Research Paper on:
United Kingdom's Labor Market and British Women's Position

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
on the proviso that mens earnings should be reduced to the level of womens -- an obvious social impossibility (Atkinson, 1998). Employment in the UK has changed considerably  since Lord Weinstocks day with the last several decades showing a marked increase in womens participation in the labor market (Ackah and Heaton, 1996). The twenty-sixth edition of the  British governments yearly Social Trends report shows the number of working women in the UK has increased, with women making up 16.4 million of the national workforce as of 1994  (Whitfield, 1996). This increase is generally attributed to women postponing motherhood and also having fewer children (Whitfield, 1996). The following discussion of female employment in the UK offers a perspective  on how the job market has changed over the course of a lifetime for women born in the late 1950s. Following World War II, the rate of British women  entering the job market roughly doubled, with many mothers returning to work (Dex, Joshi and Macran, 1996). Prior to the war, for the most part, women retired from the  job market when they married. This pattern altered drastically after the war, and by 1992, 73 percent of married women aged 16-59 were in some form of paid employment outside  the home, with the same percentage of non-married women also working (Dex, Joshi and Macran, 1996). When married women first began to work, it was after taking a  lengthy break from the job market while they had their children. When they returned to paid employment, it was usually in a low-skilled, low-paying, part-time position in the service industry,  frequently close to their homes. Usually, these women acquired informal and unpaid child care from family members. The 1980 Women and Employment Survey found this to be the dominant pattern