Women and Work in the 1970s

Louise McLaren

Louise is a multidisciplinary strategic insights professional working across qualitative and quantitative research methods as well as cultural insight and behavioural science. She typically partners with her clients on upstream programmes such as segmentations, category strategy, positioning, proposition development and innovation work. She is the Chair of Trustees of Talking Taboos Foundation, Ambassador for Renewable World, a Fellow of the MRS and of the RSA, and is currently studying for an MSC in Applied Neuroscience.

Women and work in the 1970s

In today’s world, women have access to more opportunities than ever before. To look at the positive indicators to begin with, a few statistics stand out:

Women’s participation in the workplace – 72.5% as of April 2026, per ONS data [1]
Attainment in secondary education – very close to males at A grade in 2025, following several years of outperformance [2]
Attainment in university education – with women outperforming men in achieving first and upper second degrees in 2023-24 [3]
Unemployment – as of Q3 2025, the unemployment rate for women in the UK was actually lower than for men — 4.7% vs 5.7% – a trend that has been seen over the past two decades [4]

It is also worth considering that since the 1970s, there have been several important legislative advances — women have gained rights to maternity leave and pay, protections against sexual harassment, and extensions to the original Equal Pay Act of 1970 to close loopholes [5].

There has been meaningful progress on parity in pay, but women are not on level with men. It is interesting to study the period from the 1970s to the modern day, because 1970 is precisely when the Equal Pay Act came into force [6]. This act was the first piece of UK legislation which enshrined the right to pay equality between women and men. It was followed in 2010 by the Equality Act, which [7]:

Sets out that people should not be discriminated against in employment, when seeking employment, or when engaged in occupations or activities related to work, because of their sex
And that an individual can claim equal pay when she or he, when compared with a comparator of the opposite sex, is employed in:
- Like work: Which means work that is the same or broadly similar, regardless of whether the job title is the same.
- Work rated as equivalent: Which means work that has been rated as equivalent under a job evaluation scheme.
- Work of equal value: Which means work that requires the same levels of effort, skill, knowledge and responsibility.

Nonetheless, the pay gap remains, and employment presents a mixed picture overall. Median weekly pay for female full-time employees was £710 in April 2025, according to data from the ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings. This is compared with £815 for male full-time employees. In April 2025, the gender pay gap in median hourly pay (excluding overtime) between men and women was 6.9% for full-time employees but it is 12.8% for all employees (including those who work part-time). This reflects the fact that more women than men are employed part time, with part-time workers typically earning less per hour than those working full time [8].

The gap has been closing over the past 20 years: in 1997, the gap in pay for full-time employment was 27.5% [9]. While behind men, women’s share of directorships of publicly listed companies has grown: as of October 2025, 44.4% of FTSE100 and 42.7% of FTSE350 directorships were occupied by women, and 43% of all new FSTSE100 board appointments were women [10].

The data shows that women working has a positive knock-on effect in employment prospects for their daughters, helping drive change across generations [11].

Yet of course, it would be rare (perhaps impossible) to see only the positive trajectories. At the same time, we can see several persistent inequalities between women and men, which are systemic.

Men’s paternity leave in the UK is enshrined in law: fathers/non-birthing partners are given a statutory allowance of £194.32 per week for up to 2 weeks of leave for the birth of a child. This is the government baseline, setting the standard for what workplaces are willing to offer, although some companies do exceed this [12]. Nonetheless, research by childcare provider Koru Kids found that 76% of fathers/non-birthing partners were only offered the statutory minimum [13].

Access to affordable childcare is a widely recognised challenge in the UK, which has some of the highest childcare costs in the OECD net of government supports. For couples earning an average wage, net childcare costs account for 25% of their earnings in the UK [14]. Research by Pregnant then Screwed and Mumsnet of 26,962 parents of young children found that 62% say that the cost of childcare is now the same or more than their rent/mortgage [15]. There is evidence that living costs coupled with the high cost of childcare are deterring women from having children today. In 2022, Pregnant Then Screwed surveyed 1,630 women who had had an abortion in the previous five years. The research found that 60.5% say that the cost of childcare influenced their decision to have an abortion, while 17.4% of women said that childcare costs were the main reason they chose to have an abortion [16].

Since the 1970s, there is also growing insight into the uneven distribution of what is known as the ‘domestic load’ – the sharing of household tasks. A popular humorous novel by Allison Pearson, published in 2002, called ‘I Don’t Know How She Does it’ explored the experiences of a woman who sought to have a demanding career alongside motherhood, and found herself crushed by the unrealistic expectations of modern life, with a lack of meaningful support by her hapless husband. Since then, a truism that is often trotted out is that women can have it all, but not all at the same time – unless society changes to support them better.

