From the New Internationalist
July 1980
1980: Everywhere women still work longer for less.
This is an article written by Eve Hall in the new Internationalist in 1980 - 20 years ago. Has the situation of women in the developed world improved enough since then? If not then why not?
One of the greatest economic and social changes of the post-war years has gone largely unnoticed. It is that more and more women are going out to work. Today in the United States, in Japan and in the United Kingdom, almost 40 per cent of the work force is female.
In theory this should mean that women are becoming better-off, liberated, equal. But in practice it is a different story.
Most women now work far longer hours than men - in factory, shop or office as well as in the home as cook, cleaner, child rearer, shopper and homemaker. This 'double burden' means that the average woman who goes out to work is now putting in an 80-hour working week - twice as long as most men.
So equality depends not only on women sharing in paid employment but also on men sharing in the tasks of the home. At the moment husbands in all industrialised countries contribute very little to domestic work and recent research shows that this contribution does not increase when the wife goes out to work. American researcher Joan Vanek, for example, found that the average father in the United States spends only 12 minutes a day with his children. Overall, women's unpaid work in the U.S.A. is estimated at about 40 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product.
But even in the work-place itself, women's wages are everywhere lower than men's. In the U.K., women are paid an average of 25 per cent less. In the U.S.A., they are paid 40 per cent less. And this is despite equal pay legislation in most industrialised countries.
The reasons why women earn less than men go deeper than legislation. And again the main cause is the 'double burden' of home responsibilities which means that many women have to take part-time jobs, or less demanding jobs, and that they have less time for training and less opportunity for promotion.
As children, girls are educated and conditioned either for no employment at all or for more menial and lower-paidjobs. As workers, they are crowded into industries like textiles, food, clothing, retailing - where they compete with each other for low-paid and insecure jobs which require little skill or training and offer little chance of promotion. A recent survey in Sweden shows that women have a choice of about 25 different occupations whereas a man chooses from over 300 careers. Indeed certain countries, says the OECD, 'have come to rely on a supply of female labour which costs little and enjoys little protection'.
The result of this inequality is that women have more than their fair share of poverty. And particularly hard-hit are the families dependent on a woman's earnings.
Single parent families are increasing in almost every industrialised country. In Britain at least 600,000 families are now headed by single mothers and the number is growing by 6 per cent a year. The main cause is the rise in divorce rates which have doubled in many countries (including both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.) during the last 15 years.
It is these single-parent families, says the International Labour Organisation, 'which make up the fastest rising group in any classification of the poor population. Even after the receipt of benefits, the incidence of poverty is only just below that of pensioners and is much higher than in any other group.
As the ILO notes, pensioners are the poorest social group in the industrialised world. But here too it is the women who are worst off - partly because they tend to live longer than men and partly because inequality during their working lives is reflected in reduced pensions. In the United States, for example, the 8 million women who are over the age of 65 make up by far the poorest group of people in America - with almost half of them living below the official poverty line.
For women at work, the final irony is that the trades unions - which have done so much to improve the pay, conditions and benefits of work forces in the industrialised world - are also dominated by men. In America's garment industry, 80 per cent of the union members are women but 21 of the 22 member board of the union are men. In New Zealand only 15 of the country's 323 unions have any women executives despite the fact that women carry over a third of all union membership cards.
The first half of the U.N. Decade for Women (1975-80) has now gone and the vast majority of women in the industrialised countries have seen little or no benefit. Equal-pay legislation in almost all industrialised countries has been one of the big achievements of these five years. The task for the next five years is to achieve equal work which will give substance to equal pay. The biggest barrier is that working women now do two jobs. And overcoming that barrier is as much of a challenge to men as it is to women.
Eve Hall
July 1980
1980: Everywhere women still work longer for less.
This is an article written by Eve Hall in the new Internationalist in 1980 - 20 years ago. Has the situation of women in the developed world improved enough since then? If not then why not?
One of the greatest economic and social changes of the post-war years has gone largely unnoticed. It is that more and more women are going out to work. Today in the United States, in Japan and in the United Kingdom, almost 40 per cent of the work force is female.
In theory this should mean that women are becoming better-off, liberated, equal. But in practice it is a different story.
Most women now work far longer hours than men - in factory, shop or office as well as in the home as cook, cleaner, child rearer, shopper and homemaker. This 'double burden' means that the average woman who goes out to work is now putting in an 80-hour working week - twice as long as most men.
So equality depends not only on women sharing in paid employment but also on men sharing in the tasks of the home. At the moment husbands in all industrialised countries contribute very little to domestic work and recent research shows that this contribution does not increase when the wife goes out to work. American researcher Joan Vanek, for example, found that the average father in the United States spends only 12 minutes a day with his children. Overall, women's unpaid work in the U.S.A. is estimated at about 40 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product.
But even in the work-place itself, women's wages are everywhere lower than men's. In the U.K., women are paid an average of 25 per cent less. In the U.S.A., they are paid 40 per cent less. And this is despite equal pay legislation in most industrialised countries.
The reasons why women earn less than men go deeper than legislation. And again the main cause is the 'double burden' of home responsibilities which means that many women have to take part-time jobs, or less demanding jobs, and that they have less time for training and less opportunity for promotion.
As children, girls are educated and conditioned either for no employment at all or for more menial and lower-paidjobs. As workers, they are crowded into industries like textiles, food, clothing, retailing - where they compete with each other for low-paid and insecure jobs which require little skill or training and offer little chance of promotion. A recent survey in Sweden shows that women have a choice of about 25 different occupations whereas a man chooses from over 300 careers. Indeed certain countries, says the OECD, 'have come to rely on a supply of female labour which costs little and enjoys little protection'.
The result of this inequality is that women have more than their fair share of poverty. And particularly hard-hit are the families dependent on a woman's earnings.
Single parent families are increasing in almost every industrialised country. In Britain at least 600,000 families are now headed by single mothers and the number is growing by 6 per cent a year. The main cause is the rise in divorce rates which have doubled in many countries (including both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.) during the last 15 years.
It is these single-parent families, says the International Labour Organisation, 'which make up the fastest rising group in any classification of the poor population. Even after the receipt of benefits, the incidence of poverty is only just below that of pensioners and is much higher than in any other group.
As the ILO notes, pensioners are the poorest social group in the industrialised world. But here too it is the women who are worst off - partly because they tend to live longer than men and partly because inequality during their working lives is reflected in reduced pensions. In the United States, for example, the 8 million women who are over the age of 65 make up by far the poorest group of people in America - with almost half of them living below the official poverty line.
For women at work, the final irony is that the trades unions - which have done so much to improve the pay, conditions and benefits of work forces in the industrialised world - are also dominated by men. In America's garment industry, 80 per cent of the union members are women but 21 of the 22 member board of the union are men. In New Zealand only 15 of the country's 323 unions have any women executives despite the fact that women carry over a third of all union membership cards.
The first half of the U.N. Decade for Women (1975-80) has now gone and the vast majority of women in the industrialised countries have seen little or no benefit. Equal-pay legislation in almost all industrialised countries has been one of the big achievements of these five years. The task for the next five years is to achieve equal work which will give substance to equal pay. The biggest barrier is that working women now do two jobs. And overcoming that barrier is as much of a challenge to men as it is to women.
Eve Hall
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