In February, California’s legislature began considering AB 708, a bill that would require cleaning product manufacturers to disclose all ingredients on product labels. Although the bill doesn’t directly address female exposure to chemicals, if it passes, it could have had significant and wide-ranging impacts on women – the primary users of cleaning products.
While gender roles have changed in the last few decades, a 2014 survey by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that women still perform about 55-70% of household cleaning, about 30% more of the cleaning than men. In addition to eating up time, this extra work could leave women more susceptible to any negative impacts of chemicals in cleaning products.
Professionally, the gender difference in cleaning is even more stark: 89% of home and hotel cleaners – whose exposure to these chemicals is quadrupled – are women. The majority of those women are minorities, according to the most recent US Bureau of Labor Statistics data.