The Jobs People Do
1 job in 5 is in financial & business services
Employee jobs: by industry and sex at June each year.
Financial and business services now account for about one in five jobs in the UK, compared with about one in ten in 1981.
This sector saw the largest increase in jobs between 1981 and 2001, part of the post-war growth in the service industries and the decline in manufacturing.
Twenty years ago one in three jobs held by men was in manufacturing. By 2001 this had fallen to about one in five. The proportion of female workers in this sector dropped from nearly one in five to under one in ten.
Other changes in Britain’s labour force over the last two decades include a marked increase in the number of jobs performed by women. In 1981, men filled 3.2 million more jobs than women. Now the numbers are almost equal, with men performing 12.8 million jobs and women 12.7 million, although almost half of these are part time.
But men and women still follow very different career paths. About a quarter of female employees do administrative or secretarial work, while men are most likely to be managers, senior officials or in skilled trades.
Similar proportions of men and women work in ‘associate professional and technical’ occupations – computer programmers, technicians and nurses, for example – while one in eight performs low-skilled jobs, such as those in farming, construction, hotels and restaurants.
Men are more likely than women to be self-employed – 73 per cent of the 3 million self-employed people in spring 2001 were male. Around a fifth of all self-employed people worked in construction, with similar proportions in sales and distribution, hotels and restaurants; and in banking, finance and insurance.
People from certain ethnic groups are more likely to be self-employed than others. Around one fifth of working Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are self-employed, compared with only one in ten white people and fewer then one in ten black people. Chinese and Indian people are also more likely than white or black people to be self-employed. Sales and distribution, hotel and restaurant work account for two thirds of the Chinese, over half of the Indians and two-fifths of the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who are self-employed.
Source: Office for National Statistics
Information is collected from employers on the number of men and women they have on their payrolls (filled jobs), and published as 'workforce jobs'. This is the source of the information given on jobs by industry.
The information on occupations and self-employment comes from the Labour Force Survey (LFS). This is a survey of individuals, which asks about their work and personal circumstances. If people have more than one job (including self-employment) information about their main job is used.
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Workforce jobs: time series