The sharing of household chores is hard to quantify accurately, and influenced by perception. As Starling Bank found in 2023: While nearly three quarters (72%) of women say they do the majority of household tasks in their relationship, just 18% of men agree their partner does the most [17]. Today, it is also understood that the burden for working mothers is not just the chores themselves, but the emotional and practical responsibility for organising the majority of the tasks – whether it be school lunch payments, playdates, and so much more. This is often referred to as the ‘invisible load’.

Overall, it would be valid to reflect that while progress in gender equality has been made, it has not been sufficient. To contextualise this mixed picture, it is invaluable to build a historical perspective. The 70s were fifty years ago, or thereabouts.

Women’s participation in the workforce is one of the main societal areas of change we have seen over recent decades. Today, there is limited concern about the impact of mothers working on their children’s wellbeing and development – as noted above, the cost of childcare, or quite different issues such as social media addiction, or how AI is impacting employment prospects.

In 1971, however, a survey regarding women’s employment was concerned to obtain not just the views of women who worked outside the home as well as those not in paid employment, but also of children [18]. Interviews were carried out with 490 married working women and 495 non-working married women. Note that the report specifically makes mention of marital status, and by implication the sampling excluded non-married women. This would not happen today: sample design would be inclusive of non-married mothers and indeed may set out to include solo parents, same sex partners and fathers.

This report offers a fascinating insight into the differences in attitudes of women towards their own employment status and prospects, and their roles in the family. Its headline findings are that women valued work primarily for the freedom that money could offer them. The ‘softer’ benefits of working are also highlighted: women perceived that it helps stave off boredom and depression, makes them more interesting, and offers companionship.

The disadvantages that women perceived in working are illuminating. The reports emphasises the following, each of which prompt reflection:

‘They find they have to skimp on housework’ – the implicit assumption, made by women themselves but also assimilated by the report writers, being that it remains women’s responsibility to do the housework, and their working outside the home need not change that
‘They resent the restriction on their free time’ – related, arguably, to the issue of having to juggle domestic with employment responsibilities, a tension that remains unresolved for many women, as the data above signals
‘They get particularly tired trying to do work and the housework’ – underscoring the issue of uneven domestic load

The report also draws out the finding that: ‘Though they pick money as a major motivator of working, they do not choose a job purely for the money they will get. The most important characteristic is how near to home the job is, and the next most important characteristic is pleasant companions’. Thus women’s participation in the workforce had real or imagined limitations placed on it – rather than choosing employment for the opportunities it presents, a primary consideration was proximity to the home, and it could be inferred that this is because women were still carrying the majority of the responsibility for childcare and household responsibilities.

The survey report frames further findings in a way that is highly telling, providing wider insight into gender attitudes at the time.

It did not survey male partners, but asked women to reflect on their husbands, stating: ‘Most wives work with their husband’s approval, but some of those who don’t work claim it is their husband’s disapproval that keeps them at home’, and ‘not many husbands mind their wives working with men’. Today, it would likely be considered a relationship ‘red flag’ if a woman reported that she needed her husband’s approval to work.

Because the norm was for working mothers to be married, as implied by the survey sampling, the report does not consider the wider benefits to women’s empowerment that can be offered by having their own income source, such as the financial freedom to divorce or separate. The money that women’s employment gives is reported as beneficial to help pay for little luxuries, such as holidays or wigs.

Change moves slowly. By 1977, a survey by NOP published in the Sunday Times reported that ‘most women remain deeply committed to a traditional view of themselves’, and highlights that:

Three-quarters of working wives (again with marital status baked into sampling and reporting) say that if unemployment gets worse, men should take priority over women in the job market
Only 37% of working wives would accept promotion involving responsibility, compared with 81% of men

Yet it did find one substantial change in attitudes from 1971 to 1977. Whereas in 1971, two-thirds of working wives considered themselves as mainly ‘housewives with a job’, by 1977, almost half saw themselves as ‘working women who also run a home’ [19]. An important shift in the framing of priorities,
but worth noting that this still implies that women remain primarily responsible for the domestic load.

As remarked earlier in this paper, the domestic load remains a challenge for working women today. The reasons this persists are complex – societal attitudes and support structures will both play a role. Where there is a lack of equality in parental leave payment, and women therefore take on most of the parental leave in the early months, already it could be that household roles and priorities become somewhat shaped.

Overall, the 1971 NOP report is fascinating in the window it offers into the attitudes women themselves had towards employment at that time. Not only does it shine a light on the benefits they saw but the limitations they faced, helping us understand how they thought at that time, but simply in the construction of the research itself, and the way it is reported, we can see how markedly different attitudes towards gender equality were at that time. In this respect, the report helps us to see myriad ways in which societal attitudes have evolved for the better in the past fifty years.

Sources

Louise McLaren

Posted to amsr.org.uk in June 2026