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| Major Findings
Women have not, on the whole, taken jobs away from men. Rather, what has happened is that over the past 2 decades:
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Introduction
The number of women in jobs has risen sharply during the past 20 years-from 2.1 million in 1977 to 3.6 million today. Working women now comprise almost half the adult female population, compared with just 40 per cent of women who were in jobs two decades earlier. By comparison, male employment growth (from 3.9 million to 4.8 million) has been much slower and has failed to keep pace with male population growth. The result has been that the proportion of men in jobs has actually contracted during the past 20 years. The question therefore arises: have women taken jobs away from men? (1)
Factors Influencing Female Employment Growth
In common with every other OECD country, Australia has experienced a significant increase in the proportion of women entering employment. During the past 20 years the number of women in jobs has increased by around 3 per cent per year. The proportion of men in jobs, however, has fallen. As a result, females have increased their share of the total job pool so that the gap between male and female employment has narrowed considerably (Chart 1). If present trends continue, males and females will be about equally represented in the workforce by the year 2010.
A major factor that has contributed to the change in male and female representation in the labour force has been the structural change in the labour market that has occurred over the past 20 years. This change has included a marked growth in the services sector of the economy (in which women have traditionally been strongly represented) and a cutting back in the size of the manufacturing sector (where mainly men are employed).
In Australia, almost 90 per cent of all female workers are to be found in the services sector and of these almost a quarter are in wholesale and retail trade. Over the past 20 years, employment in the services sector has grown by 2.4 per cent per year. Therefore, had women merely maintained their share of employment in this sector, they would have made a substantial contribution to employment growth over the period. As it is, however, women not only maintained but increased their share of employment in the services sector from 40 to 47 per cent. At the same time, employment in the manufacturing sector, in which nearly three quarters of the workforce is male, has been contracting. Overall, during the past 20 years, 6 out of every 10 new jobs created have gone to women and almost all of these have been in the services sector (see Chart 2).
Not only has the sector in which women are traditionally employed generated the most new jobs, but there has also been a growing preference by employers to take on more part-time (particularly casual) employees, an arrangement that has generally tended to favour women. In all of the industrial world, women (and especially women with children) are more likely to work part-time than men. In Australia, 43 per cent of working women and 58 per cent of working women with children are employed part-time, mostly on a casual basis. By comparison, only 13 per cent of all employed men are working part-time.
Casual work offers significant advantages to employers. First, it provides them with greater flexibility by allowing them to employ staff only when they are needed. In addition, casual workers are generally cheaper(2) as employers do not have to offer the full range of benefits (e.g. sick leave, recreation leave, etc.) that are offered to permanent (mostly full-time) staff. For these reasons, employers have tended to employ relatively more casuals, most of whom are part-time, with the result that the part-time share of the total job pool has expanded from 15 to 25 per cent during the past two decades. Women, who occupy around three-quarters of all part-time jobs, have thus been well placed to take advantage of this growth in part-time casual work.
Other factors that have contributed to greater female participation in the labour force include rising educational levels of women and increases in female wages which have effectively raised the opportunity cost for women not working. Another significant factor has been the change in social attitudes to women working.
Concluding Remarks
In conclusion, women have not, on the whole, taken jobs away from men. This is not to say, however, that there would not be more men employed if there were fewer women to compete with in the job market. Rather, what has happened is that those jobs in which women have traditionally found work have expanded in the past two decades while jobs usually occupied by men have contracted. This is most apparent in the split between men and women in manufacturing and service jobs. Moreover, the preference by women (whether by choice or by circumstance) for part-time work has meant that they have been better able to benefit from the expansion in part-time work opportunities.
Of more significance, perhaps, than the question of whether women have taken jobs away from men is the issue of why men have not taken up more jobs in the expanding services sector.
