Both of my grandmothers worked outside their homes.

My father’s mother was a farm wife until my grandfather’s alcoholism and abuse drove her to divorce him. I remember being told she worked as a cleaning woman to support her youngest son, my uncle, while my father was sent to live with another farm family.

My mother’s mother, who died at a very young age, ran a restaurant with my grandfather, who preceded her in death.

My own mother worked in the early years of her marriage, and returned to the workplace when I was a teen-ager out of economic necessity.

Work always figured into my ideas about the future. Before I graduated from high school, I had worked as a babysitter, a waitress and a caterer’s assistant. During my first marriage, I was often either the sole or primary breadwinner, and since my divorce and remarriage, I have been unemployed only once. For about a week.

I work. And it’s not just what I do. It’s part of my heritage. It’s a large part of who I am.

According to A Woman’s Nation, an extensive report on the status of American women, I was among the minority of mothers who worked outside the home in the 1980s. Today, those numbers have evened out. Children no longer keep women out of the workplace, and because of that enormous economic shift, much of the 450+ page report addresses the impact of work on women and their families.

The workplace gender shift is truly startling. Just 40 years ago, women held about 35 percent of American jobs. Today, women are fully half the work force. We are over-represented in certain fields: nursing, retail sales, home health aides, clerical, and elementary education. And we are under-represented at the top in the corporate world.

But our numbers are growing, and according to the report, co-presented by California’s First Lady Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress, they’ll only increase. Job growth projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics through 2016 shows the vast majority of new jobs will be created in fields that are typically dominated by women.

What’s more, an astounding 70 percent of all the jobs lost since 2007 were held by men.

Over and over again, statistics and research reported in A Woman’s Nation took me back to one conclusion: While we still have many choices, work has become an integral part of most women’s lives. Our failing economy should be stripping the veneer of sexism off the workplace. But it took an act of Congress for Lily Ledbetter to finally get fair treatment from her employer.

Too many parents are still penalized in large and small ways when they put family before work. Too many employers still haven’t gotten the message that a family caregiver who has time to address critical needs at home will be more productive and less absent.

Women still earn, on average, 77 cents to every dollar a man earns. Still. In this economy. Even college-educated women, who start losing ground the minute they graduate.

A Woman’s Nation combines a dizzying array of workplace studies that, time and again, expose clear, gender-based gaps and inequities that affect both men and women. Jobs are still largely sex-segregated, which is as unfair to men as it is to women, and maybe even moreso in our emerging service-driven economy.

As the report concludes, we can no longer look at the workplace through the lens of gender. That means approaching every aspect of employment and public policy based on the assumption that men and women have equal responsibility for work and home life. It means recognizing, as have other industrialized nations, that parents need to work and spend time at home to fully support their children. Policies recommended by Ann O’Leary and Karen Kornbluh in “Family Friendly for All Families” include reforming paid family leave and social security retirement benefits, retooling wage and hour laws, and increasing support to families for child care, early education and elder care.

A Woman’s Nation shows the impact of workplace sexism and gender separation spreads far beyond just the lives of women. Its clear policy recommendations would accomplish something we always talk about in this country, something our churches and schools and governmental leaders always say they want, but never seem to accomplish: putting family, in all its glorious and varied compositions, first.

Read A Woman’s Nation.