History Of Women's Work Research Articles

Women in Banking: Continuity and Change Since the Second World War

Employment relations in the major clearing banks have been the subject of sociological attention since the 1950s, when they presented the apparent epitome of the bureaucratic career. However, the banks have increasingly become major employers of female labour. Women in banks have not historically had the same career opportunities as men, for a variety of reasons ranging from deliberate male exclusion practices to the broken and often short-term nature of many women's work histories. This contrast between the experiences of men and women in the same occupation is used to question the `conventional view' of occupational class analysis, where the (male) occupational structure is treated as if it were the `class structure'. The argument is developed using a number of sources, including the occupational history of a female bank employee with over thirty years work experience, as well as the findings of recent equal opportunities investigations.

Women returning to paid employment

Using data from the 1975/76 National Training Survey, this paper investigates some aspects of women's working lives. An attempt is made to control for life-cycle effects in order to investigate the extent to which the pattern of women's work histories has changed in younger cohorts. Particular attention is paid to the phenomenon of returning to the labour market after a period of withdrawal. This return is often accompanied by a phase of part-time employment and evidence is presented to suggest that there is widespread mismatching between a woman's training and the skill requirements of the job to which she returns. The paper concludes with a discussion of the policy implications of the findings.

Women's Work Histories: An Analysis of the Women and Employment Survey

Women's Work Histories: An Analysis of the Women and Employment Survey

Book Review: Labor Economics: Labor Markets: Women's Work Histories: An Analysis of the Women and Employment Survey

Book Review: Labor Economics: Labor Markets: Women's Work Histories: An Analysis of the Women and Employment Survey

Women's Work Expectations and Labor-Market Experience in Early and Middle Family Life-Cycle Stages

Two issues are addressed in this research: the effect of work expectations for age 35 on labor-market attachment during childrearing years, and the extent to which work expectations interacted with changes in women's sociodemographic characteristics to influence the extent of employment. The National Longitudinal Survey of the Labor Market Experiences of Young Women is used in estimating the work history of women in the sample. Findings indicate that employment expectations significantly increased the length of women's employment and that the effects of marital and fertility variables differed considerably for those who planned employment for midlife and those who did not. The implications of these and other findings are discussed in the context of major demographic and economic change that occurred over the 1970s.

Work History Analysis, Women and Large Scale Data Sets

This paper describes the methods and concepts which were developed during an analysis of women's work histories contained in a recent large-scale source, the Women and Employment Survey. Large scale longitudinal data are relatively rare in social science although more sources are becoming available but the techniques and methods of approaching such data are lagging behind. The concepts described here were developed in the context of a specific type of work history but they are thought to have general relevance to these data, as are the methods of approach which are also described. The main approach was to classify individuals' longitudinal employment experiences aided by inspection and computer graphical displays. This single variable can be used subsequently in multivariate analyses of the large scale data set. This method provides a micro foundation to macro-sociology or economics.