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A full three weeks before the front page of The New York Times blared As Layoffs Surge, Women May Pass Men in Job Force, their own economic blogger, Casey B. Mulligan broke the news to blog readers: women are, for the first time, more than 49% of the workforce. He suggested that this is a historic milestone, although most of the comments on the post said that there is nothing to celebrate in gaining from the losses of others.
The reason for women's job security in these scary economic times is sadly do to gender segregation. As the Times explains:
a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.
The other reason that women are finding themselves working is that they tend to be paid less than men, both because of the careers they opt for that "allow more time for child care and other domestic work" and because even when women perform the exact same job as men, they tend to be paid less. The Association for American University Women reports that "just one year out of college, women working full time already earn less than their male colleagues, even when they work in the same field. Ten years after graduation, the pay gap widens." I'm fairly certain that most 21 or 22 year old female college graduates have the same demands on their time for "child care and other domestic work" as men their age in their fields do, so we can't chalk that up to personal decisions, just pay inequities, which arise for many reasons.
Ann Bartow at Feminist Law Professors asks how long it will be until "the economic recession is labeled an evil plot by feminists", which cracks me up, although it also makes me want to weep because it is so true:
Any minute I’m waiting for someone to accuse women of hurting men by hogging all those depressed salary, low prestige jobs without fringe benefits or health insurance for ourselves.
Melanie Klein at FeministFatale reminds us that while women may never have been the majority of the workforce, the "traditional" family with a stay-at-home mom and working dad has not been normative in the United States for a long time (and never was for low-income families and families of color):
Deborah Siegel’s article confirms what many of us have know for quite some time: even if we, as women, wanted to stay at home to bake sagging cakes, birth and bathe babies and have an afternoon snack of tranquilizers, WE CAN’T AFFORD IT! “Traditional” (this is in quotes because upon cross-cultural and historical investigation it becomes clear that there’s nothing traditional or normative of these gender roles or the fallacy of the nuclear family) gender roles can’t be supported or sustained in this economy. In fcat [sic], they were not sustained for long. By the 1970s women were launched into action by many variables including (surprise??) the economy.
Of course, that hasn't stopped many "traditional" people from grousing about who is going to take care of the kids while all the women are at work. Which is an equally sad reflection on the hardline gender roles assigned to men and women, as it seems logical to me that if men are at home, they can take care of the kids while women work. Last time I checked, men do have the capacity to care for their own offspring, and even fathers' time with children is often referred to as "babysitting" (seriously, can you imagine if we referred to moms' time with the kids as "babysitting?" - everyone would be a babysitter!), it seems that they are able to figure things out just fine, thank you. Maybe - just maybe - kids and dads even benefit from the new situation as they develop new bonds. I've always wondered what would happen under those circumstances, although maybe this isn't the best environment as involuntarily unemployed people are prone to depression, so that could skew how the stay-at-home thing works out.
At any rate, the gains from employment are not a zero sum game. The recession employment figures reflect a race to the bottom - how little can we
