The employment rate of women during the twentieth century has risen greatly, and is still continuing to rise. Women's paid employment rate has risen continuously since the Second World War, whilst men's has declined.
There are many reasons behind this statement, one of which is the most important factor, that women won political citizenship in 1918. This gave women a great deal of power and sense of achievement. It made the feminist groups realise that if political citizenship was possible then so were many other things possible that were dominated by males.

Women have only been half the workforce since the 1950s, before that time they were only a third of the workforce. It became more accepted for women to go out and work, because a lot had helped out during the two world wars.

Women have also proven themselves worthy by achieving great educational qualifications since the 1970s. The educational qualifications for women have succeeded with better gains in employment, such as the higher socio-economic group levels, such as managerial and professional jobs.
This has therefore led to competition between younger and older women, because younger women have better qualifications, in full-time work they can achieve higher-level employment than that of older women.

The Equal opportunities legislation was brought in, so therefore there could be no discrimination made against women. Women had to be seen as equal to men and to also be paid the same as men if doing the same job. The acts that were brought in to cover this were the Sexual Discrimination Act' and the Equal Pay Act'.

The Equal Pay Act (1975/1984) states that it is unlawful to discriminate between women and men on the basis of pay and other terms in their contracts of employment. Women are entitled to the same pay as men if they do the same work with the same tasks involved.

However most of the advantages gained from these acts only really apply to those women working full time. Part time workers are paid less than those full time, about 60%. Also full time working women have certain fringe benefits open to them whereas those working part time do not, this can also be seen as a form of discrimination.

With women being half the workforce there is an occupational segmentation, where certain sectors are seen as female dominated sectors, such as Administration and Clerical (24%) Associate and Professional (13%) Personal Services (13%) and Sales and Customer Service (13%). Whereas the male

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