Women in the workforce
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Until modern industrialized times, legal and cultural practices, combined with the inertia of longstanding religious and educational traditions, have restricted women's entry and participation in the workforce. A traditional dependency upon menfolk, and consequently the poor socio-economic status of women have also restricted their entry into the workforce. Particularly as occupations have become professionalized over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, women's meagre access to higher education has effectively excluded them from the practice of well-paid and high status occupations. Entry of women into the higher professions like law and medicine was delayed in most countries due to women being denied entry to universities and qualification for degrees. For example, Cambridge University only fully validated degrees for women late in 1947, and even then only after much opposition and acrimonious debate. Such factors have all conspired to confine women to low-paid and poor status occupations for most of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Restrictions on women's access to and participation in the workforce include the wage gap and the glass ceiling, inequities most identified with industrialized nations with nominal equal opportunity laws; legal and cultural restrictions on access to education and jobs, inequities most identified with developing nations; and unequal access to capital, variable but identified as a difficulty in both industrialized and developing nations.
Although access to paying occupations (the "workforce") has been and remains unequal in many occupations and places around the world, scholars sometimes distinguish "work" from "paying work". Analyses distinguishing between unpaid work and paying work have led to the frequently cited slogan "Women do two-thirds of the world's work, receive 10 percent of the world's income, and own 1 percent of the means of production", which has come to capture the imbalance between work and remuneration faced by women. This analysis considers uncompensated household labor — for instance, childcare, eldercare, and family subsistence farming — as well as compensated work in the workforce.
See also
- Feminisation of the workplace
- Rosie the Riveter
- Women's history
- Women's empowerment
- Women's rights
- Women's studies
- Gender studies
- Workplace discrimination, Occupational sexism, and Glass ceiling
- Labor history
- Educational Inequality
- Timeline of women's rights (other than voting)
- Motherhood penalty
- Supervising Women Workers (short social guidance film)
- Western dress codes
Women's participation in different occupations
thumb|A news anchor going live on TV in Poland Below is a list of encyclopedia articles that detail women's historical involvement in various occupations.
- Sciences – See generally Women in science and List of female scientists
- Women in computing (see also Women in the Information Age research project)
- Women in engineering
- Women in geology
- List of female mathematicians
- Medical professions – See generally Women in medicine
- Legal professions – See generally Women in the United States judiciary
- Although women comprise approximately half of the students enrolled in American law schools, they represent only 17% of partners at major law firms and less than a quarter of tenured law professors. Similarly, in the United States, there has been only one female attorney general, three female secretaries of state, two women Supreme Court justices, and one acting solicitor general.
- Arts, writing, media, sports and entertainment
- Women artists (visual arts)
- Women Surrealists
- Performing arts
- Vulcana Women's Circus (organization for women in the circus)
- Writing
- Film
- List of female film and television directors
- Women's cinema (discusses women screenwriters & directors)
- Music
- Sports
- Humanities
- Crime: Women in piracy
- Government: Women in politics
- Military
- Women in the military
- Women in the military by country, in Europe, and in the Americas
- History of women in the military; Timeline of women in ancient warfare; Timeline of Women in Medieval warfare
- List of women warriors in folklore, literature, and popular culture
- Category:Female military personnel
- Women's Land Army