ther factors of society provide incentives to working parents to remain childless or delay child birth – key factors that has brought down the proportion of children in the population of the US to 26% in 2001 from 36% during the “Baby Boom” era of 1960s [Forum on children and family statistics, 2000: http://www.childstats.gov/ac2002/pdf/pop.pdf]

The period between 1970 and late 1990s witnessed great strides in the field of participation of women in the labor force. The various civil rights movements in the sphere of feminism had already laid the ground work for striving towards equal status of women and men in the workplace. Growth of service sector jobs, particularly technology and information centric jobs in the latter quarter of the last century was a major factor attracting women to the workplace. The concept of the establishment of an egalitarian society was growing among women as more and more women tried to assert their financial independence from their male partners and a desire to be treated as an equal of their male partners arose in spheres of both work and domestic responsibilities. Such desires are quite vividly portrayed in the gender ideologies of Nancy, a character from Second shift [Arlie Hochschild, 1989: Pg. 39-41]. Nancy tried to establish herself as the career woman. Her gender ideology centered on the idea of herself as a woman who would be needed and appreciated both at home and at work. One of her friends, a house keeper who has to run numerous domestic chores is described by Nancy as “a younger version of her mother, depressed, lacking in self-esteem, a cautionary tale whose moral was ‘if you want to be happy, develop a career and get your husband to share at home’” [Arlie Hochschild, 1989: Pg. 40]. The author explains such ideals to be quite popular among women in the last three decades which shows the willingness among women to get a paid job outside home. Many studies have proven that the intellectual abilities of men and women showed very few differences. Anne Fausto Sterling provides criticism of various research works that shows the inferiority of women compared to men in the field of scientific and mathematical skills. She says “Are men really smarter than women? The straightforward answer would have to be no. Early in the century, scientists argued that there might be more male than female geniuses because male intelligence varied to a greater extent than did female intelligence … hypotheses in defense of this position still pop up from time to time. They consist of all ideas in modern dress and are unacceptable to most mainstream psychologists.”[Anne Fausto-Sterling, 1992: pg. 58] Women are adept in scientific and technological fields to the same capacity as men. The growing service sector areas in which the number of employed workers jumped from 11 million in 1970 to 20.5 million in 1994 and which currently employs greater than 80% of the women [Bureau of Labor, 2001: http://www.bls.gov/opub/rtaw/pdf/rtaw2001.pdf] demanded the exploitation of intellectual or creative faculties rather than hard physical labor must have been a significant facilitator of growth of women’s participation in the labor force. Thus, the feminist movements of 1960s and 70s coupled with growth of service sector jobs and an overall acceptance of the equal cognitive capabilities of women compared to males resulted in masses of women entering the workforce and launching a revolution in gender roles where women were no longer confined to the domesticity of homes. The percentage of women in the work force has increased from 59 percent in 1970 to 72 percent in 1995 while that of married women almost doubled from 31.3% to 62.1% [National Bureau of Economic Research, 1999]. However, the husbands of working women who were married were unwilling to cater to this revolution of gender roles there

Some topics in this essay:
Stephanie Coontz, Commission EEOC, Housing Child, American Women, , Design Fisher, Fausto Sterling, Lawrence Michelle, Bureau Labor, Arlie Hochschild, married couples, american women, lawrence michelle colleagues, percent american, lawrence michelle, children family, health care, service sector, michelle colleagues, child birth, percent american women, colleagues 1998-99 pg, married women, child care health, revolution gender roles,