Interwar Employment
Cherchez la femme

The rise in female participation has been one of the marked changes in the UK labour market this century: the proportion of women in the total labour force has risen from 27% to 38% between 1881 and 1981. But this change has been confined, for the most part, to the last 50 years, making the interwar decades a critical period. Although there are a number of quantitative studies of the determinants of postwar female participation, studies of earlier periods have tended to be more qualitative, and often stress the role of social and institutional constraints upon female labour force participation. The rise in participation is therefore the result of the erosion of these constraints. Female participation between the wars remains a puzzle, however: although the proportion of women in the labour force rose sharply after the Second World War, why did it remain so close to its nineteenth century level before 1939?

In Discussion Paper No. 113, Research Fellow Tim Hatton attempts to resolve this puzzle through a quantitative analysis of the structure and determinants of female labour force participation during the interwar period. Hatton notes a variety of reasons why one might have expected it to rise sharply after 1914. These include demographic trends such as the fall in family size and a lower average age of marriage, which released women from childrearing at an earlier age. In addition, rising wages and growth in industries which tended to employ a higher proportion of women, in for example clerical jobs, might be expected to increase female participation. Finally, the drafting of two million women into paid employment during the 1914-18 war would seem likely to boost both the employment opportunities offered to women and their willingness to take them up. Hatton observes that although these broad economic influences appear to have contributed to the rising female labour force participation in the postwar period, it is curious that their combined impact between the wars appears to have been so marginal.

One of the most striking features of female labour force participation in the interwar period is its enormous variation across the country. In 1931, regional figures ranged from 19.5% in South Wales to 39.9% in Greater London and 41.9% in North-West England. This reflects the different industrial traditions of each region, as established in the nineteenth century, with the highest rates occurring in textile areas and in London, slightly lower rates in other manufacturing areas, and the lowest rates in rural areas and in those dominated by mining. In the postwar period, these regional variations shrank: participation rates rose in areas of traditionally lower female participation so that by 1971 the rates in different regions varied only from 35.7% to 45.4%.

The differences are as striking between towns as they are between regions. Hatton estimates an equation explaining female labour force participation, based on 1931 Census data from 144 towns. His estimates indicate that variations in age, marital status and dependency affected female participation in a similar manner to that found in studies of postwar data. But when measures of the occupational structure in each town, if included, dominate all other variables in the participation function. Hatton finds that high female participation rates are most strongly associated with high overall employment in industries such as domestic service, textiles and clothing, which had employed the largest proportions of women in the nineteenth century. This suggests that the major influence on female participation was the continuation of power occupational structures and local traditions in working employment.

Social attitudes are also influential in determining both the supply and the demand for female labour, Hatton argues. During the 1914-18 war, about two million women replaced men in jobs, and the proportion of women in the workforce rose from 24% to 37%. This pattern is very similar to that for the Second World War, which is often credited with having begun a revolution in women's work. Yet Hatton finds that by the time of the 1921 Census, female participation in employment had largely reverted to prewar levels. In contrast to the period after 1945, when an official campaign was mounted to retain women in the workforce, the 1918 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act was widely accepted by employers and unions and was strictly enforced. In the interwar period, the ban on employing married women was reimposed in many occupations, and the view that a married woman's place was in the home and not in full-time employment regained its dominance.

The persistence of high unemployment in the interwar period makes the relationship between unemployment and female participation a key issue. Low female participation rates might be explained by the 'discouraged worker' effect: high unemployment might simply have caused women to drop out of the labour market. Hatton analyses time-series data for the insured female labour force, about 55% of all women in work, and discovers a very low correlation between the overall level of unemployment and the ratio of men to women in work. This, he argues, weighs heavily against the possibility of a strong 'discouraged worker' effect in the interwar period.

Hatton concludes that nineteenth century traditions and attitudes to women's employment continued to prevail in the interwar period, and that these had a dominant effect on labour supply, eclipsing conventional economic factors. It was only in the postwar period, when the influence of these traditional attitudes waned and when occupational structures inherited from the previous century disintegrated, that wider economic and demographic changes were reflected in the pattern of female employment.


Female Labour Force Participation: The Enigma of the Interwar Period
Tim Hatton

Discussion Paper No. 113, June 1986 (HR)