Tougher
economic conditions being blamed for increasing the number of UK mothers
working 
full-time from less than a quarter
to almost a third.
According to new
figures from the Office of National Statistics, 29pc of mothers worked 35 hours
a week or more at the end of last year, up from 23pc in
1996.
The
figures were “terribly worrying”, Kathy Gyngell of the Centre for Policy Studies
told The Daily Telegraph.
She
said: “The evidence suggests that mothers don’t want to go full-time so they are
doing this because they have to or because their husbands are out of
work”.
However, a higher
number of mothers worked part-time rather than full-time, with 37pc doing so at
the end of last year.
The gap between
employment rates for mothers and for women with no dependent children has
narrowed significantly, the statistics found. In the final quarter of 2010, 66pc
of mothers and 67pc of women without dependent children were in either full-time or part-time
work.
In 1996, 61pc of
mothers were employed, compared to 67pc for women without dependent children,
which includes 16 to 18-year olds in education and anyone under the age of
15.
Since the recession,
the employment rate for women without children has fallen back from its peak of
70pc in 2006, driven mainly by a fall in employment for those aged 16 to
24.
ONS statistician
Jamie Jenkins said: “Over 15 years the proportion of mothers working part-time
hasn’t changed much but the number of full-timers has risen markedly, which is
what’s driving the increase is working
mothers.”
He added that over
the last 15 years, the decline in manufacturing industries and rise in services
may have contributed to more women with children going to work. Women were
starting to have babies later on in life, in their mid-thirties, he said,
meaning they were generally on higher salaries and were less inclined to stop
working full-time after childbirth.
Meanwhile, a senior
Tory politician has suggested that the entry of more women into the workplace
has harmed the career prospects of working-class men.
David Willetts, the
Universities Minister has said that the advance of equal rights for women has
resulted in a lack of progress for men, although he
made it clear he supports equal rights.
He was speaking in
advance of the publication of the Government’s social mobility strategy, to be
published next week. It is set to conclude that movement between the classes had
“stagnated” over the past 40 years.
Speaking at a
briefing with journalists on the strategy, Mr Willetts said that “Feminism
trumped egalitarianism,” adding that women who would otherwise have been
housewives had taken university places and well-paid jobs that could have gone
to ambitious working-class men.
The Government’s new
strategy will include a plan to test the population at seven ages, from birth
until the age of 30, to measure whether life chances were improving for children
from different backgrounds.
Figures to be
published are expected to paint a grim picture of the prospects for advancement
for children from the poorest backgrounds dating back to the 1960s.
Asked what was to
blame for the lack of social mobility, Mr Willetts said: “The feminist
revolution in its first round effects was probably the key factor. Feminism
trumped egalitarianism. It is not that I am against feminism, it’s just that is
probably the single biggest factor.”
Mr Willetts, who set
out his views on feminism in his recent book, The Pinch, said that, as a result
of better education for women, households now contained two people who were
either both financially successful or struggling to get
on.
“One of the things
that happened over that period was that the entirely admirable transformation of
opportunities for women meant that with a lot of the expansion of education in
the 1960s, 70s and 80s, the first beneficiaries were the daughters of
middle-class families who had previously been excluded from educational
opportunities,” he said.