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In 1996, Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), more commonly known as the Welfare-to-Work Bill, in an attempt to reform the welfare system in the United States. As Cohen (1998) argues, 'Work First' initiatives were enacted in most states with the primary focus being centered on getting welfare recipients to go to work - any type of work. This piece of legislation has had significant impact on adult and vocational educators in the United States, and countless documents, reports and journal articles have been published for adult and vocational educators given the responsibility for developing programs to help welfare recipients make the transition into work. What is lacking in the research literature, however, is any critical examination of the way work itself is conceptualized in this legislative act. In this paper, we examine how the lack of attention to the gendered division of labor, the gendered meaning of work, and the gendered implications of work on the material realities of people's lives, has serious and detrimental consequences for women.