The rise in number of women in the workplace is very interesting on so many fronts. A lot of guys I know resent the presence of women in the workplace for a number of reasons. There are changes to office culture, language, and behaviour. This creates a bit tension. The funny thing is most of these changes are imposed by male management rather than any complaint by women that I am actually aware of.

There is also a false sense of equality in the workplace as well. The following is based on my own workplace experience. Everything on paper will appear as if men and women have equal opportunities. In reality, this is often not the case. Often the more competent women are given less opportunities while the less competent women are given more opportunities. When it comes to rising through the ranks based on performance, the men stay ahead because they are not competing against their strongest competition.

Another strange phenomenon is that when women climb the ladder, they often provide the men with more opportunities than the women. Again, this is all based on personal experience in the Australian workplace.

I thought I would just touch on wages. Increasing supply of workers for whatever reason will put downward pressure on wages. We have more people competing for jobs. Still, this is just one side of the story. There is also an effect on demand as well. Clearly jobs have not been created just so women can work. More people are employed because there is a demand for whatever work they happened to do (unless we are talking about the Government who care little for market forces). Therefore, increased demand puts pressure on wages to increase. Whatever pressure is strongest will determine if wages go up or down.

Another thing to consider as well is the number of working hours. Your graph shows an increase in participation rate, It does not show the overall increase in hours worked per household. It is possible that this increase may not be that significant. All this information is available but I don't have time to dig it out right now.