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Women in the workforce earning wages or a salary are part of a modern phenomenon, one that developed at the same time as the growth of paid employment for men, but women have been challenged by inequality in the workforce. Until modern times, legal and cultural practices, combined with the inertia of longstanding religious and educational conventions, restricted women's entry and participation in the workforce. Economic dependency upon men, and consequently the poor socio-economic status of women, have had the same impact, particularly as occupations have become professionalized over the 19th and 20th centuries. Women's lack of access to higher education had effectively excluded them from the practice of well-paid and high status occupations. Entry of women into the higher professions like law and medicine was delayed in most countries due to women being denied entry to universities and qualification for degrees;for example, Cambridge University only fully validated degrees for women late in 1947, and even then only after much opposition and acrimonious debate.〔() 〕 Women were largely limited to low-paid and poor status occupations for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, or earned less pay than men for doing the same work. However, through the 20th century, public perceptions of paid work shifted as the workforce increasingly moved to office jobs that do not require heavy labor, and women increasingly acquired the higher education that led to better-compensated, longer-term careers rather than lower-skilled, shorter-term jobs but women are still at a disadvantage compared to men because motherhood. Women are viewed as the primary caregiver to children still to this day so their pay is lowered when they have children because businesses do not expect them to stay long after the birth. The increasing rates of women contributing in the work force has led to a more equal disbursement of hours worked across the regions of the world.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=Gapminder World )〕 However, in western European countries the nature of women's employment participation remains markedly different from that of men. For example, few women are in continuous full-time employment after the birth of a first child. Due to the lack of childcare and because women in Britain lose 9% of their wage after their first child and 16% after their second child.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=What Keeps Mothers in Full-time Employment? )〕 Restrictions on women's access to and participation in the workforce include the wage gap which in the United States, women only make 87.5% of what a man makes and the glass ceiling, inequities most identified with industrialized nations with nominal equal opportunity laws;legal and cultural restrictions on access to education and jobs, inequities most identified with developing nations;and unequal access to capital, variable but identified as a difficulty in both industrialized and developing nations. Women are prevented from achieving complete gender equality in the workplace because of the “ideal-worker norm,” which “defines the committed worker as someone who works full-time and full force for forty years straight,” a situation designed for the male sex (Williams 100). Women, in contrast, are still expected to fulfill the caretaker role and take time off for domestic needs such as pregnancy and ill family members, preventing them from conforming to the “ideal-worker norm.” With the current norm in place, women are forced to juggle full-time jobs and family care at home. Although access to paying occupations (the "workforce") has been and remains unequal in many occupations and places around the world, scholars sometimes distinguish between "work" and "paying work," including in their analysis a broader spectrum of labor such as uncompensated household work, childcare, eldercare, and family subsistence farming. ==Areas of study== The division of labor by gender has been particularly studied in women's studies (especially women's history, which has frequently examined the history and biography of women's participation in particular fields) and gender studies more broadly. Occupational studies, such as the history of medicine or studies of professionalization, also examine questions of gender, and the roles of women in the history of particular fields. Women dominate as accountants, auditors, and psychologists. In addition, modern civil rights law has frequently examined gender restrictions of access to a field of occupation;gender discrimination within a field;and gender harassment in particular workplaces. This body of law is called employment discrimination law, and gender and race discrimination are the largest sub-sections within the area. Laws specifically aimed at preventing discrimination against women have been passed in many countries;see, e.g., the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in the United States. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Women in the workforce」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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