Women Getting Equally Slammed by Bad Economy

From the New York Times, an article detailing how the economy is hitting women as well as men, reversing labor trends of rising employment that had held steady since the 1960s.  At first, the falling numbers were attributed to motherhood or women selectively choosing to drop out of the economy, but the numbers and researchers suggest otherwise.

Women Are Now Equals in Poor Economy Louise Uchitelle

Indeed, for the first time since the women’s movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960 ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many suggested that the pullback from paid employment was a matter of the women themselves deciding to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

One of the largest issues cited is the stagnation of wages, which made it both less attractive for women to jump into employment and more likely to sit out the market in the event of a job loss since they often could not match their previous wages.

Wage stagnation often discourages them from pursuiYoung new jobs, says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard. “While pay was rising solidly in the 1990s, you had women continuing to move into the work force,” Mr. Katz said.

The proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years, 25 to 54, peaked at 74.9 percent in early 2000 as the technology investment bubble was about to burst. Eight years later, in June, it was 72.7 percent, a seemingly small decline, but those 2.2 percentage points erase more than 12 years of gains for women. Four million more in their prime years would be employed today if the old pattern had prevailed through the expansion now ending.

Looking at the economy as a whole, it's hard to see trends such as these, especially in light of our the average American debt loads (see Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt) and not worry about the confluence of economic events that seem to be swirling around us.