The Superwoman Syndrome: Gender Differences in Attitudes towards Equal Opportunities at Work and towards Domestic Responsibilities at Home

Abstract

The greatest social change over the past two decades has been the increase of women in the labour force. The 1951 Census showed that only 22% of married women were economically active (Hakim 1979) but by 1987, 68% of married women were active (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1987). The total labour force has grown by nearly 3 million since 1971, and most of this increase (approximately 90%) has been among women (Department of Employment 1990). This has been achieved in conjunction with a change in attitudes towards working women. Jowell, Witherspoon and Brook (1988) compare data from a 1965 study of working age women (Hunt 1968) with their 1987 data on British social attitudes. Even in 1965 only a small minority of married women felt that being married disqualified a woman from working. So these attitudes have changed little. However, there has been a fairly radical change in beliefs about women with children. In 1965, 78% of women felt that mothers with children under five should stay at home. By 1980 that proportion had fallen to 62% and by 1987 it had dropped to only 45%. A closer examination of the results of such surveys does highlight some potential anomalies in the attitudes measured. For example, Martin and Roberts (1984), analysing data from the 1980 Women and Employment survey, found that only 25% of women held the view that a woman's place is in the home, yet 46% agreed that a husband's job is to earn money, a wife's job is to care for the home and family. Clearly, the view must be that work for a woman must be accommodated alongside domestic demands and responsibilities. Younger full-time working women and students were found to hold less traditional attitudes, but husbands were repeatedly found to be more traditional than their wives with regard to gender roles at home and work.