In this first article of a two part series, Lewis Silkin LLP explore the history of women in waged work through the ages and both the historic and current challenges faced by women in the workplace. Our second article focuses on what the future of work may hold for women in light of the pandemic and the effect of increasing automation on the labour market and women's working lives.
When were women allowed to work?
Women have always worked, whether in paid jobs or at home, and often in both. In this first of two articles, we explore the history of women in waged work and the challenges faced by women in the workplace.
Women in work in the Victorian era
The Victorian ideal of the “Angel in the House” would not have been at all familiar to the majority of working class women of the era. Women had little choice but to work in order to support themselves and their families. Women worked both from home, for example in piecework, and outside of the home in textiles and clothing factories and workshops, or in domestic service for wealthy households. Many women of that era were also employed in what was known as the “sweated industries”- small industries like nail making, matchstick making, and shoe stitching, where the hours were long and the pay was extremely low. Real opportunities for women in work were slim.
Historically, pay has been very low for nearly all women, and significantly lower than their male counterparts. For a long time, women were also largely excluded from trade unions. This combination made women an attractive prospect for Victorian employers. Interestingly when in 1888, Clementina Black, one of the only two women delegates at the Women's Trades Union Council, proposed the first TUC equal pay resolution, she framed her submission on the basis that women’s lower pay disadvantaged men in the labour market.
The majority of upper and most middle-class women did not undertake paid work, and those who did were largely expected to stop working when they got married and look after their children and home. Entry to professional work - lawyers, doctors, and civil servants - remained closed to women.
Court declares that women were not “people”
In 1913, the Law Society refused to allow four women to sit the Law Society examinations. The women took the case to the Court of Appeal. In Bebb v The Law Society, the Court of Appeal upheld the Law Society's decision and it was held that women were not “persons” within the meaning of the Solicitors Act of 1843. It took another six years before women became people and were allowed to be admitted to the roll under the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.
The First World War: women join the workplace
A few years prior to this, during the First World War, women were recruited into either voluntary or paid work in order to release men to be conscripted into the armed forces. The war effort also created new jobs for women such as in munitions factories, indeed such factories became the largest employer of women by 1918. Recruitment drives and campaigns also led to women being employed in roles that had been uniformly male, becoming bus conductors and bank clerks, window cleaners and gas fitters, and joining the police and fire services. In all, the employment rates of women in work increased during the First World War from 23.6% of the working age population in 1914 to between 37.7% and 46.7% in 1918.
It may come as little surprise that during the First World War, women were paid less for their work than men, and there was concern that after the war was over employers would continue to employ women rather than the more expensive men returning from war. These fears were unfounded; women in work were either sacked or remained employed beside men but at the lower wages.
Women take two steps forward in the workplace, one step back
Recession hit the UK economy during the interwar years. Despite unemployment benefit having been introduced through the National Insurance Act 1911, women were not eligible to claim benefits if they refused to take up domestic jobs. Many women therefore went back to the domestic roles that they had carried out before the war. The interwar period was a significant regression for women in work.
The Second World War: more jobs for women
As the Second World War loomed, recruitment drives and campaigns for women in the workplace began again. A secret report by Sir William Beveridge argued in 1940 that the conscription of women was unavoidable. In the following year, every woman in Britain aged from 18 to 60 had to be registered, and their family occupations were recorded. Each was interviewed and required to choose from a range of jobs. The National Service Act 1941 (no 2) made the conscription of women into the workplace legal. At first, only single women in their twenties were called up, but within two years almost 90%of single women and 80% of married women were employed in essential work for the war effort.
With so many women and mothers in work, the government was forced to address childcare. State funding was provided to temporarily increase the number of nurseries from just 14 to approximately 1,345 “wartime nurseries”. However, after the war, mothers of young children were once again discouraged from working and most of the state-funded nurseries were closed by the post-war Labour government.
