Unpaid household labor is still predominantly performed by women, despite dramatic increases in female labor force participation over the past 50 years. For this article, interviews with 76 highly skilled women who had returned to the workforce following the birth of children were analyzed to capture reflexive understandings of the balance of paid…

After a long decline, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of older men in the United States leveled off in the 1980s, and began to increase in the late 1990s. We examine how changes in Social Security rules affected these trends. We attribute only a small portion of the decline from the 1960s-80s to the increasing generosity of Social…

Many have asserted that high female labor turnover imposes costs on employers which induce firms to discriminate in hiring and pay against women. This study examines male and female quit data and draws two primary conclusions. First, women are less likely than men to quit for job related reasons although women do quit more often because of…

This report examines the extent to which Americans participated in the labor force, worked, or looked for work during 1979. It also takes a look at changes in work activity over the past decade as reflected in the work experience data. (Author)

Reviews three U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' labor force projections, each based on different assumptions. All show big increases in number of women entering job market, keen job competition for jobs among recent college graduates at least until 1985, and improving employment prospects for teenagers over the next five to ten years. (CSS)

This brief report presents and discusses statistics on the marital and family characteristics of workers in 1973 [e.g., nearly 40 million married men and 20 million married women were among the 88 million person labor force, and of the 1.7 million increase in the labor force, three-quarters consisted of married women (34 percent), single men (24…

The average workweek of full-time workers declined by 35 percent between 1900 and 1940, but has not changed significnatly since then, and the secular rigidity of the full-time workweek remains. An expanded model which incorporates the effects of growth in education and in the female wage explains the post-1940 secular trend. (Editor/HD)

Boston-area families described the ambivalence of male responses to pressures of increased participation in homemaking. Because of different social support networks, men obtain little support and help in performing housework. Men perceiving paid employment as their primary contribution hesitate to acknowledge responsibility for homemaking…

Data from 1970 on work life expectancy indicate that the average number of years spent in the labor force is declining for men and rising for women, with an increase in the number of working women with children under six. Tables supplement the discussion. (LH)

Examines reversal of two longstanding unemployment patterns in 1980-82 recession: nonmetropolitan unemployment rate exceeded metropolitan rate and men's unemployment rate exceeded women's. Attributes reversals to recent changes in labor force: shift to service economy, expansion of women's role in workplace, and changes in women's working…

As part of its mandate under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires periodic reports from public and private employees, unions, and labor organizations, indicating the makeup of their workforce by sex and by race-ethnic categories. This volume contains two tables summarizing data obtained as…

Findings are presented from a May 1969 survey on the growing number of "moonlighters" in the work force: (1) one in twenty workers held more than one job during the survey week; (2) three of every ten multiple jobholders were women, nearly double the proportion of 1969; (3) the number of men with multiple jobs remained about the same; (4) the…

Competing hypotheses relating the division of labor between husband and wife to their absolute level of education, their relative level of education, and their relative wage rates are identified, and are combined in a fully specified model. (Author)

Describes labor market developments in 1985 for major age-sex, race-ethnic, industrial, and occupational groups. It also examines the performance of key employment and unemployment indicators in cyclical terms and evaluates selected developments from a secular perspective. Data discussed in this article come from two sources: household interviews…

A major development in the American workforce has been the increased labor force participation of women. In 1970, only about 43 percent of women age 16 and older were in the labor force; by 1999, that figure had risen to 60 percent. From 1999 to 2004, women's labor force participation rate receded slightly to 59.2 percent, still well above the…