following up the protest with a national “Day Without a Woman” demonstration on Wednesday in which women are encouraged to stay home from work.

While only a fraction of working women are likely to participate, it should come as no surprise that society couldn’t function without all of them. To see what parts of our routines would be most disrupted, we chose a variety of occupations, regardless of the gender disparity, that a person is most likely to encounter on a day-to-day basis, then calculated what percentage of those jobs are held by women. Here’s how a day might go if all women were to stay out of work.

While plenty of occupations are overwhelmingly male, like roofers and mining machine operators, women make up a large percentage of the occupations with which many of us interact on a common basis. And that’s not going to change. Women are now more likely to have a college degree than men, so the workforce will only become more dependent on them as time passes.

Methodology

We examined American Community Survey records for the years 2013-2015, grouping responses by gender and the 2010 Census definitions of occupation. For activities that involve multiple professions, like seeing a doctor, the percentage is weighted by the number of total people in each individual job. Source: IPUMS-USA, University of Minnesota, www.ipums.org.