1914 7.7 million French women already had jobs, and they made up 32 per cent of the total workforce; by the war’s end they accounted for 40 per cent of the workforce. In Britain women workers rose from just under 6 million, or 26 per cent of the workforce, to just over 7.3 million, or 36 per cent, in the same period. In Germany the number of females in insured employment expanded so quickly in the two decades before the war that the increase during the war, from about 3.5 million to just over 4 million, represented a decline in the rate of growth.
