The Carrying Stones Project combines art and data visualization to jump-start public conversation about women’s work inequity. The works encourage viewers to confront issues of equity, labor, and community by pairing human faces and stories with the numbers behind them.

My large-scale data sculptures, accompanied by poignant photographic portraits of the women whose stories they tell, communicate the diverse and distressing truths about American women’s unpaid/underpaid and unseen labor. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, eldercare, and community volunteerism statistically still default to women, which keeps them from advancing at work and in society. These sculptures document the physical, emotional, and practical effects of these imbalanced burdens.

My works on panel and paper shine a light on the thorny data issues of the gender pay gap, unequal representation of women in higher-paying industries, women in leadership positions, and representation of women in the media — as well as the ways in which women of color and low-wage workers are disproportionately affected.

The artworks from The Carrying Stones Project profile female-identifying people of different ages, races, sexual orientations, occupations, and socio-economic statuses — building a broad yet touchingly intimate picture of the labor that underpins the complex fabric of our society. I choose the women I depict both for their compelling personal work stories and for the larger issues their stories bring up.

It is critical that, as a society, we come to a deeper understanding of the pervasive effects of gendered labor inequity. A gender balanced workforce is better for productivity, innovation, worker happiness, and the economy as a whole, while a gender balanced workload in the home leads to healthier partner and parent-child relationships.