Got To Work: How the Obama jobs program will really affect women workers.
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Hey, Big Gender: Men, women, and money.
Got To Work
How the Obama jobs program will really affect women workers.
By Linda Hirshman
Posted Tuesday, January 13, 2009 - 9:42pm
Looks like the Obama administration is finally remembering who most of its voters were: women. During the early rollout of the Obama jobs program, all the talk was of roads, bridges, and alternative fuel. And as many people quickly noticed, that plan might as well have had the old boys' club sign posted to it: NO GIRLS ALLOWED. Who builds roads and bridges and invents alternative fuels? Construction workers and engineers. And according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the construction trades are approximately 3 percent female and 97 percent male, while engineers are 12 percent female and 88 percent male.
Since the start of the recession, the unemployment rate for women is up by 1.6 percentage points. That is not as dramatic an increase as men's unemployment (up 2.8 percentage points), but it's clear that women's unemployment went up by a factor far greater than 10 percent of the men's rate, while they would have captured only 10 percent of the jobs, as they were originally described. So in the recession-suffering Olympics, it would have seemed that women were entitled to a little more than 10 percent of the job ointment.
Without ever letting on, of course, the no-drama Obama mantra suddenly began to shift on the stimulus package to include talk of new jobs also going to places where women can sometimes be found, such as "education" and "health care." Then last Saturday, the president- and vice-president-elect's chief economic advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, released a report on the program, titled "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan," which includes an analysis of the effect of the jobs program on women. The report said almost nothing about any other group.Â
According to Romer and Bernstein, the jobs program as now conceived will be a veritable estrogen-fest:
The total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42% of the jobs created by the package. Given that so far in the recession women have accounted for roughly 20% of the decline in payroll employment, this calculation could reflect that the stimulus package skews job creation somewhat toward women, possibly as a result of the investments in healthcare, education, and state fiscal relief.
Doesn't this sound wrong? Could it possibly be that women have lost only 20 percent of the jobs that have vanished in the last, devastating year? Elsewhere in the report, Romer and Bernstein write that while the overall unemployment rate during the current recession has risen 2.3 percentage points, the unemployment rate for women has increased only 1.6 percentage points. Math may be hard, but that figure still means the unemployment rate for women rose 70 percent as fast as the overall rate. How can that be if they bore only 20 percent of the job losses? Women comprise almost half of the American work force. The two numbers are impossible to reconcile.
What's the answer? According to Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, the key is that more new women entered the market, looking for work just as, interestingly, men left the job market. He didn't say it, but I'm guessing that women are pouring into the workplace at least in part because their spouses' incomes cannot support the family anymore.
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Civilian Labor Force in The US . . .
Linda: Both you and JS do yourselves and women a disservice by not looking at the base rate for unemployment at the end of 2007 which was supposedly when this recession began??? I am also amazed that one of you admitted to being too lazy to research the numbers. Taken from here:
, it would be 4.8% for women (2007). At the end of 2008, it is 6.4% This is Unemployment Rate for women 16 and over which is the traditional point at which BLS starts to measure. The increase was 1.6% or an ~ 33% increase. Looking at men, the Unemployment Rate at the end of 2007 was 5% and at the end of 2008 it was 7.9% or 2.9% points or a 58% increase.
