Why Women Work

In 1940, 8.6 percent of women with children 18 and under were in the U.S. labor force. 

Then America joined World War 2, and around six million women joined the civilian workforce. 

Women may have saved the day during WWII, but when the war ended, things quickly changed. Soldiers were returning home and they needed jobs to help them get back on their feet and reacclimatize to civilian life. The managers who had previously begged women to help out were now forcing them back into their kitchens to free up jobs for men.

By 1948, the percentage of women in the U.S. workforce dipped to 32.7 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, this despite a poll taken in the last few years of the war that suggested between 61 to 85 percent of women wanted to remain in their jobs when the war was over. 

Why? 

Women had enjoyed and even thrived on a taste of financial and personal freedom - and many wanted more.

Post-war Society quickly mobilised against that aspiration, conscripting mass culture and experts to promote the role of women as housewives and men as workers. 

If women were denied work on the logic that children needed rearing, then greater access to abortion and contraception, through the invention of the pill and legal precedent like Roe v Wade, softened that barrier by allowing women to choose if and when to bear the children that they would presumably have to quit work to care for.

Women Win Work

American women have seemingly won the war for work.

Since the 1960s, U.S. labor force participation has increased for women of all family statuses. More single mothers are working, but more married mothers are working too.

Elsewhere, female labor force participation across the OECD is up, however ...

#NotAllWomen

Some groups of women are engaging less with work over the long term, notably those in low and middle income countries.

And the young:

To be fair, labor force participation among 15-24 year-olds is declining for both genders, though if they are forgoing work for higher education, that may actually be a good thing overall.

The Other Foot

I don't want to turn this post celebrating women into something about men, but suffice it to say that labor force participation for males has fallen as that for females has risen. There are no clear reasons why, but a few theories. None of which, importantly, imply that the two are related.

And even if they were, men only temporarily retook the jobs they gave to women during wartime. It is unlikely a second attempt to expand male workforce dominance will succeed.

Happy International Women's Day.

The title promised some insight into why women work. It seems they just do, out of necessity, ambition, or other reasons of their own.

Further reading:

Bureau of Labor Statistics

St Louis Fed

Population Reference Bureau

New York Times

Center for American Progress