Employment of Women

III

American Working Women

Much of colonial America was agrarian, and most women worked the land alongside men. Even after the American Revolution, many women continued to make economic contributions by farming and tending domestic animals.

By the early 19th century the factory system had spread to the U.S. The first cotton factory was built in 1814, and by 1850 some 24 percent of manufacturing workers were women. They produced clothing, shoes, cigars, and other items. In the Northeast, newly arrived immigrant women with little education or command of the English language became the permanent factory force. In the South, black women moved into factory and domestic jobs, first as slaves and later as free workers. A home-work system, similar to the putting-out system, kept many women employed in home manufacturing enterprises for meager pay.

By 1890 nearly 4 million women in the U.S. worked for pay. This represented 18 percent of the female population aged 14 and over and 17 percent of the total workforce. Half the female workers were under 25 years of age, and seven out of ten were single. The majority worked in domestic service, teaching positions, and textile factories; only about 5 percent were secretaries, clerks, or salespersons.

A

White-Collar Employment

The early 1900s were marked by a striking change in the growth and composition of the white-collar workforce in the U.S. As a result of urbanization and the availability of public education, more middle-class women joined the labor force, primarily as teachers and nurses. With the growing use of the typewriter in business, women filled more than 75 percent of typist jobs by 1900. At the same time, 29 percent of telephone and telegraph workers were women. Like the majority of all women in the workforce, female white-collar workers were young, single (teachers were required to quit when they married), and paid less than male workers, but they were also native-born and educated. This concentration of women in low-paying white-collar jobs has persisted throughout the 20th century.

---

---

B

Legislation

Two types of legislation have directly affected women workers in the U.S.: protective legislation and antidiscrimination, or equal opportunity, legislation. Protective laws were developed in the early industrial era to guard women and children from exploitation by limiting the number of hours and shifts they could work, the weights they were required to lift, and the minimum wage they could be paid. See also Child Labor.

Massachusetts established a commission in 1912 to determine minimum-wage schedules for women and children. In 1938 the federal government passed the Fair Labor Standards Act, setting maximum working hours and minimum wages for persons engaged in or producing goods for interstate commerce. Coverage has been extended over the years, and in 1974 it was amended to include domestic employees.

In the 1960s protective legislation for women was nullified by antidiscrimination policies. Through legislation, executive orders, and judicial decisions, equal opportunity for women in employment and education became a federal goal. This goal was first expressed in the Equal Pay Act (1963), an amendment to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibited wage discrimination, based on sex, in public or private employment. Current legislation applies to nonprofessional (wage and salary workers), professional, executive, and administrative employees.

Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extended the prohibition against sex discrimination to include not only wages, but also job classification, assignment, promotion, and training. A 1978 amendment required employers to treat pregnancy in the same way as any other disability. In 1986 the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that sexual harassment of an employee violates the civil rights law. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission administers Title VII regarding sexual harassment. Various executive orders, enforced by the Labor Department, prohibited sex discrimination by companies receiving government contracts and established guidelines for employers to take affirmative action to recruit, hire, train, and promote women. Enthusiasm for such aggressive enforcement activities diminished under the conservative administration of President Ronald Reagan.

Family responsibilities are clearly related to women's equal employment opportunities. The U.S. has no federal child-care policy, but several government programs do affect child care. Six major programs, including Head Start and the Work Incentive Program, are targeted for low-income families; during the Reagan presidency, however, these programs were squeezed by increasing federal budget pressures. A tax credit for work-related child-care expenses is claimed mainly by middle- and upper-income families.

IV

Current Trends in the United States

In 2000 almost 63 million women, aged 16 and over, were employed, representing 47 percent of the total workforce. Three-fifths (60 percent) of all women over 16 years of age were employed; 66 percent of all black women and 68 percent of all Hispanic women were in the labor force. Some 68 percent of the working women were married with husbands present, and 72 percent of these women had children under 18 years of age. Working mothers with children under 6 years old more than tripled from 1960 to 2000.

Despite the increasing number of working women and more than a quarter century of equal opportunity legislation, women in the early 2000s, as in 1900, were concentrated in a few types of jobs and generally earned less than men. Some 23 percent of the employed women were administrative support workers, and 18 percent were in the low-paid service occupations. Women were further segregated within certain occupations and industries: 99 percent of secretaries, 98 percent of family childcare providers, 97 percent of receptionists, 96 percent of private household workers, 93 percent of registered nurses, 90 percent of bank tellers, and 64 percent of retail sales clerks were women. Statistics show that employees in clothing and textile industries, telephone communication, health services, and local education were predominantly women.

American women today are holding paid jobs of greater diversity than ever before. In the last two decades many more women have entered the new high-technology industries; by 1998, for example, 31 percent of all computer programmers, and 28 percent of all computer systems analysts and scientists were women. Women are also making slow but steady progress in entering nontraditional fields such as engineering and construction work, professions such as medicine and law, and elected and appointed political positions.

Women continue to be paid less for their labor than men. In 2001 women's median annual full-time earnings were 28 percent less than men's earnings. Women in professional jobs earned 70 cents and saleswomen earned 60 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. One reason for this disparity is that a relatively small number of women hold top-level (and high-paying) jobs, even in such fields as social work, library work, and teaching, in which they greatly outnumber men. Even when they do the same kind of work at the same level, they are frequently paid less than men. Women are also more likely to work part time or to be unemployed. Women in minority groups remained the lowest paid, reflecting the impact of race and sex discrimination.

In 2000, 11.5 percent of the total female labor force belonged to unions, representing 41 percent of all labor union members. Union organization generally reflected the segregation of the marketplace. The majority of women were concentrated in a few unions. More than 80 percent of the members of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union and the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (see UNITE HERE: International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union) are women. Although women in blue-collar jobs are most likely to be union members, white-collar employment is currently the fastest-growing area of union organizing, as teachers, nurses, clerks, and others in both the public and private sectors try to improve their wages and working conditions. See Trade Unions in the United States.

Many policymakers now believe that the major problem for working women is not equal pay for equal work or equal access to jobs—although both are important—but the undervaluation of work traditionally done by women. The concept of “equal pay for comparable work” challenges current job evaluation procedures and implies added payroll expenses for employers.

V

Working Women in Other Nations

Despite the fact that women constitute more than one-third of the world's labor force, in general they remain concentrated in a limited number of traditional occupations, many of which do not require highly technical qualifications and most of which are low paid. According to data from the International Labor Organization, however, as countries become industrialized, more women obtain jobs in more occupations.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain