Signs of Jobs Recovery Seen For Women
Researchers have begun seeing a gain in jobs for women in the U.S., at a pace close to men.
When the U.S. began recovery post the 2007-2009 recession, men saw much stronger job gains than women, according to a Pew Research Center report. However, men and women both gained approximately 206,000 jobs in the last three months of 2011, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports.
“That’s definitely a new development,” President of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Heidi Hartmann, told MSNBC.
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Job gains in the last few months of 2011 were high enough to offset earlier recession losses, according to the BLS. Nearly 43,000 more women were employed in December, in contrast to when the recession ended in June 2009, the BLS report said.
“Finally, women moved into the black at the end of 2011,” said Joan Entmacher, vice president for family economy security at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), to MSNBC. The NWLC has been following women’s employment throughout the recession and recovery process.
Entmacher added that women have only received a small percentage of the net 1.4 million jobs added since the recession ended, however.
The unemployment rate for women and men is almost even mostly due to the sharp decline in the unemployment rate for men, according to MSNBC.
Employers across the nation added about 200,000 jobs in December, according to the BLS, dropping unemployment rate to 8.5 percent, from 9.1.
“It’s a slow jobs recovery for everybody. That’s disappointing,” Hartmann said to MSNBC. “We’ve seen some improvement in the last half of (the) year … but it’s a long haul.”
"The men’s recession happened earlier and their recovery happened earlier," Hartmann added. "The women’s recession happened later and their recovery happened later."
Researchers did not discover a reason for why women didn’t see job gains in the recovery’s early stages. Many said cuts in local government and state funding, which lead to job losses in the predominantly female sectors of education and social services, were a likely factor, MSNBC reported.
Hartmann said less job losses in the public sector as of recently is a good sign, but more must be done to aid women in need.
“I would say mainly that the reduced rate of job loss in the public sector (especially state and local jobs, where women are the majority of employees) is good news for women. A lot of public sector budget years start on July 1, so hopefully there will continue to be a reduced rate of job loss (compared with this past summer) throughout the spring," Hartmann told The Christian Post in a written statement.
"It’s still the case, however, that additional federal help for state and local governments, for example through more federal support for Medicaid or for public education, is needed, because we would not like to see another round of state and local government layoffs next summer. And women are of course disproportionately low income and disproportionately supporting children on their own. Single mothers have a very high unemployment rate (double digits)," Hartmann added.
"The fairly strong jobs growth in October-December (412,000 jobs across those 3 months, split evenly between women and men) is good news, but that rate of job growth is not enough to reduce the unemployment rate substantially," Hartmann said in a statement to The Christian Post.
