Tougher economic conditions are being blamed for increasing the
number of UK mothers working full-time, from less than a quarter to
almost a third.
According to new figures from the Office of National Statistics, 29
per cent of mothers worked 35 hours a week or more at the end of last
year, up from 23 per cent in 1996.
The figures were “terribly
worrying,” Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies told The Daily Telegraph.
She said, “The evidence suggests that mothers don’t want to go
full-time so they are doing this because they have to or because their
husbands are out of work.”
However, a higher number of mothers worked
part-time rather than full-time, with 37 per cent doing so at the end of
last year.
The gap between employment rates for mothers and for women with no
dependent children has narrowed significantly, the statistics found.
In
the final quarter of 2010, 66 per cent of mothers and 67 per cent of
women without dependent children were in either full-time or part-time
work.
In 1996, 61 per cent of mothers were employed, compared to 67 per
cent for women without dependent children, which includes 16 to 18-year
olds, in education and anyone under the age of 15.
Since the recession,
the employment rate for women without children has fallen back from its
peak of 70 per cent in 2006, driven mainly by a fall in employment for
those aged 16 to 24.
ONS statistician Jamie Jenkins said, "Over 15 years, the proportion
of mothers working part-time hasn't changed much but the number of
full-timers has risen markedly, which is what's driving the increase is
working mothers."
He added that over the last 15 years, the decline in
manufacturing industries and rise in services may have contributed to
more women with children going to work.
Women were starting to have
babies later on in life, in their mid-thirties, he said, meaning they
were generally on higher salaries and were less inclined to stop working
full-time after childbirth.
Meanwhile, a senior Tory politician has suggested that the entry of
more women into the workplace has harmed the career prospects of
working-class men.
David Willetts, the Universities Minister has said
that the advance of equal rights for women has resulted in a lack of
progress for men, although he made it clear he supports equal rights.
He was speaking in advance of the publication of the Government’s
social mobility strategy, to be published next week.
It is set to
conclude that movement between the classes had “stagnated” over the past
40 years.
Speaking at a briefing with journalists on the strategy, Mr Willetts
said, “Feminism trumped egalitarianism,” adding that women who would
otherwise have been housewives had taken university places and well-paid
jobs that could have gone to ambitious working-class men.
The Government's new strategy will include a plan to test the
population at seven ages, from birth until the age of 30, to measure
whether life chances were improving for children from different
backgrounds.
Figures to be published are expected to paint a grim
picture of the prospects for advancement for children from the poorest
backgrounds dating back to the 1960s.
Asked what was to blame for the lack of social mobility, Mr Willetts
said, “The feminist revolution in its first round effects was probably
the key factor. Feminism trumped egalitarianism. It is not that I am
against feminism, it’s just that is probably the single biggest
factor.”
Mr Willetts, who set out his views on feminism in his recent
book, The Pinch, said that, as a result of better education for
women, households now contained two people who were either both
financially successful or struggling to get on.
“One of the things that happened over that period was that the
entirely admirable transformation of opportunities for women meant that
with a lot of the expansion of education in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the
first beneficiaries were the daughters of middle-class families who had
previously been excluded from educational opportunities,” he said.