Women in the workplace—the unfinished revolution: "society has not focused on the need to provide alternative types of care, particularly for children and the elderly, during the time that caregivers are employed." - American Thought

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Nov, 2003 by Myra H. Strober

AMONG THE MANY remarkable upheavals of the 20th century, the huge increase in women's employment stands out. The shift of women to paid labor has led to a widespread transformation of the traditional rules and practices of daily life, not only at workplaces, but in families. As work and family changed, there were reverberations throughout society. The roles women play today would be unrecognizable to our forebears of 100 years ago.

Still, for all the change, the revolution remains incomplete. The arithmetic is simple--if women's jobs require 30, 40 or more hours a week, they cannot spend those same hours caring for their families. Society has not focused on the need to provide alternative types of care, particularly for children and the elderly, during the time that caregivers are employed. To finish the revolulion, new institutions and new arrangements are in order.

In 1900, 20% of workforce women were married. Only in minority, immigrant, or destitute families were married women likely to be engaged in paid work. Employed mothers were even rarer. Over the course of the next 100 years, though, a variety of forces drew additional females, including mothers of very young children, into the labor force.

Throughout the last century, employers particularly sought women for several rapidly growing occupations, including clerical duties, teaching, and nursing. These were jobs that men usually declined, in part because they were relatively low paying and offered little chance for advancement, and in part because they were stigmatized as "women's work." At the same time, more and more women completed the high school or college degrees necessary to hold these jobs. In the last 25 years, fields have opened up that virtually had been closed to females and vast numbers were educated in law, medicine, business, and engineering. Women's earnings increased commensurate with their education, making employment even more attractive.

Women became interested in paid employment because, as the economy became more complex, they and their family members began to want new products and services. This required additional income. For example, as medical advances were made, women no longer found it sufficient to provide nursing care directly to their seriously ill children as their mothers and grandmothers had done. They needed income to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medications. In later years, they wanted medical benefits that crone with being employed.

In the latter part of the century, women found yet another reason to seek paid work. Specializing in childrearing and homemaking became too risky. In a climate where half of all marriages ended in divorce, and one out of three children spent a part of his or her childhood in a single-parent home, wives no longer could trust that their husbands would support them financially "'til death do us part." Some women also saw paid employment as insurance in case they wanted to initiate a divorce or leave an abusive or loveless marriage. As single mothers increased in number, they, too, found their way into the job market.

By the end of the century, women had come to see paid work as a standard part of their lives, even if they were married and raising young children. As of 2000, 61% of women over the age of 16 were in the work-force (as compared to 74% of men), including nearly 80% of mothers with kids aged six to 18, almost 75% of mothers with children aged three to five, and slightly more than 50% of mothers with infants. These figures reflect an extraordinary change throughout the entire century, particularly over the past 30 years. For example, in 1970, about 25% of mothers with a child under the age of three were in the labor force.

As each woman with a family came into the workforce, she made private arrangements for the care of her children or other relatives. In some cases, particularly where the woman earned a high salary, she could hire multiple replacements for her previously unpaid caregiving with good results. However, in the vast majority of cases, relying on private arrangements is difficult, as many families do not have sufficient income. Moreover, solutions to work-family balance require systemic changes--new types of institutions to provide care and new rules and practices at the work-place--that cannot be created privately one family at a time.

At the forefront of these new institutions are childcare centers, slightly more than half of which are run by private nonprofit agencies, and a little less than half by for-profit businesses. Employer--provided childcare represents a very small share. Among preschoolers with working mothers, around one-third are enrolled in childcare centers, about 15% are in family daycare homes, and approximately five percent are cared for by nannies. That leaves around 48% under the care of a relative. Sometimes, a combination of arrangements is necessary, stressing out parents as they monitor multiple caregivers and deliver children to and from severed sites each week. Some mothers and fathers are forced to work separate shifts, a solution that often is tough to sustain and results in a straining of the parents' relationship.