During the past half century, the participation of women in the labor force has increased substantially. In 1930, the 10 million working women represented 24 percent of all women and 22 percent of the total work force (table 1). By 1957, the number of female workers had doubled and their labor-force participation rate had increased to 37 percent. In 1982, 48 million women were in the labor forc...

What Explains the Stagnation of Female Labor Force Participation in Urban India? We study the surprisingly low level and stagnation of female labor force participation rates in urban India between 1987 and 2009. Despite rising growth, fertility decline, and rising wages and education levels, women’s labor force participation stagnated at around 18%. Using five large cross-sectional micro survey...

This study explored the effect of unplanned changes in disability and marital status on labor force participation for a sample of just under 6,000 men and women born between 1931 and 1941. It was based on Wave 1 (1992) through Wave 4 (1998) of the Health and Retirement Study data. Binomial hierarchical linear models were used to evaluate the change in the probability of working. Unplanned chang...

The work and retirement decisions of husbands and wives are likely to be made jointly as they allocate their available resources. This article models the allocation of family wealth and family members' time over the lifetime of the unit. The first section reports simulation results that illustrate the relationship between the value of members' time in both market work and the production of home...

Much of the increase in female labor force participation in the post-war period has come from the entry of married women with young children. Accompanying this change has been a rise in cultural acceptance of maternal employment. We argue that the concurrent S-shaped rise in maternal participation and its cultural acceptance is well explained by generations of women engaged in Bayesian learning...

BACKGROUND The labor force participation rate is an important indicator of the state of the labor market and a major input into the economy's potential for creating goods and services. The objectives of this paper are to examine the prevalence of labor force participation among older people in Thailand and to investigate the factors affecting this participation. METHODS The data for this stud...

Despite the Chilean economic success and the high number of women appointees in executive positions, a wide gender gap still exists in the political and economic realms, which is even broader than in the rest of Latin America. This study looks at the labor market, an area in which the gender divide is strong and prevents women’s progress. It examines (1) the situation of Chilean women at work s...