The role of women in the economy and in other aspects of social life is not the same today as they were 50, 100 or even more years ago. And it is not the same in the eastern world than in the western world. It is basically a gender issue. Women have struggled for years to be considered equal to men intellectually, to have the same rights, to have the same access to education, to earn equal salaries, and to be considered equals under the law. This battle started long ago, and a lot has been achieved, but still women need to gain more rights, in order to have equal opportunities. Probably the key to equal rights starts by allowing women to have access to education because education contributes directly to the growth of national income by improving the productive capacities of the labor force.

In the early eighteen hundreds women in Europe, were only allowed to attend primary school and they even had different curricula than men. Primary school taught girls how to repeat the received words from others, but couldn´t generate their own. By midcentury the professions more commonly found for women were: teacher, nurse and midwife, and in the late eighteen hundreds, different Universities in Europe opened their doors to women. During the war, many women had no other alternative that getting out of their homes, and enter the workforce. This gave women a sense of independence unknown to them until then. Some years later the feminism era started and women in Europe and in other parts of the world, won the vote and gained control over their bodies. Of course Europe was always a little bit behind regarding feminist achievements.
Instead in America by mid eighteen hundreds there were already schools for women. Fredrika Bremer, a Sweden author writes about this in her letters when she visited the United States of America and was so impressed to see how women were improving themselves by studying. By the end of the century, women had already academies and institutions of higher education.
In the 1900´s women in America gained a lot of status by entering colleges and occupying a bigger percentage of the workforce every year. 1970 was the era of women´s liberation, as women fought to achieve rights and opportunities equal to those of men. American women were looked at as role models in magazines and advertisings, as regarding feminist achievements; they always seemed to have the lead.
Education for women is and has always been different in the western world than in the eastern world. In some African countries and Arab countries women are hardly allowed to study. In the Arab world, men feel that by letting women study, this will upgrade their status and that this would then interfere in their men’s dominated social structure. Therefore in these countries, women are extremely dependent on men.
Women play a very important role in the economy, as by nature women are consumers, so in a way they maintain the flow of capital keeping the economy growing. They are the ones who decide what to buy for the house, what to buy for their children and which stores have the best price. Basically women are in charge of the household economy. Many of these women, when entering the retail sector to work know more than anybody else what sells and what doesn’t sell, and can give their point of view as a woman.
When women are looking for jobs, it is very common to find that employers prefer not to hire women, especially when they are young, because if they get pregnant they will need maternity leaves. Also, when interviewing women for jobs, employees ask how many children they have and if they are married or not, because if they have children, they think this might interfere in their work.
Unfortunately, in recent years, women have had to face a very big problem at work: sexual harassment. The number of sexual harassment cases filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in the USA, has climbed dramatically. In 1992, the number of sexual harassment cases filed with EEOC offices across the country jumped fifty percent over the previous year. Complaints about sexual harassment have ranged from fostering of a hostile work environment to demands for prostitution.
Harm caused by sexual harassment is often extreme, including humiliation, loss of dignity, psychological (and sometimes physical) injury, and damage to professional reputation and career. Inevitably, the victims face a choice between their work and their self-esteem. Sometimes, they face a choice between their jobs and their own safety.
Another problem that women have to face at work is the difference in salaries that men and women earn doing the same job. The UK carried out a research study in the year 2010 comparing salaries between women and men and concluded that men earn 20% more than women. In the developed countries, fortunately, the gap is getting smaller every year.
There have been a number of very important women that have influenced their countries and the world, politically, scientifically and economically in the last centuries. One of these women was Margaret Thatcher who transformed British economy performance over the course of her government as Prime Minister. She took drastic measures like: trade union reforms, privatizations, a strong anti-inflationary stance, and control of tax and spending. These measures created a better economic prospect for Britain that anybody would have thought when she became Prime Minister.

http://www.ehow.com/about_6461842_women_s-educational-rights-20th-century.html http://historyengine.richmond.edu/episodes/view/5151 http://www.angelfire.com/ca/HistoryGals/Linda.html http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schooladventures/womenofthecentury/decadebydecade/1900s.html http://www.helsinki.fi/science/xantippa/wee/weetext/wee213.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2011/mar/08/international-womens-day-pay-gap