Women and Gender in Modern Britain

Introduction

Like others in the Oxford Modern Britain Series, it provides a concise, empirically-based overview of the topic, in historical and comparative context. It is written in an accessible style and brings together in one place a wide range of sources and summary statistics. I would certainly use it for introductory level sociology courses, and would recommend it to more advanced students as a useful short-hand guide to the area and as a route into further reading (Frader, 20-28).

In paid employment, a major social change since the first half of the 20th century has been the growth in economic activity of married women from under 10% in the 1920s to 53% in 1991. This has been accompanied by a gradual decline in the proportion of men in the labour force, such that by 1991, 73% of men of working age were economically active compared with 50% of women. (On figures cited in The Guardian, 22.7.98, 67% are now in paid work.) The overall figures are of course misleading since the main growth in women's employment has been in part-time work (45% of women work part-time), and occupational segregation remains pronounced: clerical, secretarial, personal services and `other elementary' occupations account for over half of women's employment, but only 17% of men's. The increasing entry of women into professional and managerial jobs is resulting in greater polarisation between women, as some, chiefly through higher education, improve their labour market position relative to men. The author speculates on the extent to which the emerging pattern is primarily attributable to women's choices, as Catherine Hakim (1996) has recently argued, or to the constraints of labour market and welfare state `regimes'.

Hakim used labour market and attitudinal data to argue that there are two groups of women, those committed to an employment career and those in part-time and `flexible' work, who are committed to a domestic career. Rosemary Crompton suggests that the patterns reflect women's choices only in the context of significant constraint and societal norms, which allocate principle responsibility for caring and domestic work to women. The case for a theory emphasising constraint is made most effectively by means of cross-national comparisons to show how state policies on welfare, citizenship and fertility shape different gender divisions of labour (Neely, 20-28).

Drawing on Esping Andersen's (1990) analysis of welfare state regimes, and Lewis' (1993) and O'Connor's (1993) feminist critiques, Crompton examines the way in which three dimensions of state policy (welfare provision, support for mothers and equality policies) produce different patterns of women's labour market participation in Britain, France, Norway and the Czech Republic. Thus in France for example, despite later formal sex equality, pro-natalist policies have resulted paradoxically in greater employment equality than in Britain because of the provision of state-funded childcare. In effect, those states which make provision for non-market and caring work tend to provide more genuine `choice' for women about their relationships to paid and unpaid work.

It is concluded that, in European societies at least, the stereotypical ...