The Glass for Women in Corporate America

In 1920, Congress finally passed the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which established that the right to vote could not be abridged on account of sex. After that, change began to happen fast. Word War I marked the first mass movement of women to find jobs formerly held by men. In 1917 the War Labor Board ordered that wages ordinarily paid to men should not be lowered for women rendering the same service. The unions supported this rule in both interest of equality and to protect the gains earned by union men. (Sally Helgesen, The Female Advantage (New York: Doubleday 1990), pp. 46-50.

After the war, women working declined sharply and despite the progress made during the 1920's, by 1930 only 24% of the work force was female. With the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, equal pay for work by men and women was mandated by federal law for the first time in our nation's history. The wartime equal pay was restored during World War II, and the War Labor Board regularly tried to enforce it. But in practice, wages for women were often reduced by as much as 30%. Though few could question that the labor of women was vital, both to win the war and to keep the economy up and running while many men were away, women were often criticized, harassed and stigmatized. Many competent female workers were fined after the war, not because a returning veteran wanted his job back but because the employer had seen the woman as an emergency employee all along, even if she had been on the job three or four years. (Ibid., pp.51-53)

After World War II, women filled more jobs than before. While much of this growth can be attributed to the war efforts, the 36% of women working in 1945 decreased only slightly to 34% in 1950. The overall figures re bounded to 38% by 1960, increasing to 43% by 1970 and up to 52% by 1980. The increase between 1950 and 1980 is even more dramatic when expressed in actual numbers. In 1950, 18.4 million women were in the workforce and 44.7 million were working by 1980. Today there are 56 million women working outside the home in America. (Ibid., pp. 56-62)