Today, more American women than ever before stay in the workforce into their sixties and seventies. This trend emerged in the 1980s, and has persisted during the past three decades, despite substantial changes in macroeconomic conditions. Why is this so? Today’s older American women work full-time jobs at greater rates than women in other developed countries. In Women Working Longer, editors Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz assemble new research that presents fresh insights on the phenomenon of working longer. Their findings suggest that education and work experience earlier in life are connected to women’s later-in-life work. Other contributors to the volume investigate additional factors that may play a role in late-life labor supply, such as marital disruption, household finances, and access to retirement benefits. A pioneering study of recent trends in older women’s labor force participation, this collection offers insights valuable to a wide array of social scientists, employers, and policy makers.

"Stories about women in the workforce permeate newspapers, magazines--virtually all media formats devoted to news and commentary in contemporary society. Women's movement into the paid workforce has transformed their lives--and those of their families-and has in many ways reshaped society. This book takes a holistic view of the economic lives of women in the workforce"--

In the first half of the nineteenth century the main employments open to young women in Britain were in teaching, dressmaking, textile manufacture and domestic service. After 1850, however, young women began to enter previously all-male areas like medicine, pharmacy, librarianship, the civil service, clerical work and hairdressing, or areas previously restricted to older women like nursing, retail work and primary school teaching. This book examines the reasons for this change. The author argues that the way femininity was defined in the first half of the century blinded employers in the new industries to the suitability of young female labour. This definition of femininity was, however, contested by certain women who argued that it not only denied women the full use of their talents but placed many of them in situations of economic insecurity. This was a particular concern of the Womens Movement in its early decades and their first response was a redefinition of feminity and the promotion of academic education for girls. The author demonstrates that as a result of these efforts, employers in the areas targeted began to see the advantages of employing young women, and young women were persuaded that working outside the home would not endanger their femininity.

In the present stage of international capitalist development, women are increasingly being drawn into paid employment by multinational and state investment in the Third World. This volume investigates the interrelations between women's participation in the urban wage economy and their productive and reproductive roles in the household and family. It brings together a selection of important recent research on all major regions of the developing world by leading scholars in this emerging field. It argues that the household itself is an important determinant of the character and timing of women's labour force participation, and it assesses the extent to which family patterns can be expected to change as women increasingly work outside the home.

Dr Hakim tests the power of patriarchy theory against economic and psychophysiology theories. Sex discrimination, part-time work, flexible hours, homeworking, marriage and career patterns, labour mobility, labour turnover and the impact of the European Union are all considered. Analysis of the grand sweep of history over the last century, based on large national surveys, is complemented by case studies of people working in occupations undergoing change and their resistance to it. Throughout the book comparisons are drawn between Britain, the USA, and other European countries and also China, Japan and other Far Eastern societies. The analysis draws on sociology, economics, psychology, labour law, history and anthropology to conclude that female heterogeneity is increasing, explaining the growing polarisation of women's employment and many contradictory research results

"By analyzing the process of work in both the electrical and the automobile industries, the supplies of male and female labor available to each, the varying degrees of labor-intensive work, the proportion of labor costs to total costs, and the extent of male resistance to female entry into the industry before, during, and after the war, Milkman offers a historically grounded and detailed examination of the evolution, function, and reproduction of job segregation by sex." -- Journal of American History "Analytic sophistication is coupled with a powerfully rendered narrative: the reader strides briskly along, enjoying one provocative insight after another while simultaneously absorbed by the drama of the events." -- Women's Review of Books

In order to determine whether methods of job analysis and classification currently used are biased by traditional sex stereotypes or other factors, a committee assessed formal systems of job evaluation and other methods currently employed in the private and public sectors for establishing the comparability of jobs and their levels of compensation. A review of sociological and economic literature shows that some differences in the characteristics of workers and in jobs do form a legitimate basis for wage differentials. Nevertheless, there exists a pervasiveness of occupational and job segregation by sex. Given the current operation of the labor market and the existence of a variety of factors that permit the persistence of earning differentials between men and women (e.g., labor market segmentation, job segregation, and employment practices), it would seem that intentional and unintentional discriminatory elements enter into the determination of wages and are not likely to disappear. Use of a job evaluation system is one possible remedy to this situation. While the subjectivity of job evaluation makes job evaluations less than perfect vehicles for resolving pay disputes, they can serve to identify potential wage discrimination. (MN)

Based on extensive original research, this volume examines contemporary patterns of womens employment in Europe in the context of the profound economic, social and cultural changes that have taken place in recent years. It considers the progress made towards equal treatment in the labour market in the light of European Union action programmes, and