The history of women’s work and wages and how it has created success for us all

As we celebrate the centennial of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote, we should also celebrate the major strides women have made in the labor market. Their entry into paid work has been a major factor in America’s prosperity over the past century and a quarter.

Despite this progress, evidence suggests that many women remain unable to achieve their goals. The gap in earnings between women and men, although smaller than it was years ago, is still significant; women continue to be underrepresented in certain industries and occupations; and too many women struggle to combine aspirations for work and family. Further advancement has been hampered by barriers to equal opportunity and workplace rules and norms that fail to support a reasonable work-life balance. If these obstacles persist, we will squander the potential of many of our citizens and incur a substantial loss to the productive capacity of our economy at a time when the aging of the population and weak productivity growth are already weighing on economic growth.

In the early 20th century, most women in the United States did not work outside the home, and those who did were primarily young and unmarried. In that era, just 20 percent of all women were “gainful workers,” as the Census Bureau then categorized labor force participation outside the home, and only 5 percent of those married were categorized as such. Of course, these statistics somewhat understate the contributions of married women to the economy beyond housekeeping and childrearing, since women’s work in the home often included work in family businesses and the home production of goods, such as agricultural products, for sale. Also, the aggregate statistics obscure the differential experience of women by race. African American women were about twice as likely to participate in the labor force as were white women at the time, largely because they were more likely to remain in the labor force after marriage.

The fact that many women left work upon marriage reflected cultural norms, the nature of the work available to them, and legal strictures. The occupational choices of those young women who did work were severely circumscribed. Most women lacked significant education—and women with little education mostly toiled as piece workers in factories or as domestic workers, jobs that were dirty and often unsafe. Educated women were scarce. Fewer than 2 percent of all 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in an institution of higher education, and just one-third of those were women. Such women did not have to perform manual labor, but their choices were likewise constrained.

Despite
the widespread sentiment
against women, particularly
married women, working outside the home and with
the limited opportunities available to them, women did enter
the labor force in greater numbers over this period, with
participation rates
reaching nearly 50 percent for
single women by 1930
and nearly 12 percent
for married women.
This rise suggests that while the incentive—and in many
cases the imperative—remained for women
to drop out of the labor market at marriage when
they could rely on their husband’s
income, mores were changing. Indeed, these years overlapped with
the so-called first wave
of the women’s movement,
when women
came together to agitate for
change on a variety of
social issues, including
suffrage
and temperance, and which
culminated in the ratification
of the 19th Amendment in 1920 guaranteeing women
the right to vote.

Between
the 1930s and mid-1970s,
women’s participation
in the economy continued to rise,
with the gains primarily
owing to an increase in work
among married women. By 1970, 50 percent of single women
and 40 percent of married women
were
participating in the labor
force. Several factors contributed to
this rise. First, with the advent of mass high school education, graduation rates
rose substantially. At the same time,
new technologies contributed to
an increased demand for clerical
workers, and these jobs were
increasingly taken on by women.
Moreover, because these
jobs tended to be cleaner and safer,
the stigma attached to work for a married
woman diminished.
And while there were still
marriage
bars that forced women out of the labor force, these formal
barriers were gradually
removed over the period
following World
War II.

Over
the decades from 1930 to 1970, increasing opportunities also arose for highly educated
women. That said, early in that period, most women still expected to have short
careers, and women were still largely viewed as secondary earners whose husbands’
careers came first.

As time
progressed, attitudes
about women working
and their employment prospects changed. As women gained experience in the labor
force, they increasingly saw
that they could balance work and family.
A new model of the two-income family emerged. Some women began to attend college and graduate
school with the expectation of working, whether or not they planned
to marry and have families.

By the 1970s, a dramatic change in women’s work
lives was under way. In the period
after World War II, many
women had not expected that they would spend as much of their adult
lives working as turned out to be
the case. By contrast, in the 1970s young women more
commonly expected that
they would spend a substantial portion of
their lives in the
labor force, and they prepared for it, increasing their
educational attainment
and taking courses and college majors
that better equipped them for
careers as opposed to just jobs.

These changes in attitudes
and expectations were supported by other changes
under way in society. Workplace
protections were enhanced through the passage of the Pregnancy
Discrimination Act in 1978
and the recognition of sexual harassment in the workplace. Access to birth control increased, which
allowed married
couples
greater control over the size
of their families and young women the ability to delay marriage
and to plan children
around their educational and work choices. And
in 1974, women gained, for the
first time, the right to
apply for credit in
their own name
without
a male co-signer.

