ABSTRACT
In 1979 Hakim’s study for the Department of Employment described the emergence, since the 1960s, of the ‘two-phase’ or ‘bimodal’ profile of female employment. Before the war, most women had left the labour force permanently on marriage or at the birth of their first child. Increasingly however, this pattern had been replaced by one in which women returned to work from their thirties onwards, and indeed, in 1971, labour force participation rates for women in their forties were equal to those of women in their early twenties.