The welfare state and women in the workplace
The Beveridge report, which provided the blueprint for the post-war welfare state, curiously also laid the groundwork for the return of the Angel in the House.
“The attitude of the housewife to gainful employment outside the home should not be the same as that of the single woman. She has other duties...” William Beveridge, The Beveridge Report 1942
Indeed, the creation of the welfare state had mixed results for women in work. On the one hand, the NHS created many waged job opportunities in what had previously been seen as unpaid ‘women’s work’. On the other hand, it has been argued that the benefit system was based on the notion of “family units with a male breadwinner at the head of each”. Married women were not entitled to benefits on the assumption that they were, like children, dependants of the male head of household.
Equality laws help women in work
As jobs returned to being strictly segregated by gender with routine, repetitive and care work categorised as “women’s work”, it follows that pay disparity continued. The gender pay gap was not limited to the working classes; while it was recommended in a 1946 report by the Royal Commission on Equal Pay that women who were teachers or who were in the civil service receive equal pay, it was not until 1961 that women teachers achieved this. For civil servants a scheme was introduced in 1955 to establish equal rates of pay for men and women doing equal work in the non-industrial civil service. However, the roll out of this took over seven years and there was controversy over what “equal work” meant.
Significantly, as dramatised in the film Made in Dagenham, in 1968, women sewing machinists at a Ford factory went on strike after their jobs were re-graded as “unskilled” to justify their lower pay, despite doing the same level of work – making car seat covers – as their male colleagues who were graded “semi-skilled”.
After three years of industrial action, The Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle, intervened, and although the sewing machinists’ pay was increased to 92% of the male rate (from 85%), they never received their Category C grade. It wasn’t until further industrial action 16 years later, and an independent arbitration panel finding in the women’s favour, that Ford agreed to regrade them as skilled workers in 1984.
Barbara Castle was also instrumental in the introduction of the Equal Pay Act 1970 which eliminated separate lower rates of pay according to gender. The Equal Pay Act 1970 gave women the right to the same contractual pay and benefits as men in the same employment under certain conditions where the man and the woman were doing:
like work; or
work rated as equivalent under an analytical job evaluation study; or
work that is proved to be of equal value.
The law was sufficiently ambiguous to allow some employers to get around it by creating different job titles for women, or by raising the women’s rates to the lowest male rate, even when those women’s jobs were more demanding. However, full–time women’s average earnings rose from 72% to 77% compared to men’s by 1975.
The pursuit of equal pay in Britain was hugely influenced by the European Union. The passing of the Equal Pay Act 1970 came ahead of the UK’s impending entry to the EU in 1973. Equal pay was adopted as a core principle of the EU when it was founded in 1957, originally as the European Economic Community. Article 141 of the European Treaty states that “each Member State shall ensure that the principle of equal pay for male and female workers for equal work or work of equal value is applied.”
The Sex Discrimination Act 1975 made it unlawful for an individual to be discriminated against in the workplace in relation to selection for a job, training, promotion, work practices, dismissal or any other disadvantage such as sexual harassment because of their sex or marital status. These provisions are all now part of the Equality Act 2010.
The rise and rise of women in work?
In the more than 50 years since equal pay legislation has been introduced, the UK has seen an almost continual rise in the proportion of women in work: from roughly 52% of women aged 16 to 64 in 1971, to 72% in 2021.
According to a 2018 report from the Institute of Fiscal Studies, this increase of women in the workplace is largely the result of a huge change in working patterns at particular points in the life cycle. There are far more women in employment today over the course of their mid-to-late 20s and early 30s. This is in part because women are now cohabiting and having children both less frequently and later in life.
Birth control innovations in the 1960s enhanced many women’s opportunities to control childbearing and their careers, allowing them to choose contraception and plan fertility independently of their partner or spouse, which increased many women’s education, labour market options, earnings and capital accumulation.
