Contribution
Over the last 50 years, women’s contribution to paid employment has increased while men’s has declined. Women have cracked the glass ceiling by occupying positions of power and responsibility in the public and private spheres, workplaces are less segregated, and men have become more involved in childcare. The Economist even claimed that a “quiet revolution” has taken place as women are gradually “taking over the workplace”. However, a more careful analysis suggests this claim is premature and three key challenges remain: employment segregation, the gender pay gap and the gender division of labour between paid and unpaid work.
Nearly all workplaces are more gender-balanced than 50 years ago, but progress towards equality has been slow and uneven. Women represent 20 per cent of FTSE 100 board directors but only four are chief executives. Women are under-represented among the top 10 per cent of earners and vastly over-represented among the low-paid. This situation is not improving as there are now three times more young women in low-paid jobs than 20 years ago. Women’s low pay is linked to their concentration in the three Cs – caring (82 per cent female), clerking (77 per cent female) and cashiering (63 per cent female); while men are more likely to be managers and senior officials (77 per cent male), process, plant and machine operatives (89 per cent male) and in ‘skilled’ trades (90 per cent male).
Yet this does not explain why women are valued differently. Feminist economists have challenged conventional economic theory linking pay to marginal productivity, pointing out that productivity is not an appropriate measure for labour-intensive relational work, such as care work, where the input is also the output and productivity increases are limited unless the character of the work is profoundly changed. Parallels are drawn with William Baumol’s notion of technologically unprogressive sectors epitomised by the problem of increasing the productivity of a string quartet. Even the Coalition Government turned back from increasing the number of toddlers for each care worker to six; and private sector providers struggle to make profit except by paying low wages and exacerbating labour market disadvantage among women, migrants and ethnic minorities. The fact that care work is so low paid is even more surprising given the value people place on their children and parents, and expenditure on care generates social benefits in the form of better educated citizens with social skills of communication and trust.
Another puzzle is why do women disproportionately ‘choose’ low-paid jobs? It is unlikely that, as a group, women simply prefer such employment but more likely that they face external constraints that limit their options. One barrier is cultural bias, which associates particular jobs with particular stereotypical characteristics. For example, leadership and authority become equated with white men who then shape the notion of leadership as male and white. Likewise, aptitudes for care work are equated with women, who are believed to have the necessary and ‘natural’ predisposition.
In this way occupations become stereotyped. People are reluctant to transgress by entering supposedly gender-incongruent occupations. Occupational segregation is therefore one of the strongest influences on career choice.
A further constraint relates to the uneven gender division of domestic work and caring. While the gap in employment rates for women with and without children has narrowed, motherhood remains a key constraint to employment, while fatherhood has the opposite effect. The employment of women in households with dependent children is lower than those without, whereas the employment of men in households with dependent children is higher than those without.
According to the Office of National Statistics’ analysis of employment patterns of parents, only 30 per cent of mothers and 82 per cent of fathers work full-time, whereas 37 per cent of mothers and only 6 per cent of fathers work part-time.
In the UK context with a comparatively long working hours culture, there is much scope for a more equal division of paid and unpaid work. Looking at average minutes a day dedicated to paid and unpaid work, this points to a persisting gender gap with men spending more time in the paid economy (259 minutes) than women (169 minutes), but women spending more time in the unpaid economic activities (258 minutes) than men (141 minutes). The UK is not unique in this respect, as data for 18 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries show that men and women who are in paid employment spend less time in childcare than parents who are not in paid employment. While non-employed fathers spend 51 minutes on care a day (only 11 minutes more than fathers in employment), mothers double their caring time from 74 to 144 minutes a day when they are not in paid employment. Fathers’ substantially lower contribution to childcare than mothers’, whatever their employment status, is evidence of the persistence of the traditional gender division of labour.
Notably, the total amount of work (paid and unpaid) tends to be higher for women. Putting a number on the economic contribution on unpaid household work is thus important to assess the actual effort that sustains the market economy. That number is substantial even if we only consider a subset of unpaid household work, namely informal adult and child care. In the UK such valuations have been included in household satellite accounts calculated for 2000 and 2010 by the ONS. According to these estimates, the value of informal adult care in 2010 was equivalent to 4.2 per cent of GDP (£61.7bn) while the estimated value of unpaid childcare was equivalent to as much as 23 per cent of GDP (£343bn).
Symmetry
In some ways there is now greater symmetry between women’s and men’s lives, but the convergence has been principally one-sided, with women being partially assimilated into the largely unmodified masculinised model of working to a greater extent than men have been assimilated into the feminised world of domestic work and care. This asymmetric convergence contributes to enduring disadvantages for women in the labour market, the extent of which varies by social class and ethnicity and leads to an under-estimation of their contribution to the economy as currently defined.
Forming an accurate picture of women’s contribution requires an expanded concept of the economy incorporating paid and unpaid labour. This would go some way towards correcting for the invisibility of women’s input. Addressing the further problems of the unequal distribution of men and women between paid and unpaid labour, the gender division of labour within these spheres, and the over- and under-valuation of what women and men do, remain key concerns. To value and reward women’s and men’s real contributions, equality legislation and company policies are essential but need strengthening through other measures, including greater state support for child and elder care, properly paid paternity and maternity leave, quotas, and pay audits.
Professor Diane Perrons is director and Dr Ania Plomien is an assistant professor of the Gender Institute at the London School of Economics LSE
Key points
- Over the last 50 years, women’s contribution to paid employment has increased while men’s has declined.
- Nearly all workplaces are more gender-balanced than 50 years ago, but progress towards equality has been slow and uneven.
- Occupational segregation is one of the strongest influences on career choice.
