Working girls

In the 21st century, women - at least in developed societies - have virtually no occupation barred to them. The people most affected by this change, and the main subject of this essay, are professional and elite women. Women used to enter the elite as daughters, mothers and wives. Now they do so as individuals.

This marks a rupture in human history. It is one that has brought enormous benefits to many people, and to women in particular. But its repercussions are not all positive. We are no more likely to return to the old patterns than we are to subsistence agriculture, so we need to understand what the new female labour market means for all our lives.

Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millenniums during which women of all classes shared the same significant life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. The second is the erosion of female altruism, the service ethos that has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies, particularly in the education of their young and the care of their old and sick. The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children.

From the early 19th century, paid employment outside the home became increasingly possible for educated women. Outside the middle classes, full-time work until marriage was the norm and poor married women and widows supplemented family income out of necessity. But what all women, educated and uneducated, assumed was that after marriage and childbearing their lives would centre on the home. Today this pattern is transformed. Mothers in general return to work sooner than their mothers or grandmothers did.

But there are new and widening differences between the less and the more educated. The best educated most often go back to work while their child is still a baby. Of course, a few highly educated women opt for full-time motherhood. But the norm is that educated women work in the same way, and increasingly in the same jobs, as men.

Those with few or no qualifications, in contrast, are likely to be out of the labour force for several years. They are concentrated in predominantly female occupations and tend to work full time before children but part time afterwards.

In the recent past, women's earnings through a lifetime were a small fraction of their husbands’, especially if there were children, but even if there were not. This has ceased to be true for the educated but childless in the generation who are now middle-aged. The gender gap for women with children is shrinking rapidly too. Educated younger women are projected to earn as much as men through a lifetime if they have no children and almost as much even if they do. This gap mostly reflects part-time work and career breaks: it is these differences, not some male employer conspiracy, that drive the headline figures on the disparity between male and female pay.

Feminists dispute the reasons for the rapid growth of female part-time work. Many believe it is the result of continuing barriers to female participation and sex discrimination. However, Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics, who has done most to document and analyse its rise, believes it is usually chosen. These patterns are preferred by most women, she argues, because they fit with their home commitments and these are still their primary concern.

Most working women continue to have jobs and not careers. Compared with 1850 or 1900, there are more retail and office jobs, and fewer in mines, fields and mills. At the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder some women can even be married to the state and live on benefits in a way no previous society could have imagined. Otherwise, the underlying pressures and priorities for most women have stayed surprisingly similar for a century or more.

The revolution has taken place at the top. In the UK, a majority of trainee barristers and almost two-thirds of medical students are female (up from 29 per cent in the early '60s) and, on present trends, by 2012 the majority of doctors will be women.

Hakim has examined the proportion of women in "the most senior occupations which play the major part in running a country". By the end of the 20th century, 43 per cent were women. Female representation is not, of course, so evident if one concentrates on the very top jobs: managing directors of top companies, self-made billionaires or judges. How could it be, when these people are mostly in their 50s and 60s, and part of an earlier, more gendered generation?

The change, in so short a time, is nonetheless extraordinary and cumulative.

Heated arguments over whether mothers should stay at home with small children are familiar. What gets far less attention is the impact of recent change beyond the family. The revolution in female opportunity has also had a huge effect on the public services and voluntary work. It has reinforced other changes - the decline in religion, the glorifying of self-actualisation - to transform our behaviour and values. Welcome to the end of female altruism.

The period from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century was a golden age for the caring sector in one important respect. The most brilliant, energetic and ambitious women, who worked in the sector as paid employees, also gave enormous amounts of time for free. Now, increasingly, they do neither.

Here, too, the changes are most obvious among the elite. By the 17th and 18th centuries, upper and middle-class women were educated, cultured and well read. They also had no career open to them other than marriage. Paid employment for an impecunious female member of this class was restricted to the education of the young as a governess or the care of the old as a companion. But in the 19th century, education was transformed and, with it, women's careers.

From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, teaching attracted many of the most academically able women. Clever working-class girls progressed from pupil teachers to schoolmistresses, while growing numbers of middle-class girls also entered the profession. This has radically changed, and schools have been the big losers.

Does any of this matter? The first century of professional paid work for women saw traditional female concerns move into the public sphere. If the able women of 70 or 100 years ago entered classrooms and hospital wards merely because nothing else was available, they would have brought little commitment to their work, and greater choice would clearly have benefited them and society alike. But this is not how it was. These women mostly saw their jobs as a vocation. Many of them lived in a world that took for granted such duty and service to others and a belief that their jobs mattered, especially to the future of other women.

The relative decline of these values and the number of such service-oriented women is sometimes cited as a reason for the perceived deterioration in health and education services, despite the far greater sums of money being spent on them. The apparent decline of a specifically female public service ethos is impossible to measure but is surely connected to the retreat of religious belief.

