The real engine of this revolution was deeper economic forces. There was a shift from direct production to an economy based on the finance and service sectors which led to the complete closure of certain types of industry, particularly heavy industry. Some traditional male jobs in mining and the steel industry disappeared altogether. Since 1950, five million jobs had gone from industries producing goods. Jobs depending on physical strength, such as construction or the Army, have vanished in their millions. As a consequence of these shifts, in the past fifteen years, two million men have disappeared from the workforce (Independent, 2 January 1996). On top of these long-term changes, recession and the development of global markets also played a profound role. Both favoured industries which could shift production from base to base and ‘down-size’ their workforces at speed in order to stay in business. The result was ‘flexibilization’, a shift to a culture of short-term contracts, and more part-time work, changes in working patterns which had a profound impact on men.
Actually it is not strictly accurate to talk about the destruction of heavy industry. Those difficult, dirty and arduous industries which relied on skills traditionally associated with men disappeared from the UK but were relocated to the Third World. That sort of work is now performed wherever the production cost is lowest. So Third World countries bear the cost both in environmental terms – the exploitation of their raw materials - and in terms of human health. In the UK, though, these jobs appear to have gone for good. The jobs in finance and information technology which replaced them are gender-blind, or even favour women because of their dexterity and communication skills. Increasingly big companies have become multinational or global, and prefer to work with part-time or short-term contracts which allow them to move base quickly.
It is hard to say definitively how much the huge increase in women workers, especially part-time women workers, was driven by demand from women themselves for such work and how much by these economic changes. There was probably a meshing of interests. Throughout the 1980s the culture of permanent contracts for full-time jobs gave way to short-term contracts and part-time employment which was both cheaper and more easily dispensed with as companies maintained profit levels in a recession. Certainly women were more prepared for these developments when they came. They were more used to career breaks, had often argued that part-time work might solve childcare problems and had already suggested employers stop valuing unilinear careers and look instead at the overall ‘portfolio’. Indeed, feminism had always been vociferous about the way the old male career pattern thwarted human potentiality in both sexes. ‘The assumption that people want to change careers, that they want time out of work, that they want to learn new things, go to college, have kids, move in and out of the labour market, rather than stay fixed in one place for forty years, with a gold watch at the end of it, all of those transformations are associated with women’ (Bea Campbell, ‘Analysis’, BBC Radio 4, 1994).
Feminism’s interest in increased part-time work and increased flexibility, however, was connected with calls for increased involvement in parenting, and a different relationship between work and home. Such ideas were and remain one of the most significant progressive discourses on how to live in the new millennium, on how to develop new ways of feeling good about yourself and your contribution to society other than just in terms of work achievement. When feminists were vocal about the need for work flexibility, they couldn’t have known that global capitalism would deliver the goods quite so promptly and quite so unpleasantly. Nor could they have anticipated that the time at which these arrived would coincide with social developments which whipped the rug out from under men’s feet.
Professor Ray Pahl, author of After Success (1995), says that men were hit particularly severely by the needs of the global market for job flexibility. The idea of the unilinear career was the basis of masculine identity. It involved sacrifices, either of the body to physical labour or of the soul to the company, to provide for the family. ‘Contracting out’, ‘down-sizing’ and ‘delayering’ meant the end to steady career paths. Some chose self-employment and some had it thrust upon them, but however it arrived, it marked a shift to personal autonomy in the labour market. ‘Career ladders’ gave way to ‘portfolio careers’ and men were at first unready. Young men now no longer have those same expectations of traditional jobs for life but it took at least a decade to abandon such expectations. Women, however, were already used to interrupted employment. They had learned to market their diverse skills and demanded praise for balancing home and work. Women ‘juggle their lives’, She magazine proclaimed, coining the ultimate ‘80s slogan. Many men were unprepared and even unwilling to accept these new conditions when so much of their identity previously rested on traditional careers. There was more at stake for men than women.
As we shall see in the following chapter, there are many who play down the implications of these developments for gender roles or the levelling of the sexes. The increase is in poorly paid, part-time jobs such as retailing, catering and services, so feminization of the workplace just means more poorly paid female employees. This argument does not hold water. In the 1980s it was certainly true that the biggest increase in the numbers of women working was at the lower-paid end, especially in part-time work. But this was no deployment of some reserve army of labour which could be speedily withdrawn at will: this was a shift to more women permanently in the labour market.
This is still not the full story. In the 1990s there has also been a steady increase in the numbers of women working fulltime and even at the higher-paid end of the economy. Indeed, women appear to be making dramatic progress in the professions; in 1997, 52 per cent of new solicitors were women; 32 per cent of managers and administrators; 34 per cent of health professionals; and 27 per cent of buyers, brokers and sales reps (Demos Report, Tomorrow’s Women, 1997). Given that professional jobs are growing faster than any other occupational group, with women forecast to have 44 per cent of those jobs by 2001, this does not sound as if women are confined to the poorly-paid sector. With girls currently outperforming boys at school and universities, the education gap is also closing and women are likely to be more highly qualified than men. ‘The high skill end of the economy… is finding as many candidates among young women as young men and since the mid-eighties …it has been jobs for women in the full-time sector, in the professional and technical occupations, that have been on the increase’ (Heather Joshi, interview with author, 1998).
Women’s increased role in the economy means that women have more personal wealth than ever before. Two-income families, while often necessary to deal with rising costs, now have great advantages over one-income families. The number of women earning more than their partners has trebled from 1 in 15 in the early 1980s to 1 in 5 by the mid-1990s. Among childless couples with degrees, it is normal for women to provide half the income. In 1996 it was estimated that more than 20 per cent of couples had the woman as the main breadwinner (Focus, March 1998). Women have also made inroads into the corridors of power. There are more women on boards than ever before, and a larger number of women running successful businesses. These are the statistics behind the fact that, for most educated couples now, sexual equality at all levels of life is simply taken for granted.
Although many of these changes may appear to affect only the higher paid, it does not mean they are any the less significant. The old feminist equation that being a woman necessarily entails low income and low status is no longer always true, even if it sometimes is. Feminists cannot have it both ways. Maybe not all women are in well-paid full-time jobs, and maybe it is still more usual for women to be in low-paid part-time work, but not all are, and nor do they of necessity have to be. So one of the vital foundations of feminist argument – that women are always financially disadvantages – has been seriously shaken. As we have seen in the previous chapters, these economic changes also coincided with changes in law and morality which mean that, for the first time in recorded history, women have at least in theory the opportunity to be economically autonomous and to earn money at the same level as their male counterparts. These developments cannot be dismissed just because the poorest women are still at the bottom of the heap; if feminism was premised on the idea that women are always structurally disadvantaged, what happens to