BRITAIN

The Influence Of Gender On Life Chances In Britain Today

The Influence Of Gender On Life Chances In Britain Today

Women have continued to play an increasingly important role in the labour market in Britain. Leaving aside those who were retired, only just over half (55 per cent) of women interviewed by the 1989 British Social Attitudes survey were in paid employment. Now just over two-thirds (68 per cent) are. Over the same period the proportion of non-retired men in employment has if anything decreased, from 84 per cent to 81 per cent. Women are still less likely to be in employment than men, but the gap has closed significantly.

In the not too distant past, it was assumed that women had different attitudes to paid employment as compared to men. Historically, research on women as employees implicitly incorporated the assumptions of the 'breadwinner' model, in that whereas men's social positioning and identity has been assumed to be primarily shaped by their breadwinning role women's 'central life interest'(Courant, 2008) has been seen as having more of a focus on family life. In contemporary research, this rather simplistic approach has long been transcended.

Nevertheless, the assumption still persists that women's 'orientations to work' are, in aggregate, different to those of men, and that the majority of women will give priority to their families when seeking employment.

As women become an increasingly important element of the labour force, are these assumptions still correct? Are they also less committed to work and to employment in a more general sense? Moreover, the increasing involvement of women in the labour market has focused attention on the relationship between the world of work and the domestic world. There has been increasing concern about 'work-life balance', (Cooke, 2008) that is, in ensuring that the demands of work do not impact adversely on domestic and family life - and vice-versa. These topics were investigated using data on attitudes to work collected on the 1989, 1997 and 2005 British Social Attitudes survey.

Past survey evidence suggested that, even in the 1980s, women were less 'committed' to work than men, being less likely to say that they would continue to work even if they had 'enough money to live comfortably on for the rest of their lives'. However, by the 1990s, a substantial change had taken place in women's commitment to paid work, and just under 70% of men and women were giving positive answers to this question. The three BSA surveys demonstrate that this gendered 'commitment gap' has not disappeared and women continue to express the same - indeed, if anything, a slightly greater - level of non-financial employment commitment as men do.

Moreover, women are working longer hours - although they still work fewer hours than men. A third of full-time women now work for more than 40 hours a week, and amongst part-time women, only a half now work for less than 20 hours a week, as compared to 64% who did so in 1997. Although men's working hours have actually fallen slightly, this ...