Things seem to have changed around the 2001 recession. Until then, women tended to keep their onward march into employment steady even when the economy faltered. If their employment dipped, it quickly recovered. But this was the first time that the share of working women dropped without bouncing back.
.. Husbands’ wages grew faster than wives’ in the 1990s, which may have eventually discouraged married women from staying at work.
.. For lower-wage women, work itself has also gotten worse. Research by Robert Moffitt, a Johns Hopkins economist, has found that the decline in women’s labor force participation, especially among lower-educated women, mirrors that of their male peers.
.. The low-wage jobs these laid-off workers found are more likely to come with variable schedules that make it difficult to arrange child care. Work hours have also stretched later and later, which hurts women more... the United States has done almost nothing to help make it easier for parents to work and raise a family at the same time. Unlike all other developed countries, the United States doesn’t guarantee parents any paid time off when they have children... If the United States were to spend more on helping parents get child care, ensure they can take paid time off work and protect those who want or need to work flexible schedules, it would almost certainly tap into this pool of women who have stepped away from work... the economy would have been 11 percent smaller if women’s labor force participation had remained at the levels of the late 1970s... President Trump has said he wants to reach 3 percent G.D.P. growth. He would do well to focus on increasing how many women work... This is a man who said in the 1990s — that same decade when working women reached their zenith — that “putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.”He’ll find out how dangerous it is for the economy when the government doesn’t help put all women, married or not, to work.
The Best Era for Working Women Was 20 Years Ago
Reply