The pioneering female professionals of the 19th and early 20th centuries were imbued, in an unselfconscious way, with the language and values of religion. Duty to God and duty to their fellow women and men were inextricably combined. Most educated 18th-century women regarded the traditional women's work of caring for home and children not with '60s feminist disdain but with the values of love and duty, fortitude, propriety and resignation.

The centrality of religious belief in public pronouncements and private lives marks out the different country of the past, a world where actively "doing good" was both a key part of many women's lives and intrinsically linked with religious faith and instruction. The 19th and early 20th centuries saw the development of myriad charities with religious links and almost all of them relying heavily on female volunteers.

Today, the middle class, working-age female volunteer has all but vanished. Voluntary organisations are increasingly run by professionals. Religion has become marginal to the lives of most of us. Theda Skocpol, in Diminished Democracy, notes how mass membership, cross-class organisations in the US have been replaced by professionally staffed advocacy groups concerned about influencing policy-makers and the direction of public funding.

Few phenomena have a single cause. That middle-class women are all out at work is one reason, not the only one, for the decline of voluntary action. Equally important is professionalisation of almost all occupations and the increasing importance of government in the nonprofit sector. Yet the virtual disappearance of home-based, educated women (at least below the age of 60) has had an effect. A path once followed by able women across the developed world led to university, teaching, then motherhood, homemaking and voluntary work. Such women are now too busy.

There is a chasm between the moral purpose voiced by female pioneers and the female advertising slogan of today: "Because I'm worth it." We could, I suppose, write off the beliefs of the former group as the opium of the educated female classes, developed to reconcile them to unequal lives. But then we should see our own obsession with female occupational success as an ideology too.

As late as the '40s and '50s, education white papers were still imbued with the language of morality and idealism. Today's are concerned almost entirely with the economic benefits of schooling and the delivery of occupational skills. This mirrors the priorities of mainstream feminism, which is equally focused on the workplace and which evaluates female advance accordingly.

One could interpret today's feminist assumptions as reflecting the appetite of global capitalism for all talent, female and male, at the expense of the family. Certainly our economic arrangements offer precious little support to family formation. On the contrary, they erect barriers in its way. We all know by now that in most developed countries, birthrates are well below replacement level. Less recognised is the extensive change in incentives to have children.

In the past, adults had no tax-financed welfare state to depend on. Their families were their social insurance policies: children paid.

Today, they expect the state to help out, regardless of whether they have six children or none. The benefits we get are completely unrelated to whether we contribute a future productive member to the economy. Moreover, our labour market, with its greater gender equality, makes childbearing a very expensive prospect for successful professionals.

Rearing a healthy, balanced child requires intensive attention and large amounts of time, and is not something that technical progress is going to alter. The price of that time is especially high for high-earning, busy elite parents, female or male. If they give up or cut down on work, the opportunity cost in terms of income forgone and careers stalled is far greater than for an unskilled 16-year-old school-leaver.

In addition, elite children are expensive. Children are dependent for longer, high-quality child care is costly and formal education has become increasingly important as the route to success. Parents know this, and it explains why the professional classes devote so much money and attention to schooling.

The financial disincentives to child-bearing have become so high for upper-middle income families that the puzzle is not why professional women have so few children but why they have any at all. American economist Shirley Burggraf observes: "No society until recent times has expected love alone to support the family enterprise. To put it another way, parental love has never cost so much."

Personal fulfilment for both sexes is increasingly evaluated in economic terms. Yet we still rely on traditional values and emotions to produce the next generation. It is fortunate that children are so intrinsically rewarding or our birthrate would be lower still.

The hard economics tells us that professional women will have to give up most if they have children and so will be least inclined to do so. "The rich get richer and the poor have children" still applies, but this time it is women specifically that we are talking about. There is no reason to believe that teenage and uneducated mothers are any less loving and devoted than others. But there is plenty of evidence that their children are likely to be relatively unproductive future citizens, less skilled in their turn and more likely to experience unemployment.

There is a very strong inverse relationship between education and childbearing. The occupational emancipation of women may create intransigent problems for the future of our societies. Shirley Buggraf’s view is that the tension between the modern workplace and family wellbeing is real and irresolvable so long as our societies place no financial value on the activities that take place within the home - and that feminists and economists share the blame. For the feminist, unpaid home-based activity is labour performed under the lash of patriarchy. For the economist, unpaid work does not contribute to gross national product and so does not exist.

There are negative economic consequences of any barriers to female participation in the work force and of losing half the country's best brains to the kitchen sink. I am in no hurry to go back there myself. But it is striking how little anyone mentions, let alone tries to quantify, the offsetting losses (or social externalities) when women choose work over family.

Women today are no more homogeneous a group than men, and the service ethic that traditionally supported civil society and public service has weakened. Families remain central to the care of the old and sick, as well as raising the next generation, yet our economy and society steer ever more educated women away from marriage or childbearing. The repercussions for our futures are enormous and we should at least recognise this fact.