A marriage bar is the practice of restricting the employment of married women. 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 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, and has been either discontinued or outlawed by anti-discrimination laws. In the Netherlands, the marriage bar was removed in 1957, and in Ireland 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 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 BBC in 1944. The BBC had a marriage bar between 1932 and 1944, although it was a partial ban and was not fully enforced due to the BBC's ambivalent views on the policy. Lloyds Bank utilized a marriage bar to classify married women as supplementary staff rather than permanent until 1949, when the bank abolished its marriage bar. Several other jobs in the UK had marriage bars until sometime in the 1970s, for example the British Geological Survey until 1975. The marriage bar prohibited married women from