A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the
employment
Employment is a relationship between two parties regulating the provision of paid labour services. Usually based on a contract, one party, the employer, which might be a corporation, a not-for-profit organization, a co-operative, or any othe ...
of
married women
A wife ( : wives) is a female in a marital relationship. A woman who has separated from her partner continues to be a wife until the marriage is legally dissolved with a divorce judgement. On the death of her partner, a wife is referred to as ...
. Common in Western countries from the late 19th century to the 1970s,
the practice often called for the termination of the employment of a woman on her marriage, especially in teaching and clerical occupations. Further, widowed women with children were still considered to be married at times, preventing them from being hired, as well.
The practice lacked an economic justification, and its rigid application was often disruptive to workplaces. However, marriage bars were widely relaxed in wartime due to an increase in the demand for labor. Research carried out by
Claudia Goldin
Claudia Goldin (born May 14, 1946) is an American economic historian and labor economist who is currently the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a co-director of the NBER's Gender in the Economy Study Group and was th ...
to explore their determinants using firm-level data from 1931 and 1940, find out that they are associated with promotion from within, tenure-based salaries, and other modern personnel practices.
Since the 1960s, the practice has widely been regarded as
employment inequality and
sexual discrimination
Sexism is prejudice or discrimination based on one's sex or gender. Sexism can affect anyone, but it primarily affects women and girls.There is a clear and broad consensus among academic scholars in multiple fields that sexism refers primari ...
, and has been either discontinued or outlawed by
anti-discrimination laws. In the
Netherlands
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, the marriage bar was removed in 1957,
and in
Ireland
Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...
it was removed in 1973.
Variations
While "marriage bar" is the general term used to encompass all discriminatory hiring practices against married women, two variations were commonplace for employers in the 1900s. The "hire bar" is the classification of the prevention of hiring married women. The "retain bar" is the prevention of retaining married workers. Both terms fall under the larger umbrella term.
To avoid seemingly discriminatory practices, many employers utilized marriage bars to classify married women as
supplementary staff, rather than permanent. This was the case, for example, at
Lloyds Bank
Lloyds Bank plc is a British retail banking, retail and commercial bank with branches across England and Wales. It has traditionally been considered one of the "Big Four (banking), Big Four" clearing house (finance), clearing banks. Lloyds B ...
until 1949, when the bank abolished its marriage bar.
Classifying women as supplementary, rather than full-time staff, allowed employers to avoid paying women fixed salaries and to terminate women more easily.
History in the United Kingdom
In the UK, the marriage bar was removed for all teachers and in the
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in 1944. The
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