Woman and paid work : issues of equality

This book brings together the results of a two-year programme of research funded by the Equal Opportunities Commission which explored the wealth of national statistical material hidden away in a variety of large social surveys conducted in Britain over the period 1965 to 1981. The researchers pooled a variety of skills-statistical, computing, data interpretation and policy formulation to generate this well-argued analysis of the obstacles towards further progress in the elimination of gender-based differences in employment status.
The present labour force position of women has not been reached through a continuous process which simply sped up during the last twenty or thirty years. During the twentieth century alone, the relative importance of paid employment in women's lives has fluctuated markedly. Any belief that the work of women during the First World War would quickly alter social attitudes and begin the march of progress towards greater labour market equality was soon belied by the experience of the inter-war years. Nor did their Second World War contribution produce a radical rethinking of the position of women. The exigencies of war rather than the possibilities of peace seemed to dominate: the married women in Beveridge's welfare state were expected to return to motherhood with only a small minority pursu ing gainful employment. What rescued women from a regression to the past was not a cultural change born of war-time experience but the rising demand for labour in the post-war boom. By the time the British economy again experienced unemployment on the scale of the inter-war years, the position of women had altered and a ratchet of changed social attitudes and economic convenience appeared to be in place to defend it.