Women and Employment: Changing Lives and New Challenges

Citation

Scott, J. (2009), "Women and Employment: Changing Lives and New Challenges", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 17 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2009.04417fae.003

Women and Employment: Changing Lives and New Challenges

Article Type: Suggested reading From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 17, Issue 6

Jacqueline Scott, , Shirley Dex and , Heather Joshi (Eds),Edgar Elgar, 2008

This collection presents findings from a range of researchers active in GeNet, the Gender Inequalities Network. Most of the contributions were presented at the conference marking the 25th anniversary of the Women and Employment survey, carried out by the UK Office for Population Census and Surveys and the Department of Employment in 1980. As a consequence, all the contributions focus on the UK situation over the past 25 years, although some offer comparative exemplars and analysis.

The editors’ introduction situates the collection against the changes and continuities in employment, and especially women’s employment, over the past 25 years. The editors acknowledge that “the picture [remains] complex”. Yet, they expertly summarise “unanticipated” economic changes over the past 25 years, especially the growth in occupations requiring the “production, management or transfer of knowledge or information”, and the concomitant transformation of the labor market, occupational structures and women’s working lives more generally.

Part 1 focuses on women and employment, and “assessing progress on equality”. The three chapters in Part 1 combine well, and present a detailed analysis of the position of women in employment by contrasting contemporary and historical data. Purcell and Elias’s chapter on career couples is compelling. This and the other chapters detailing occupational change and occupational mobility and differences in labor-market activity by ethnicity draw on the themes of the impact of a segmented labor market on women’s experience of work, as well as how gendered workplaces sometimes facilitate, but more often constrain, women’s experiences of “career”.

Progress towards equality is uneven, and perhaps even unnervingly slow. Nevertheless, these chapters show that women’s working lives have been transformed by the knowledge economy, and women’s employment experiences are now in many ways remarkably different.

Dex, Ward and Joshi, for example, present a detailed analysis of occupational change, as well as the relationship between time out of the labor market and the “mother penalty”. This very complex paper has a clear message: a total of 25 years of statutory maternity leave has been important, and although the “mother penalty” persists, its effects have been mitigated.

Part 2 focuses more specifically on employment and family dynamics over the past 25 years, while Part 3 examines the more contemporary concern of work-life balance (or “work-life conflict”, as one author describes it). While Part 2 highlights the complexity of employment and family dynamics, Part 3 provides empirical investigations and philosophical considerations surrounding work-life balance.

Crompton and Lyonette’s finding that the cost of motherhood is greater for low- and mid-skilled women (who are more likely to work fewer hours in more precarious jobs) resonates with the findings of the qualitative investigation reported by Fagan et al. into work-life balance among dual-career couples. These chapters show the importance of analysing gender and class effects, as well as the contribution that qualitative and quantitative methods offer for enhancing our understanding of the complexity of women’s working and family lives.

Continuing inequalities in the household division of labor are well illustrated in Harkness’s chapter, as are changes in the proportional earnings of women to household income in partnered households.

Finally, Lewis’s chapter tracing the development of work-family policies in the UK presents a strong case for the importance of policy interventions to achieve work-life balance. Lewis shows that statutory leave entitlements are an important mechanism for achieving equality for women.

The importance of government action in terms of women and employment is the theme of Part 4. Here, the ongoing challenges of income inequality, labor-market segmentation (and especially the experience of migrant workers), and the “problem” of the provision of care when paid work becomes the citizenship norm, are all addressed.

In sum, this is an excellent collection that should be read cover to cover.

Reviewed by Lesley Patterson, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand.

A longer version of this review was originally published in Gender in Management: An International Journal, Vol. 24 No. 3, 2009.