This paper examines the economic issues relevant to policy debates that surround the increasing labour force participation of mothers. We review the main changes in women's labour market participation in Britain. The main source of increase in women's participation rates has come from mothers...

Data from two British cohort studies show that women with children have lower wages than childless women. We develop an innovative decomposition of this 'family gap'. The crude pay gap between mothers and childless women in their thirties was similar in 1978 and 1991, but low pay in part-time...

The regular British Working Population data cover the employed plus registered unemployed. Conventional definitions include unregistered job search that is observed at the decennial Census of Population, but inferring comparable time series of female economic activity rates from these data is...