into being to attack a world of male privilege, a world where the economy was driven by male work and where individual homes mirrored this economic reality. In the 1980s this ceased to be true in any simple sense; the sexual composition of the workforce changed out of all recognition. What happened far exceeded any steady incremental increase of women in the labour market. It was so rapid that by the beginning of the 1990s there were as many women working as men. All projections suggest this is a continuing trend; there will soon be more women than men in the workforce.
How had these changes come about? And why did feminists dismiss them as insufficient and pay them such scant attention? The second question is easier to answer. Feminists were much too preoccupied with the superficial lack of change and even the possibility that gains might be reversed. Nor were they alone in missing signs of revolution. Few ordinary citizens understood these changes until they were fully upon us. In the UK most people were bedazzled by the economic boom in the 1980s and failed to notice the deeper changes. This boom was, in fact, underwritten by money raised from selling off North Sea oil resources, thus disguising profound economic difficulties. But at the time, the image of the yuppy, in particular the male stockbroker, embodied a thriving economy. This was also the time when the first images of highly successful career women began to appear, the so-called ‘post-feminist career woman’, feminists dismissed her as atypical: the city profiteers were just a modern version of an old theme.
In fact, behind the façade of a buoyant economy based on relatively unchanging sexual patterns, long-term changes were dramatically altering the balance of power between the sexes. The generally agreed term now for what has been happening is the ‘feminization of the economy’. What it describes is the fact that although the actual number of jobs has remained unchanged since 1970, the types of jobs, the way they are done and who does them have changed. And what is most important here is the change in the ratio of men to women. Women’s employment, which had been steadily increasing since the 1970s when the service sector expanded, accelerated in the 1980s at the same time as the number of men employed fulltime declined. All in all, since 1970, large numbers of men have left the workforce. There was also a huge increase in the amount of part-time work, much of this going to women. There are now three million more part-time jobs than in the 1970s while, over the same period, men have lost over three million full-time jobs. The proportion of men employed full-time declined from 62 per cent in 1970 to 50 per cent in 1996 (Demos Report, Tomorrow’s Women, 1997).
These changes in the sexual composition of the workforce were caused by several converging factors in which the ideological contribution of feminism was relatively minor. Feminism certainly made them possible: equal opportunities legislation meant it was no longer legally possible for employers to exclude women from certain jobs, and feminism had broken down social prejudices. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than attitudes towards working mothers. Until feminist values became established, social disapproval made it extremely difficult for middle-class mothers to work. Now the employment rates for mothers is growing faster than the employment rates for women without children. Nearly half of all women with pre-school-age children are working today, compared with a quarter fifteen years ago, a trend which accelerated throughout the 1980s. Between 1985 and 1991, the UK had the fastest rise in employment among women with children under ten in the European Union.
The real engine of this revolution was deeper economic forces. There was a shift from direct production to an economy based on the finance and service sectors which led to the complete closure of certain types of industry, particularly heavy industry. Some traditional male jobs in mining and the steel industry disappeared altogether. Since 1950, five million jobs had gone from industries producing goods. Jobs depending on physical strength, such as construction or the Army, have vanished in their millions. As a consequence of these shifts, in the past fifteen years, two million men have disappeared from the workforce (Independent, 2 January 1996). On top of these long-term changes, recession and the development of global markets also played a profound role. Both favoured industries which could shift production from base to base and ‘down-size’ their workforces at speed in order to stay in business. The result was ‘flexibilization’, a shift to a culture of short-term contracts, and more part-time work, changes in working patterns which had a profound impact on men.
Actually it is not strictly accurate to talk about the destruction of heavy industry. Those difficult, dirty and arduous industries which relied on skills traditionally associated with men disappeared from the UK but were relocated to the Third World. That sort of work is now performed wherever the production cost is lowest. So Third World countries bear the cost both in environmental terms – the exploitation of their raw materials - and in terms of human health. In the UK, though, these jobs appear to have gone for good. The jobs in finance and information technology which replaced them are gender-blind, or even favour women because of their dexterity and communication skills. Increasingly big companies have become multinational or global, and prefer to work with part-time or short-term contracts which allow them to move base quickly.
It is hard to say definitively how much the huge increase in women workers, especially part-time women workers, was driven by demand from women themselves for such work and how much by these economic changes. There was probably a meshing of interests. Throughout the 1980s the culture of permanent contracts for full-time jobs gave way to short-term contracts and part-time employment which was both cheaper and more easily dispensed with as companies maintained profit levels in a recession. Certainly women were more prepared for these developments when they came. They were more used to career breaks, had often argued that part-time work might solve childcare problems and had already suggested employers stop valuing unilinear careers and look instead at the overall ‘portfolio’. Indeed, feminism had always been vociferous about the way the old male career pattern thwarted human potentiality in both sexes. ‘The assumption that people want to change careers, that they want time out of work, that they want to learn new things, go to college, have kids, move in and out of the labour market, rather than stay fixed in one place for forty years, with a gold watch at the end of it, all of those transformations are associated with women’ (Bea Campbell, ‘Analysis’, BBC Radio 4, 1994).
Feminism’s interest in increased part-time work and increased flexibility, however, was connected with calls for increased involvement in parenting, and a different relationship between work and home. Such ideas were and remain one of the most significant progressive discourses on how to live in the new millennium, on how to develop new ways of feeling good about yourself and your contribution to society other than just in terms of work achievement. When feminists were vocal about the need for work flexibility, they couldn’t have known that global capitalism would deliver the goods quite so promptly and quite so unpleasantly. Nor could they have anticipated that the time at which these arrived would coincide with social developments which whipped the rug out from under men’s feet.
Professor Ray Pahl, author of After Success (1995), says that men were hit particularly severely by the needs of the global market for job flexibility. The idea of the unilinear career was the basis of masculine identity. It involved sacrifices, either of the body to physical labour or of the soul to the company, to provide for the family. ‘Contracting out’, ‘down-sizing’ and ‘delayering’ meant the end to steady career paths. Some chose self-employment and some had it thrust upon them, but however it arrived, it marked a shift to personal autonomy in the labour market. ‘Career ladders’ gave way to ‘portfolio careers’ and men were at first unready. Young men now no longer have those same expectations of traditional jobs for life but it took at least a decade to abandon such expectations. Women, however, were already used to interrupted employment. They had learned to market their diverse skills and demanded praise for balancing home and work. Women ‘juggle their lives’, She magazine proclaimed, coining the ultimate ‘80s slogan. Many men were unprepared and even unwilling to accept these new conditions when so much of their identity previously rested on traditional careers. There was more at stake for men than women.
As we shall see in the following chapter, there are many who play down the implications of these developments for gender roles or the levelling of the sexes. The increase is in poorly paid, part-time jobs
