Tammy Wynette was right when she said, 'Sometimes it's hard to be a woman'. But for all the progress we've seen, have the hard times really been banished to the past? Mary Ann Stephenson turns the clock back to see

Imagine a world where there are three rates for the same job - the skilled rate, the trainee rate and the women's rate. Imagine a world where you get sacked as soon as you announce you are pregnant - and have no legal protection. Imagine a world where you try to hire a television, and they tell you to come back with your husband - company policy does not allow married women to sign contracts. Imagine the world when your mother was young.

In 1971 my mother was married and living in South Wales. She decided she wanted to return to work and contacted her local authority to inquire about vacancies. Sorry, she was told, we don't employ married women; they don't need the work the way men do.

It's not surprising that women of her generation fought so hard for the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts, for the right not to be dismissed because they were pregnant, and for statutory maternity pay.

Better days?
Women in their twenties and thirties, today, have lives that are profoundly different from those of their mothers. And at first glance, it might seem that we've come a long way. In 1970 women's pay was 65% of men's, today its 81%. Women are entering the workforce in larger numbers than ever before, and it seems that not a day goes by without a story about a woman high-flyer becoming the first in her field to reach the top. Surely we should expect this? Today's women are better qualified than ever before. In 1963 only a quarter of undergraduates were female. This had increased to a third by the mid 1970s, and is now slightly over half.

Next page: have things really improved?

But while the generation that has grown up since the 1970s has benefitted from new legal rights, equality is not yet firmly in our grasp.

True, it is now illegal for employers to refuse to employ married women, or expect women to resign when they become pregnant. But the single biggest number of complaints to the Equal Opportunities Commission, last year, was from women who told their boss they were pregnant and were promptly sacked. Having a right is one thing, exercising it, especially, when there is no legal aid for employment tribunals, is something else.

A closer look
While women working full time now earn 80 pence per hour for every £1 earned by a man, the real gap in men and women's earnings is far wider. 44% of women in employment work part-time, and they earn, on average, only 60 pence per hour for every pound earned by a man. Women are entering the workforce in larger numbers than ever before, but the job market is still heavily segregated by gender. And the sad fact is that, the larger the proportion of women in an industry, the lower the status, and the lower the pay.

The reality of work for most women is, low status jobs that are insecure and badly paid. A few high profile women have broken through, but the reason they are high profile is precisely because there are so few of them. A quick glance at the FTSE top 100 companies from last year shows how few women there are at the most senior levels in the UK. More than half of the FTSE top 100 had no women on their boards. Only 10 had more than one, and none had more than 2.

Women today are committed to working for a living. We are certainly more likely to be in paid work than our mothers, working longer hours and for more of our lives. This change is most obvious among mothers of small children. Just over 50% of women with children under 5 are now in paid employment - this accounts for 1.6 million women. Of these women, 1.2 million were themselves brought up by mothers who were not in paid work at all. So much has change, in terms of women going out to work, but what's happening at home?

Next page: work is all around

Doing it all
While women's working patterns have changed dramatically over the past 30 years, men's contribution to childcare and household tasks has changed very little. In the mid-1970s men performed less than a quarter of all domestic work and less than 10% of routine domestic work. A study for the Co-op in 1999 showed that, four out of five women with families still did all or most of the housework. Even when both partners have full time jobs, the woman does most of the housework in seven out of ten cases. The Henley Centre has calculated that, this double shift means that men have on average 14 hours more leisure time a week than women.

Women, who never knew a world of work before the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts, have a lot to thank their mothers' generation for. Their campaigning meant that we simply do not have to deal with many of the attitudes they faced. But the best tribute we can pay them is to continue to campaign, not only to close the pay gap and finally shatter the glass ceiling, but for equality at home; without which, far from having it all, we will continue to be doing it all.

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