Equal pay is a fundamental issue affecting working families. While the number of women workers in the labor force has steadily increased, the contribution of women's wages to family income has also grown, with women's earnings now providing a significant portion of total household income.
When a person temporarily leaves their employment because of the arrival of a child, illness of a family member, or her or his own illness, economic costs arise for three groups: workers, employers, and society.
Though secretarial and clerical occupations were not always female intensive, they are currently the largest women's occupational category in the US.
Women telecommunication workers are an exception to the rule that women earn low pay for the work they do.
The growth of temporary work - both as offered through the temporary help services industry (THS), and directly by employers- presents some new and largely unrecognized questions of public policy.
Departing from the outmoded view that only male breadwinners need earn a wage adequate to support a family, a study by IWPR examines the adequacy of wages and benefits of all adult workers for family support.
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This Briefing Paper is one of a series of occasional papers by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) on the status of women workers in the communications and other service industries.
The most frequently mentioned cause of the feminization of poverty is the change in family structure-thee increase in divorce, nonmarital births, and independent households established by women (McLanahan et al. 1989; Pearce 1989).
