Women and Work

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the long-standing secondary status of females in the workforce. The paper examines how far women have come and questions whether the current statistics on the employment of women show progress. The paper contends that women are entering the workforce in greater numbers and are finding opportunities that did not exist a few years ago, but overall the disparities still exist. The paper outlines these disparities, explaining that women still make less money than men, still cannot advance as far and are still subject to discrimination and to presumptuous attitudes about why they work, whether they will stay on the job or get married and leave and whether they are as capable as men doing the same job.

From the Paper:

"Women have long been given secondary status in the workplace, with lower pay being one of the signs of this. The pay disparity that exists between men and women has a historical basis rather than a rational one. That is, women have only entered the workforce slowly throughout our history and have been shunted off to lower-paying and dead-end jobs for most of that history. Women at one time were denied the education they would need to perform in any better paying occupations. In addition, women were seen as not needing employment as much as did males. Women were expected to marry and to be supported by their husbands. Women's "proper" work was in the home, and work in the home was not paid. Whether true or not, women who worked outside the home were seen as seeking additional money for the family or as indulging themselves in a hobby, and in either case they could be paid less because they were not the primary breadwinner."

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