Constraint and opportunity: women’s employment in Britain

Paid employment is important in its own right as one form of productive activity, and is also a principal source of income, self-esteem and social interaction. It features in Nussbaum’s list of central human capabilities and the denial of opportunity for employment is discussed extensively by Sen. Empirical identification of employment as a functioning is straightforward, but identification of employment capability is not, and it is the capability which is a demand of social justice. Standard measures of unemployment fail to take account of many types of constraints on employment and often misclassify individuals, especially women, as economically inactive – a status which is implicitly assumed to be voluntary. This paper develops and illustrates two complementary ways to identify employment capability for women in 1990s Britain. One analysis is based on describing constraints on employment, the second analysis is based on subjective assessments of women themselves. Methodological difficulties created by unobservable constraints (for the first approach) and by adaptive preferences (for the second approach) are discussed. Data are drawn from the British Household Panel Study for 1998/9, a nationally representative survey of approximately 5,000 households. The results suggest that nearly three-quarters of women who were not in paid work lacked employment capability, of whom only one-third would be picked up in official unemployment statistics. The paper concludes that it is possible to identify employment capability empirically, although normative judgements about the significance of preferences and constraints have to be made. Especially for women, a measure of employment capability provides a better guide for policy than standard measures of unemployment.