Ethnic diversity and women in the workplace
According to the 2017 McGregor-Smith Review “Race in the Workplace” there are significantly higher rates of unemployment amongst Pakistani and Bangladeshi women (15.0%) than White women (4.6%). The review also found BME women, particularly Black African and Pakistani or Bangladeshi women, are taking jobs at a lower level than they were qualified for. LSE’s The Inclusion Initiative also found that black women are the least likely to be among the UK’s top earners compared to any other racial or gender group.
In a survey of 7,500 professionals, conducted by Robert Walters, 42% of black professionals said in the last year they had not received a pay increase after negotiation – double the number of white employees. This figure was 63% among black professional women.
The 2020 Hampton-Alexander report found that women now hold 36.2% of all FTSE 100 board positions, up from 32.4% in 2019 and exceeding the original target of 33% by 2020. In 2011, this figure was just 12.5%.
The number of so called “One & Done” boards has also reduced to just 16 this year, from 74 in 2018. Cranfield University’s Female FTSE Board Report 2020 notes that when progress is made on gender at senior levels it is more likely to inadvertently benefit white women over women of colour and advocates the use of voluntary targets to address ethnic inequalities at work. 12% of board positions in the FTSE 100 are held by ethnic minority directors, Of these, 46% are women, which is an increase of 42% compared to 2020.
In 2019, a ‘Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation’ was signed by nearly 200 CEOs (including Amazon, JP Morgan, Pepsico and many more) agreeing that executives need to look beyond purely maximising shareholder profits and consider about how their companies can benefit all stakeholders, including a focus on fostering “diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect”.
Women in work and the introduction of gender pay gap reporting
Although it is narrowing, gender pay disparity remains persistent. Large employers have been obliged to publish an annual report containing data on their gender pay gap since 2017, with many employers using this report to explain the initiatives they are taking to increase opportunities for women in work. The gender pay gap was 17.3% in 2019, down from 18.4% in 2017.
20-first, a consultancy specialising in gender balance produced a 2020 gender balance scorecard assessment for the top 20 UK companies of the FTSE 100 finding a 39% increase in women in top teams compared to 2018. The report posed (but did not conclusively answer) the question as to whether this could be as a result of the UK’s gender pay gap reporting.
Targets for women in the workplace?
In addition to targets for women on boards of companies, initiatives involving positive action in individual workplaces have generated mainstream interest following the introduction of gender pay gap reporting, as companies look for ways in which they could close stubborn pay gaps. Positive action involves taking targeted steps to address under-representation or disadvantage experienced by people with characteristics protected by the Equality Act 2010, including sex. For example, increasing under-representation of women in work.
Including multiple women on shortlists for recruitment and promotions was listed as the first effective action employers could take to close their gender pay gap in a 2018 report published by the Behavioural Insights Team of the Government Equalities Office. Operating targets – as opposed to hard quotas - would be within the scope of the provisions on lawful positive action, so long as there is sufficient evidence of disadvantage of women in the workplace and the steps are proportionate.
Women in work and sexual harassment
Despite sexual discrimination, including sexual harassment law, having been part of equalities law in the UK for several decades, a 2016 TUC report showed that more than half of women overall, and nearly two-thirds of women aged 18 to 24 had experienced sexual harassment at work. In 2018, sexual harassment in the workplace dominated the public conversation following the viral spread of the #metoo movement, in which women took to social media to express solidarity with victims of sexual harassment both inside and out of the workplace. A 2019 TUC report also showed that 12% of LGBT women reported being seriously sexually assaulted or raped at work.
Reflecting on the history of women in work, significant progress has been made towards acceptance and equality. However, the battle is far from over. The impact of the pandemic has already been described as a major setback for women.
This first article of our two part series was written by Gemma Chandler, Head of LS Solutions and Leonie Sheridan, Trainee Solicitor at Lewis Silkin LLP.
The second article in this two part series explores what the future of work may hold for women in light of the impact of the pandemic alongside the effect of increasing automation on the labour market and women’s working lives.