Demographic Factors Influencing Women's Decisions About Going Out for Work

Demographic Factors Influencing Women's Decisions About Going Out for Work

Laila Hlewa, Osama Mohammad
Copyright: © 2020 |Pages: 13
DOI: 10.4018/IJISSC.2020070102
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Abstract

One of the most difficult decisions, especially in the societies of third world countries, is the decision to send a woman to work. This decision has many social and economic consequences, and the decision to send a woman to work is subject to a set of influencing factors that differ from one society to another. This research deals with the most important demographic factors influencing the decisions of women going out for work in Syrian society in general and the Province of Lattakia in particular. The research reached a set of results, the most important of them include: 1) There were no significant differences between the mean answers according to the family situation. There are fundamental differences between the people in the countryside and the city when deciding to go out to work. There is a preference for exit to work among city residents, where the average decision to exit to work reached 3.3, while this indicator reached 3.01 among rural residents. 2) There were no significant differences between the mean answers according to age.
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Literature Review

Study David, H. (2004), Women, War, and Wages: The Effect of Female Labor Supply on the Wage Structure at Midcentury

The research exploits the military mobilization for World War II to investigate the effects of female labor supply on the wage structure. The mobilization drew many women into the workforce permanently. But the impact was not uniform across states. In states with greater mobilization of men, women worked more after the war and in 1950, though not in 1940. These induced shifts in female labor supply lowered female and male wages and increased earnings inequality between high school– and college-educated men. It appears that at midcentury, women were closer substitutes for high school men than for those with lower skills.

The main conclusion was the epochal rise in female labor force participation is one of the most profound labor market transformations of the past century. And yet, the economics profession knows relatively little about the consequences of increased female labor force participation for the structure of wages. An empirical investigation of this issue requires a source of variation in female employment that is orthogonal to demand for female (and also male) labor. In this paper, we developed the argument that the differential extent of mobilization for WWII across U.S. states provides a useful source of variation to identify the effects of women’s labor force participation on a range of labor market outcomes. We documented that in 1950 women participated more in states in which a larger fraction of working-age men served in the military during themid-1940s. This differential female labor supply behavior does not seem to be accounted for by other cross state differences or possible demand factors and is not present in the pre-1940 or post-1950 data. We interpret this as a shift in female labor supply induced by the mobilization for the war.

Study of Jim, T. (2008), Women and Work after the Second World War: A Case Study of the Jute Industry, Circa 1945–1954, Twentieth Century British History, London

The article examines the attempts by the Dundee jute industry to recruit women workers in the years circa 1945-1954. It locates its discussion of these attempts in the literature on the impact of the Second World War on the participation of women in the British labour market more generally, and the forces determining that participation. It stresses the peculiarities of jute as a traditional major employer of women operating in very specific market conditions but suggests this case study throws light on the broader argument about the impact of war and early post-war conditions on women’s participation in paid work.

The main conclusion was, ‘Patriarchal’ attitudes towards women, especially married women, were far from absent in Dundee in the post-war years. But the effects of such attitudes appear muted. The concerns articulated in many places about the harm done to children by absent mothers found echoes in discussions in and about the City, but with no evidence of much effect. (94) As we have seen, the policy of the City was, certainly as regards jute, to encourage women in general, but including married women, to work. The prevalent attitude may be accurately reflected in a piece in the Scotsman in 1956 headed ‘Jute Trade’s Dependence on Women Workers’ which noted criticism of ‘latch-key children’, a trope of contemporary discussion on working mothers, but went on to stress ‘industry without the services of married women would collapse today just as surely as it would have done without them during the war’.

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