Sawyer Rose MRSS

The Carrying Stones Project combines art and data 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 women’s unpaid/underpaid and unseen labor.

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.

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.