Essay Series 7.4: Women have made some progress toward equality with men in the workplace, but improvement is needed.

After World War II, women received the message that they needed to give up the jobs they had taken over when men went to war and put their primary focus on their homes and families. However, by the 1950s, women were beginning to express their discontent with focusing on the domestic labor. The Women’s Liberation Movement grew out of women’s discontents.

The Movement and the economic and employment rights women gained as a result made possible women’s progress at work from the 1960s onward. These new rights enabled women to work at jobs they enjoyed and to advance at work. These rights also helped women keep their families afloat financially when their husbands or the fathers of their children couldn’t.

Post-World War II

After World War II, society told women to confine their work to family and home and to give up their jobs to the men returning from war. Women received the message that staying at home was a privilege or progress. In addition, newer machines like vacuums and washing machines supposedly reduced women’s domestic burden.⁵⁷³

By 1950, the average woman doing paid work was in her 40s. Many of them were able to work for pay because the economy was booming and employers needed office workers, teachers, and nurses. In contrast, young women were quickly leaving the workforce to marry returning military men and have the Baby Boom generation.⁵⁷⁴ By the end of the 1950s, 40 percent of women over age 16 were employed.⁵⁷⁵ Seventy percent of employed women were clerks, service workers, or factory workers, 12 percent had professional jobs in nursing or teaching, and only six percent had management jobs.⁵⁷⁶

After the war, women went back to earning much less than men in equivalent jobs.⁵⁷⁷ And most women didn’t get access to the G.I. Bill,⁵⁷⁸ which funded so many veterans’ college educations. Women generally couldn’t get the educational benefit because the vast majority didn’t serve in the military.⁵⁷⁹ Veterans who were women or people of color often couldn’t access these benefits because they faced discrimination in admission to schools.

1950s-Early 1960s

During the post-war period, married women received the message that they should maintain homes where men were kings in their personal castles. Girls and women learned that they should serve their husbands by being sexy, keeping a clean house, and caring for children. These messages were in advertising, media, and education. Women’s acceptance of these pressures gave men control over their wives and the rest of their families.⁵⁸⁰ Women’s domestic labor usually came at the cost of financial dependence on men.⁵⁸¹

Many women in the 1950s felt stifled by their purely domestic role in subordination to their family’s needs. By 1960, many major news outlets were using the word “trapped” to describe American housewives’ feelings. Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique described women’s discontents with their domesticity. Among the sources of data for the book was a survey of Friedan’s fellow graduates from Smith College in Massachusetts; this group was largely middle-income-class White women.⁵⁸²

Men had their own discontents. They needed a wife and family to be socially acceptable, and they couldn’t express their needs outside of the family or even within it in many cases. Society expected men to conform to traditional ideals of strength, stoicism, aggression, and lack of emotional depth. Generally, men were more satisfied with marriage than women because men often controlled their families with little responsibility other than providing income. Some men resented women because these men believed women valued them for their paychecks.⁵⁸³

Women’s and men’s discontents often resulted in divorce. Between 1960 and 1980, the divorce rate more than doubled from 9.2 divorces per 1000 marriages to 22.6 per 1000.⁵⁸⁴

Before the Women’s Liberation Movement, women faced many constraints, including:

1. Earning 59 cents for every dollar a man made and being fired for being pregnant.

1. Having little control over their income and property.

1. Having no ability to enter into contracts or get a credit card.

1. Being excluded from many professions.

1. Having to give husbands total control over family finances in some states.^585,586

Women’s Liberation

It was primarily college-educated and middle-income-class women who were most visible in the early leadership of this phase of the fight for women's rights. However, a broad group of women eventually joined the movement. The women's movement gained strength in the late 1960s as women became outraged by their treatment within the Civil Rights Movement, the antiwar movement, and other movements. Women’s contributions were consistently downplayed or ignored in these movements.⁵⁸⁷

In 1970, a Women’s Strike for Equality helped propel the Liberation Movement. The Strike gathered support from a diverse group of women.⁵⁸⁸ Women were called upon to stop cleaning, cooking, waitressing, taking dictation, or doing any kind of job for which a man would get more pay. A diverse group of women got together for rallies across the country.⁵⁸⁹

Among the victories of the Women’s Liberation Movement were two laws related to employment. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 prohibits different pay levels for equivalent jobs requiring the same “skill, effort, and responsibility.” However, the Act excludes agricultural and domestic workers. There also were loopholes related to merit, seniority, and quality or quantity of work.⁵⁹⁰ Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits job discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.⁵⁹¹

As a result of these changes, by 1970, half of all single women and 40 percent of those who were married worked outside their homes for pay.⁵⁹² Women also began migrating from traditional jobs like nurse and teacher to a wider range of jobs such as lawyer, doctor, manager, and professor. Women began choosing college majors that were more lucrative.⁵⁹³

As women were becoming more active in the paid work world, men didn’t take on more caregiving and domestic responsibilities. The amount of time husbands spent on these tasks didn’t vary by their wives’ employment status.⁵⁹⁴

1980s and Beyond

Over time, women have made steady gains in terms of pay and work responsibilities. However, across a number of measures, women lag behind men. Even when controlling for children, job choices, industry, and company size, the overall pay gap between women and men hasn’t moved much because men predominate in the highest-paying positions.

Women still hold relatively few leadership positions in corporate America. For example, in 2024, women only held 10.4 percent of chief executive officer (CEO) positions and 33 percent of board seats among the 2024 list of Fortune 500 companies. Women of color held less than 8 percent of these board seats. At the current rate of progress, estimates are that it will take about 50 years for these companies to reach parity between women and men in terms of CEOs and board members.⁵⁹⁵ The percentages of women CEOs are lower among smaller companies.⁵⁹⁶

Women are still underrepresented in every level of corporate management compared to their presence in the workforce. As seniority in a company rises, women’s presence decreases. In 2025, women were 49 percent of entry-level workers, 41 percent of managers, 35 percent of vice presidents, and 30 percent of corporate leaders in the C-suite. Women of color are underrepresented in the upper management levels.⁵⁹⁷

Reflections

Post-World War II, many young women who had had good-paying, responsible jobs during the war went back to less fulfilling work at much lower pay. They married young and had children in large numbers, creating the Baby Boom generation, while societal messages reinforced their focus on home and family. Before the Women’s Liberation Movement, many women still had to work and faced many obstacles, such as jobs they couldn’t apply for because they were women or married or being fired when pregnant. For example, an older friend told me that she was denied a job in 1968 because she was married. Another example is that when I was three months pregnant, my supervisor told me I wouldn’t come back to work. When I replied that I would, he told me I didn’t know what I would do. I likely would have lost that job were it not for the Women’s Liberation Movement.