Only an estimated 11% of women workers had formal equal pay with men, even by the late 1960s. One-third of the entire labour force— over eight million women— were underpaid by means of a startling device of paying workers simply according to their gender. Yet women were now starting to go to work after a long period of enforced home-working that followed the end of the 1939-45 war. They were entering the labour force at the rate of 10,000 per month; but “some seven out of eight-and-a-half million women workers do a full-time job for less than £9 10s 0 a week” at a time when the average male manual weekly wage was over £16 a week. [January 1965 CP Women’s Bulletin] This situation was not for the want of trying to improve things.