By the early 1990s, the labor force participation rate
of prime working-age
women—those between the ages of 25 and 54—reached just over
74 percent, compared with roughly 93 percent for prime
working-age men. By then, the share of women going
into the traditional fields of teaching, nursing, social work, and clerical work declined,
and more women were becoming
doctors, lawyers, managers, and professors. As women increased their education and
joined industries and occupations
formerly
dominated
by
men, the gap in earnings
between women
and men
began to close significantly.

We, as a country,
have reaped great benefits from the
increasing role that women have played in the economy. But evidence suggests that
barriers to women’s
continued progress remain.
The participation rate for prime
working-age women
peaked in the late 1990s and currently stands at about 76 percent. Of course, women,
particularly those with lower levels
of education, have
been affected by the same economic forces that
have been pushing down participation
among men, including technical
change and globalization.
However,
women’s
participation plateaued at a level
well below that of prime working-age men, which stands at about 89 percent. While
some
married women
choose not to work, the size of
this disparity should lead us to examine the extent to which
structural problems, such as a lack of equal opportunity and challenges
to combining work and family, are
holding back women’s advancement.

The gap in earnings between men
and women
has narrowed substantially, but
progress has slowed lately,
and women
working
full time still earn
about 17 percent less
than men, on average, each week. Even
when we compare men
and women
in the same or similar
occupations who appear nearly identical
in background and experience,
a gap of about 10 percent typically
remains. As such, we cannot rule out that gender-related
impediments hold back women,
including outright discrimination,
attitudes that reduce women’s success in the workplace, and an
absence of mentors.

Recent research has shown that although
women
now enter professional schools in numbers nearly equal to men,
they are still substantially
less likely to reach the
highest echelons of their
professions. Even in
my own field
of economics, women constitute
only about one-third of
Ph.D. recipients, a number that has barely budged in two decades. This lack
of success in climbing the professional
ladder would seem to explain why the wage gap
actually remains largest for
those at the top of the earnings
distribution.

One of
the primary factors contributing to the failure of these
highly skilled women
to reach the tops of their
professions and earn equal
pay is that top jobs in fields
such as law and business require
longer workweeks and penalize taking time
off.
This would have a disproportionately
large effect on women
who
continue to bear the lion’s
share of domestic and child-rearing responsibilities.

But
it can be difficult for women to meet the demands in these fields once they have
children. The very fact that these types of jobs require such long hours likely
discourages some women—as well as men—from pursuing these career tracks. Advances
in technology have facilitated greater work-sharing and flexibility in scheduling,
and there are further opportunities in this direction. Economic models also suggest
that while it can be difficult for any one employer to move to a model with shorter
hours, if many firms were to change their model, they and their workers could all
be better off.

Of course, most women are not employed in fields that require such long hours or that impose such severe penalties for taking time off. But the difficulty of balancing work and family is a widespread problem. In fact, the recent trend in many occupations is to demand complete scheduling flexibility, which can result in too few hours of work for those with family demands and can make it difficult to schedule childcare. Reforms that encourage companies to provide some predictability in schedules, cross-train workers to perform different tasks, or require a minimum guaranteed number of hours in exchange for flexibility could improve the lives of workers holding such jobs. Another problem is that in most states, childcare is affordable for fewer than half of all families. And just 5 percent of workers with wages in the bottom quarter of the wage distribution have jobs that provide them with paid family leave. This circumstance puts many women in the position of having to choose between caring for a sick family member and keeping their jobs.

This possibility should inform our own thinking about policies to make it easier for women and men to combine their family and career aspirations. For instance, improving access to affordable and good quality childcare would appear to fit the bill, as it has been shown to support full-time employment. Recently, there also seems to be some momentum for providing families with paid leave at the time of childbirth. The experience in Europe suggests picking policies that do not narrowly target childbirth, but instead can be used to meet a variety of health and caregiving responsibilities.

The United States faces a number of longer-term economic challenges, including the aging of the population and the low growth rate of productivity. One recent study estimates that increasing the female participation rate to that of men would raise our gross domestic product by 5 percent. Our workplaces and families, as well as women themselves, would benefit from continued progress. However, a number of factors appear to be holding women back, including the difficulty women currently have in trying to combine their careers with other aspects of their lives, including caregiving. In looking to solutions, we should consider improvements to work environments and policies that benefit not only women, but all workers. Pursuing such a strategy would be in keeping with the story of the rise in women’s involvement in the workforce, which has contributed not only to their own well-being but more broadly to the welfare and prosperity of our country.

This essay is a revised version of a speech that Janet Yellen, then chair of the Federal Reserve, delivered on May 5, 2017 at the “125 Years of Women at Brown Conference,” sponsored by Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Yellen would like to thank Stephanie Aaronson, now vice president and director of Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, for her assistance in the preparation of the original remarks. Read the full text of the speech here »