Congratulations ... I failed!Originally Posted by lastlid
I got an A level in Economics.
Agreed! But its 'genesis' goes even further back than that ... to the period between 1939~45 in fact - when women were drafted into the workforce to keep the nation's economy ticking over while their menfolk went off to war.
Understandable ... during wartime. However, it follows that, with an ensuing drop in the birthrate, many women were, not unnaturally, reluctant to relinquish their newly-found earning powerin the immediate aftermath of hostilities - particularly in a period of severe, ongoing austerity - and, notwithstanding the resultant emergence of the so-called "Baby-Boomer" era, this trend took hold nationwide and continued throughout the 1950s and into the early '60s.
And so it has remained over the past half century ... to the extent of ultimately becoming 'the norm' - with *no signs of abating - *a characteristic it shares with the relentless advance of technology in being largely responsible for today's shortage of opportunities in the job market.
