Women in US retreat from workforce

Louis Uchitelle

 

   Across the US, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.
   They had piled into jobs in growing numbers since the 1960s. But that stopped happening this decade, and as the nearly seven-year-old recovery gives way to hard times, the retreat is likely to accelerate.
   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 Labour Statistics reports. In each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960, the recovery 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.
   But now, a different explanation is turning up in the research of economists and in a congressional study that follow the women’s story through the end of 2007. After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men — downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.
   Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $9 an hour are easy to land, she said. But like men with whom she worked at Maytag washing machine factory, now closed, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage.
   The Joint Economic Committee study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force “on par with men”. The proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years, 25 to 54, peaked at 74.9% in early 2000 as the technology investment bubble was about to burst. Eight years later, in June, it was 72.7%, 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.
   The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing from work with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. NYT NEWS SERVICE

 

HARD TIMES: Lisa Craig (standing) is one of the millions of women who are working sporadically, struggling hard to supplement the government welfare cheque