Again we have taken the 16 years and over as the benchmark for men. Would it be fair to say that unemployment for men rose at almost twice the rate of women? I believe it would be fair to say such by looking at the percentage of increases and the percenatge points. I am not sure if these links work; but, you can find the data retrieval tables at the BLS and it is called "Historical News Release Tables" at the bottom of here http://www.bls.gov/cps/ and it is Household data. ************** Another factor that has to be calculated into this is Participation Rate. By looking at Participation Rate one can get a feel for the percentage of people from the NonInstitutional Civilian Population that are a part of the Civilian Labor Force. This is important to look at because the trend of an increasing Participation rate was reversed in 2001 after ~40 years of increases. It stands at 65.7% today which has not been seen since the late eighties. U3 is measured against a smaller Civilian Labor Force which tends to create a lower unemployment rate than what is real. The rest not counted in the Civilian Labor Force can be found in Not In Labor Force. So lets recreate the same as above for Participation Rate 2007-2008. For women 16 years and over, Particpation Rate was 59.4% in 2007 and 59.5% in 2008. In 2001, it was 59.7%. Civilian Labor Force dropped from 68.02MM to 67.491MM (MM = Million). In 2001, it was 63.289MM. For men 16 years and older, Participation Rate was 73% in 2007 and 72.4% in 2008. In 2001 it was 74.3%. Civilian Labor Force dropped from dropped from 78.275MM to 75.847MM. In 2001, it was 72.758MM. It does not take much of a rocket scientist or a statitician to see that women have been gaining in the share of the Civilian Labor Force as opposed to men. Fewer women dropped out of the overall Civilian Labor Force between 2007 and 2008 or ~530M as opposed to men at 2.43MM or almost 5 times as many men . . . 75.3 MM men as compared to 67.5 MM women in 2008 for totals. ************* "women are pouring into the workplace at least in part because their spouses' incomes cannot support the family anymore." Anyone hear Dr. Elizabeth Warren's "The Coming Collapse of The Middle Class?" Take the 57 minutes necessary and listen to it as she is enlighteming as to your statement above.
Here is a boiled down answer to your statement (Linda) as to why: "Changes in the employment makeup have taken place over the last 30 years having no parallel in the history of the US work force. From 1970 onwards, millions of mothers joined the full time work force and families went from being a one income household to two income households. While the attitude of women with preteen children in 1970 was to stay at home and care for the family, this fifties attitude changed to where women in 2000 were returning to the work force full time and leaving a six month old child in daycare. Also occurring during this time period, women would go on to get better education and increase their salaries beyond what their mothers or grandmothers made. The expected logical outcome of this income increase should have been wealthier families, increased savings, more vacations, and families living closer to work or in cities; but, it did not quite turn out that way. What really took place during this time period was quite the opposite. Income for married couples and families went up and income for males and married males remained stagnant. Fully employed males make less in 2005 than what their fathers made a generation ago when comparing median incomes adjusted for inflation. Total family income went up only because women entered the work force. During the same time period, changes in savings and debt were also experienced. Savings, which was at 11% of annual income in 1970 for families, dropped to a negative 8 tenths of 1% by 2005 and debt which was 1.4% of annual income in 1970 increased to 15% in 2005. In the end, every bit of mom's additional family income was spent, plus the savings and the family unit of mom, dad and two kids dropped into debt by 15%." "Politics, Economics, and The Middle Class" This is the boiled down version if you do not care to spend 57 minutes of quality time listening to a "kick-ass" women who is also leading the charge on examining TARP. Anyone remember Brooksley Born? Why not her for Treasurer? She identified the derivatives issue in 1998 and went up against Greenspin, Summers, Cox, Rubin, and Gramm. She lost; but, she was correct in her fears and reasons to regulate. The real problem is not unemployment as it will always be there. The real problem is that we have not recouped the number of jobs that were lost since the end of the 2001 recession in October 2001 when Participation Rate was at 66.7%. Today Linda, the Participation Rate is at 65.7%, the lowest since 1988. In order to do so, we would have to add 2.1MM people to the Civilian Labor Force just to get even to Oct 2001 with a Participation Rate of 66.7% which was experienced immediately AFTER the 2001 recession. Job growth has not been increasing faster than population growth and the best we have been doing is keeping even. Obama's plan is too "light." We need the 2 million jobs plus the growth in population. ************* I make a terrible feminist; but, I am one hell of an ally . . . ask Dawn Coyote, topazz, rundeep, IWonder, Pace, etc. I am not female and I do not understand nuance. I do understand numbers and am learning to understand Sjoberg. The vast majority (99%) of all single parent families living in poverty are women. One out of every 9 black males is in prison with a prison population of ~1% of the total US population with males making up the majority. The tie to much of this is poverty, education, healthcare, environment, etc. (Hertz, "Mobilty in America"). Job creation is terribly important across the board. I do not wish to demean the need to put more women into the work force; but, I believe I have demonstrated a reason that males need to be given a degree of emphasis while income for women is still a major need. What you are addressing is super critical to the nation at this point. It is not just women; it is also children and men caught up in this downward spiral. If you can not find the data I have linked, please let me know and I will find it for you.