The Break in Employment for Child Rearing
| Published date | 01 April 1980 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb055424 |
| Date | 01 April 1980 |
| Pages | 37-38 |
| Author | Rita Johnston |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
The Break in Employment for Child Rearing
Rita Johnston
Sheffield City Polytechnic
This research note presents evidence that the break in
employment for child-rearing is considerably less than
has previously been supposed. It argues that this has
implications for both industry and government.
There is no official statistic for the number of years
that women, on average, withdraw from the paid
employment market in the UK, in order to have and
raise children. In
1971,
Seear
[1 ]
quoted "a gap of ten to
twenty years" as the time after which women were re-
entering employment. By 1975, King [2] had reduced
the estimate to eight years, which he compared with the
three year average break in West Germany. Since he did
not disclose the basis on which his figure was calculated,
one must presume it was a guestimate. In its 1979
Research Bulletin [3], the EOC notes earlier family
completion "enabling women to return to work at an
earlier age than previously" but does not indicate how
much earlier or what the previous age was, and recent
application to the EOC has confirmed that indeed no
actual figure is available.
A recent survey in the Sheffield area suggests that the
figures given by King and Seear may be outdated. The
survey followed two methodologies: a large scale
applied questionnaire sampling all re-entrants visiting
four job centres over a two-month period; and depth
interviewing of 32 women selected by cluster sampling
to give a balanced working class/middle class
representation.
Findings
The data on break for child-rearing from the large
scale sample are given in Figure 1. The arithmetical
average is 10.3 years and the median falls within the
nine year break, seeming to correspond closely to King's
and Seear's estimates. The mode is a break of five years,
however, and the graph is skewed by the small numbers
re-entering after a very extended break in employment.
These findings need qualification. The sample
included as re-entrants anyone "within the re-entry
adjustment process", which was taken as a period of
two years from initial contact with paid employment
after domesticity. This could mean that some recordings
exaggerate the break in employment by as much as two
years.
Of even more significance, for the purposes of
the survey a re-entrant was defined as someone who had
had a break in employment of at least four years. Thus
any women seeking re-entry after less than four years
were specifically excluded from the survey. Estimates
based on one week's details of
all
women approached by
the interviewers and reasons for their rejection from the
sample indicate that around 420 women in all may have
been excluded for this reason. Since the exact number of
years absent is not known, their effect on the arithmetic
average is hidden, but had they been included the
median would have been close to the mode at five years.
Further insight into the reality of the re-entry
situation was gained by depth interviews. For the 23
women in the sample who had already re-entered
employment the average break for child-rearing was
under four years in the working class area and almost
five year in the middle class suburb (Figure
2).
Only two
women in the working class area but seven in the middle
class area had not yet re-entered the work-force and the
gap in employment, at the time of the survey, was
already over six years for this group. Thus the evidence
from the depth interviews suggests the same pattern as
the questionnaire survey; that is, a modal re-entry after
three to five years with the average distorted by a
minority of late re-entrants.
A number of explanations—not mutually
exclusive—can be put forward to account for the
discrepancy between these findings and previously
published estimates. First, the Sheffield findings could
be atypical. Obviously, only more research in other
areas could provide enlightenment on this point, though
the work of Townsend et al[4] in the North East region
suggests similar findings.
Secondly, this could be a very recent phenomenon. It
may be that the trend towards smaller and more
condensed families, rising inflation, greater social
acceptance of working mothers and insecurity of male
employment could all be combining to draw women
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