Bibliografía

Women are now at the center of the world’s economies. Employment rates for women are at historic highs across the globe. Of the 165 nations in Figure 1, almost 60 percent have female employment rates (for those 25 to 54 years old) that exceed 0.70, and 80 percent exceed 0.50. For comparison, in the United States one-half of the women in that age group worked in 1970 and around three-quarters have done so ever since the early 1990s. Only 20 of the nations in Figure 1 have rates below 0.40, and they are disproportionately in the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. Women are at the center of the world’s economies not just because they are engaged in paid employment to a significant degree. They are rapidly becoming the better-educated gender, constituting the majority of college students in every one of the 38 OECD nations. Women do the vast amount of care-work across the world. And they largely determine the birth rate. But women were not always at the center. They didn’t always control their fates, and they don’t today in some parts of the world. Many of the nations with substantial rates of female employment today once had very low rates. A century ago in the 1920s, less than 10 percent of married women in the United States were reported as being employed outside their homes. In 1900, estimates of “gainful employment”— the conventional measure before the labor force construct was devised—indicate that the figure was only 6 percent, although we will soon see that actual rates were several times that amount. How did the female labor force evolve? And what about the complicated issues of measurement? In particular, what is meant by the notion of “conventionally” measured labor force participation for periods before the modern constructs of the labor force, unemployment, and national income were formalized? This essay summarizes how women historically became an economic force and why, despite being vital to the world’s economies, they still earn less than comparable men even in nations with family-friendly policies and gender-neutral laws, norms, and values.