A SURVEY conducted by the Shanghai Women's Federation has found that professional women enjoyed the happiest lives in the city.

　　Professional women, apart from deriving great satisfaction from their work which enabled them to fully realize their potential and ensured for them a respectable social position, also rated their enjoyment of family life highly.

　　About 88 per cent of professional women said they were happy in their lives, a higher proportion than for women cadres and entrepreneurs, who made up respectively, 1.6 per cent and 4.3 per cent of all locally employed women.

　　The latter two groups expressed lower satisfaction levels with both their material life and pressure of work.

　　The proportion of professional women working in the city was around 16.5 per cent of all employed women and most were engaged in the fields of education, medical services and accountancy.

　　Less than 7 per cent were engaged in scientific research or engineering technology.

　　The least happiest group of women were those who were unemployed and whose families had long been cash-strapped.

　　The survey found that some 16 per cent of women between the ages of 25 and 49 were either looking for a job, or had been forced to retire to become housewives.

　　The biggest age group for jobless women was between 37 and 44 which was also the period when families were most in need of extra money. Their children were mostly of high school age or attending university which required a great deal of money.

　　The survey also found that one third of the unemployed women had no extra expenses except for the necessary costs of living and eating. Half said they were not satisfied with their educational level, their material and spiritual life and their social position.

　　Single mothers and non-local women with low levels of education who had tried to escape the hardships of countryside life by marrying Shanghai men also were dissatisfied with their lives.

　　The non-local wives often had husbands who were disabled or lowly educated and who were without permanent jobs.