Women and the U.S. Job Market

More and more women have been entering the job market in the years since World War II. This trend was noted by 1960, but the size of the trend was underestimated. By the mid-1970s, women had entered the job market at rates not expected to be reached until the mid-1980s, and it was reported then that nearly 48 percent of American women over sixteen years of age either worked or wanted a job. Numerous reasons were given for this, including a growing number of young single women looking for their first jobs, newly divorced women with little or no income from their former husbands, women whose husbands did not earn enough so that the family needed a second salary, and women from higher income families who had a desire for broader horizons as a primary reason for working. Also cited for this rise was the liberation of young wives in the 1960s with economic liberation and effective birth control methods. While women have managed to make advances in the business world, they have clearly not achieved the equality they have sought. They are also subject to a wide variety of on-the-job discrimination and require legal protection, and such protection has been embodied in federal and state law, administrative regulations, and case law.

According to a study by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the occupational distribution of women has long shown a significant difference from that of males. According to 1967 data, women h

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e legislatures. In other cases, the laws may have been challenged and held invalid under Title VII by the courts while still remaining on the books. In still other cases, the laws may have remained on the books though they are unenforced or tacitly enforced because no one has yet challenged them. Twenty exclusionary laws were repealed between 1964 and 1977. Most restrictive laws have been challenged and the cases decided on the basis of EEOC guidelines. The first major case was that of Rosenfeld v. Southern Pacific Co., decided by a federal district court in 1968 and affirmed by the Court of Appeals in 1971. This invalidated a California weight-lifting statute (Brown, Freedman, Katz, and Price, 1977, pp. 210-211). Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Another area where the courts have addressed the issue of sex discrimination in the workplace involves the sexual harassment of working women. Many businesses have instituted policies regarding sexual harassment in the workplace and what to do about it both before it occurs and after, but many other companies have avoided taking the necessary steps, either pretending that the problem does not exist or simply failing to address it. Most business analysts today find that this

Category: Business - W