As reported by the 밤 알바 Womens and Employment Commission, a shortage of full-time jobs is actually keeping many women out of the workforce. Of course, Most women are not employed in fields that demand so much work hours, or impose such heavy penalties for taking leave. The mere fact that such types of jobs require such long hours probably deters some women–and men–from entering those occupational tracks. Full-time jobs are a disincentive for people who have caregiving obligations, as well as mothers who wish to balance their careers with time for their children.
Despite these obvious successes for telecommuting, flexible work, employers are still blocking mothers from the workplace, failing to address their requests for part-time work. I am frustrated by how many employers are automatically discounting requests for part-time, job-sharing work, never truly considering them.
Economic reasons are the main driving force behind working part-time at a primary job for 38% of prime-age part-timers who work multiple jobs, suggesting these workers are holding down more than one job in order to make more money than a main job could offer. Core-aged women with multiple jobs who are working part time in their main job are half as likely as their single-job counterparts to say child care was a major factor (15 vs. 29 percent). This peaked at age 35-39, when almost half (45%) of women working part time mentioned childcare as a major reason.
Among prime-age workers, contingent workers are more likely than full-time workers to be working part time because of financial reasons (42% vs. 33%) or because of school (19% vs. 9%). Among core-aged workers, the self-employed were more likely to work part time than employees (19% vs. 11%). This difference was especially stark among men, with multi-job holders more than twice as likely as employees to be working part time at a primary job out of personal preference (39% vs. 16%).
For women with younger children who were ages 13 or older, economic reasons and/or personal preferences were the most frequent drivers of working part time. It was assumed that women could potentially work outside of the home prior to marriage, but would wish to return to the domestic sphere as soon as wed. Those middle-class married women who actually sought work in the Great Depression were frequently met with hostility. The notion of middle-class, white, married women working did not truly become socially accepted until the 1940s, with the opening up of large numbers of necessary war jobs to women in 1940. Wikipedia adds that the marriage bar generally affected educated, middle-class married women, especially white women born in the United States.
While they were widespread across the U.S., marriage bars were relaxed in specific geographic areas and times. In the United Kingdom, marriage bars were present for some jobs up to the 1970s, including for the British Geological Survey up to 1975; the marriage bar prevented married women from joining the Civil Service. It was abolished in 1946 for the domestic civil service, and 1973 for the foreign service, before which women had been required to retire on marrying.
To avoid what appears to be discriminatory practices, many employers have used the marriage ban to classify married women as associate employees, instead of full-time. According to Wikipedia, widowed women with children were sometimes still considered to be married, which prevented them from being hired. Marriage bars were designed to preserve not just the opportunities of work for men, but also ensure that unmarried women with no families to support were kept in lower-paying, less-prestigious jobs.
Most of the states bar laws and policies aimed at married, working women were abolished by about 1940, because men were going off to war, leading to the lack of mens labor. Womens work threatened men, who had long held economic power–until Americas own power was threatened by mens absence. Womens labor, as well as its costs, were framed as unimportant and silly, Traflet writes, but they were competing against mens capacity to make money to feed families.
Single women were more likely to take on white-collar jobs and teach, and by the 1930s, these had become seen as womens work. At the same time, new technologies contributed to the increased need for clerical workers, and women increasingly took on those jobs.
As we see, women did not make significant enough inroads into modern work environments for preventions to take hold during most of the twentieth century. African American women were roughly twice as likely as white women at that time to participate in the workforce, in large part because they were more likely to stay in the workforce once married.
The fact that many women left work after marriage reflected cultural norms, the nature of work available to them, and legal restrictions. Lower-class women and women of color, who took jobs in production, food service, and as housemaids, were generally not affected by the marriage bars.
The participation rate of prime-age women working full time peaked in the late 1990s, and now stands at around 76%. The earnings gap between men and women has shrunk considerably, but recently the rate of progress has slowed, with women who are employed full-time still making roughly 17 percent less per week, on average, than men. More than 1 in 10 prime-age female part-timers (14%), held more than one job in 2017, compared with just 5 percent of men who worked full time.
One major contributing factor for the inability of these highly educated women to rise to the top of their occupations and receive equivalent pay is the fact that the highest-paying jobs, such as in law and business, demand longer working weeks and punish taking breaks. There are half a million women hidden in Britain who want to work, have the skills to do it, and an incredible store of experience, but just cannot find jobs that fit into their home lives. Many women want to return to work after having children, but they need a certain amount of flexibility built into their jobs so they can afford to take on a bit of caregiving responsibility: picking children up two days a week, working part-time, working only 20 hours a week, etc.