Women and men in career: equal opportunities, biased treatment
By: Arthur Hall
Submitted: 2010-04-09 05:11:52 | Word Count: 483
While the number and percentage of women who work for pay have been increasing for over a hundred years, this phenomenon accelerated greatly after World War II. By the end of the 1970s, a majority of women were in the workplace. This paper considers a wide variety of sources, both academic and popular culture such as films, in order to gain an understanding of the reality that takes place in the workplace. For instance, economists at the Urban Institute such as Ralph Smith, Nancy Barrett, and Nancy Gordon called this the “subtle revolution: women at work” in their 1979 book of that name (iii). Barbara Bergmann, professor of economics, has called this “the economic emergence of women” in her 1985 book of that name (iv). Starting the 1970s, working women went from being a minority to a majority of women. At the same time, such factor puts a lot of unconditional pressure on modern females: they have to balance between family life and work, inevitably sacrificing either careers or personal freedom. The film The Devil Wears Prada describes women’s struggling to balance their private lives and careers as well as shows how society views and evaluates career oriented women (The Devil Wears Prada para 1).
Why Did Women Go to Work?
There are several reasons for the entry of women into the workforce. Some of these reasons are economic. The main reason, according to Barbara Bergmann, is that real wages rose because of industrialization, and it became more valuable for women to work for a wage than to stay home and serve the family (14). This is an important fact to note because politicians and the media tend to obfuscate the underlying economics of women’s behavior in favor of cultural and psychological explanations. Women went to work because they needed money: either they had no husband, an unemployed husband, or a low-wage earner husband. (Sorensen 22) The growth of white-collar and service jobs that did not require brute strength made more jobs available to women. Women had more education by the end of the 1970s and better career prospects. Certain social changes also explain women’s entry into the paid workforce. Women were having fewer children by the 1970s and so needed to spend less time at home. It had become more socially acceptable to combine motherhood and work. Six million women went to work during World War II, even mothers of preschool children. This gave legitimacy to married women working (Sorensen 23). Many women wanted to maintain the identity that they had established outside the house. There were rising family aspirations to join the middle class.
The cr
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ucial change in women’s participation in the labor force is that most married women now work. The change from minority status to majority status of married women working for pay came in the 1970s.
