WOMEN’S ADVANCE IN BUSINESS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18636, 4 August 1930, Page 4

WOMEN’S ADVANCE IN BUSINESS.

WHERE THEY WORK MOST. Women’s rights and women’s business activity are given so much publicity in the English-speaking countries, that almost anybody would say off-hand that more women—in proportion to population, of course—have jobs of their own in these countries than anywhere else. But not so at all, says the New York “Journal of Commerce,” noting that in the proportion of the women in the population engaged in gainful occupation some of the continental European countries are way ahead of the Eng-lish-speaking nations. And “The Journal of Commerce” makes an effort to explain how this has come about. A recent statistical estimate, we are told, put the proportion of employed adult women in Germany at 43 per cent.: in France, at a little over 50 per cent.: but England, it seems, reports only 26 per cent, of her women gainfully employed, while only 17 per cent, are thus classified in the United States. The comparisons bring this editorial comment from the New York “Journal of Commerce”: The first impulse is to interpret them as the results of continental war-time losses and resultant general impoverishments. But, as a matter of fact, prewar statistics do hot lend much encouragement to such interpretations of the available data. In both France and Germany the numbers of women reported to be gainfully employed stood at high figures prior to the war. Post-war percental increases in numbers of women employed have been somewhat greater than in, the case of men, but not pronouncedly so. The high figures are, however, in both countries substantially increased by the numbers of women reported to be working on the land, and, especially in Germany, by the large numbers in domestic service. It follows that in these continental countries the problems created by unemployment are man for man or woman for woman, probably not as acute as those which arise in the United States and in England in times of industrial depression. Given an equal number of unemployed, for instance, the effect upon the entire population can hardly be as keenly felt in in which large numbers of women as well as men are gainfully employed. Such women by decreasing the numbers of economic dependents mitigate the Hardships which result from loss of employment by the male heads of families. When, as on the continent, a large number of women are domestic servants or agricultural workers, the bad effects of general business depression upon the general level of well-being are further alleviated.