English Unlimited HAK/HUM 4/5, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM (mit Handelskorrespondenz)

204 Activities Unit 6, exercise 11 Student B Men and women do different jobs for different pay In America in the early 1970s more than half of all families with children consisted of a breadwinner husband, a stay-at-home wife and two or more kids; now only a fifth do. Instead there are lots of single-parent households , and even if couples live together, they no longer necessarily marry. If they do, the wives are likely to go out to work, whether or not they have children. In most rich countries the dominant model now is the two-earner family , with both parents working full-time.  Men are still more likely than women to be in paid work. Across the OECD countries some 83% of men of working age are in the labour market, compared with 64% of women. But the share of women at work is still rising. In the Nordic countries the gap between men and women has almost gone, and in most of the big rich countries it is only ten or 15 percentage points. In the emerging markets it is much wider, not least because women do a lot of unpaid work in family businesses and farms.  Women, particularly if they have children, are much more likely than men to work part-time, and even in full-time jobs they work shorter hours. The main reason why women do not put in long hours at their jobs is that they work long hours at home. Housework and childcare the world over, but particularly in poor countries, are still seen mainly as a woman’s responsibility, whether or not she has a job. Even in the rich world women spend at least twice as much time as men on unpaid work.  It may be unfair, but by working shorter paid hours, women are managing to achieve a reasonable balance in their lives. According to a regular survey only 16–18% of women across Europe report dissatisfaction with their work-life balance , against 20–27% for men.  The most worrying gap between the sexes is in pay. Almost all rich countries have laws, passed mostly in the 1970s, that are meant to ensure equal pay for equal work, and the gap did narrow noticeably for a while when women first started to flood into the labour market. In America, for instance, it has halved since 1970, from 40% to 20%. Across the OECD the difference in male and female hourly earnings is around 18%.  One explanation for the persistent differences is that men and women often work in separate labour markets. Women are concentrated in teaching, healthcare, clerical work, social care and sales; they are underrepresented in manual and production jobs, maths, physics, science and engineering and in managerial jobs, particularly at the senior end.  In America women have in fact made considerable progress in getting into a range of jobs that used to bemale preserves , such as dentistry, law and pharmacy. But in America even now very few women want to become carpenters, electricians or machinists, and men show no interest in becoming dental assistants or hairdressers.  During the 1970s and 1980s the labour markets for men and women became less segregated , but that trend came to a halt in the mid-1990s. That is a worry because there is a strong link between the concentration of women in an occupation and the level of pay. Jobs dominated by women, such as teaching and nursing, pay less across the board .  One place where women seem to be both welcome and happy is the public sector because it almost always pays better than the private industry. However, due to the debt crisis public-sector jobs in many countries have been drastically cut back, which is beginning to affect female employment.  Despite these setbacks , women have been rescuing their families during the recession , when in almost all rich countries men’s working hours fell since the onset of the crisis, but women’s working hours rose to make up for the shortfall. Source: OECD It’s a woman thing Part-time employment*, 2010, % *People who usually work less than 30 hours a week in their main job United States Germany Netherlands Britain Japan OECD average Sweden Finland 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv