economy

Here’s what we know: Even with a college degree, young blacks still face lower employment rates and higher unemployment rates than their white counterparts. I’ve shown previously that young blacks are entering and completing college at higher rates than in the past. The third report of my Young Black America series examined the employment and unemployment rates of young blacks and whites from 1979 to 2014, and I made a striking discovery: Employment gaps between blacks and whites have become worse since the onset of the Great Recession. The jobs recovery, apparently, is not colorblind.

From 1979 until the Great Recession, young blacks with college degrees had employment rates that were basically the same as their white counterparts. However, once the recession hit, employment rates decreased for all – even those with college degrees. At the same time, the gap between blacks and whites widened, with college-educated young blacks being 3.9 percentage points less likely to be employed than their white peers (see Figure 1).

In 2007, 87.2 percent of young blacks with college degrees were employed, and 88.3 percent of their white counterparts were as well. Both rates bottomed out in 2011, with a black employment rate of 80.3 percent and a white employment rate of 86.3 percent. This gap of 6 percentage points for college-educated young blacks and whites represents the largest racial employment gap since 1979.

In 2014, employment rates still hadn’t fully recovered, with young blacks having more ground to make up than whites. During that year, 83.3 percent of young blacks with college degrees were employed, and 87.0 percent of young whites, for a racial employment gap of 3.7 percentage points. Young blacks with college degrees had an employment rate that was still 3.9 percentage points below their pre-recession level. Young whites with college degrees were only 1.3 percentage points below their pre-recession employment level.

The data on unemployment rates tell a similar story. Even with a college degree, unemployment is a fact of life for many young blacks. In 2007, the unemployment rate of young college-educated blacks was 4.6 percent, 2.8 percentage points above their white counterparts (see Figure 2). Black unemployment peaked in 2010 at 9.1 percent, more than twice the rate of whites (4.2 percent). In 2014, black unemployment dropped to 6.4 percent, still 1.8 percentage points higher than its pre-recession level. Young whites with college degrees had an unemployment rate of 2.6 percent, 0.8 percentage points higher than their unemployment rate in 2007.

Looking at young blacks overall can often mask the different experiences of black men and women. This is certainly true for unemployment rates during the recession and recovery. Black men were hit harder during the recession, and still have higher unemployment rates than black women. In 2007, young black men with college degrees had an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent, and black women had an unemployment rate of 4.2 percent. These rates peaked in 2010 at 10.7 percent and 8.0 percent for black men and women respectively, before falling to 7.1 percent and 5.9 percent in 2014.

By contrast, throughout most of the recession and recovery, white men and women have had virtually identical unemployment rates.

These numbers show that employment and unemployment rates of college-educated young blacks are still far from their pre-recession levels, suggesting that the economic recovery is incomplete. They saw their employment rate drop 6.9 percentage points during the recession, and have only recovered 3.0 percentage points. Their unemployment rate increased 4.5 percentage points, and recovered 2.7 percentage points. Despite the gains in educational attainment that I found in earlier reports in this series, there are still noticeable racial and gender differences in labor market outcomes.

Cherrie Bucknor is a research assistant at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She is working on a year-long series of reports on Young Black America. Follow her on Twitter @CherrieBucknor.

Blogger and career guru (and newly married friend!) Marci Alboher just posted about my Recessionwire column, Love in the Time of Layoff, over at Yahoo’s Shine.  Her piece is titled “When Your Man or Woman Gets Laid Off.” Writes Marci (and oh how I heart her for so many reasons):

The column is so readable because it talks stuff few people are talking about. Like what happens to a heterosexual relationship when a woman suddenly becomes the sole breadwinner, what happens when someone who’s used to office culture suddenly gets used to the rhythms of home life, how two people (one of whom is pregnant with twins) can avoid driving each other batty when suddenly confined to a 650 square foot apartment.

Like any good serial narrative, Love in the Time of Layoffs had a major plot twist this month: Marco is back to work, albeit in a freelance gig. Questions abound for interested readers. Will he keep the job? Will the couple inch back into their former patterns again? What will happen once the babies arrive …..?

Good question.  Time (like, gulp, hopefully 4 more weeks) shall tell….!

As we celebrated Women’s Equality Day* yesterday, we want to talk about one of the most enduring signs of the gender equality gap — the differences in how men and women spend their time on an everyday basis. Many of you have probably heard of the term the “double-shift” when talking about women’s work outside and inside the home, and anecdotally, we all have examples (“I came home from a 12 hour work day and had to pick up his socks.” Or “After work I had to pick up the kids, clean the house, and cook dinner.”) The recently released American time use survey proves what we’ve known all along: women bear the burden of household work.

A couple of snippets:
• At 5:10 pm, 17% of women are doing household activities – 11% of men are.
• At 7:40 am, 11% of women are doing household activities – 6 % of men are.

Really, do check out the link – they’ve done a cool interactive chart where you can compare time use according to age, gender, race, employment, educational attainment, and size of household. Categories vary from “household activities” to “eating and drinking” to (our favorite!) “relaxing and thinking”. The only downside to the chart is that you cannot compare by multiple qualities – for example, are black women doing more household activities than white women at 5:10? Then black men? What about black single mothers? And Hispanic women over 65? (You get the picture.)

Internationally, feminist economists have been arguing for the inclusion of household work into overall GDP estimates – where traditionally, the bulk of women’s work was uncounted, as it did not take place within the marketplace. For the past few years, the United Nations Development Fund has been tracking Gender, work, and time allocation in its Human Development Report. Although only 33 countries reported on time allocation in 2007, the results are nonetheless interesting – globally women aren’t faring that much better in balancing free time and personal care and family care.

Even the “wunderkind” countries of Northern Europe women seem to be putting more time into the children and the chores then men. In Norway, while women and men spent approximately equal amount of time on themselves, women spent more time cooking and cleaning (2:14) than their male counterparts (0:52). Women also spent double the time (34 mins) that men (17 mins) did on childcare.

In Nicaragua, a moderately developed country where interestingly even the one country where women and men have relatively equal free time women, women are the primary caregivers for the children (1:01 hours compared to the 17 mins men spent with the kids), the cooks and cleaners (3:31 hours to 0:31 mins) and less likely to be involved in market activities 28% to men’s 74%.

It is no surprise that the least developed countries have the widest disparities with regards to time. Women in Benin spend much more time (8:03 hrs) on market and non-market activities combined than men (5:36 hrs). Beninese women don’t have much time for themselves (1:32hrs) their children (45 mins) or their household chores (2:49 hrs) and yet they still spend more time on everything, except themselves, than their men. I’m exhausted just blogging about it.

Virginia Woolf spoke of the need of one’s own room and time (and of course money) when writing fiction. And truly, all of these things are needed for most successes. Who knows how much more the world could gain from women if more men got more involved in activities beyond the market? There are signs that times are changing, however: although recent studies do not indicate more equality in household chores, they do point to a shift in younger men’s (Gen X) attitudes and behaviors around fathering. Looks like we are one step closer to taking ALL work activities seriously, whether inside the market or out. And that’s what we call equality.

* Don’t miss the National Council for Research on Women’s tribute to Women’s Equality Day on their blog, The Real Deal. (Full disclosure: both Tonni and I have posts up! We did them in our personal time.)

My latest Love in the Time of Layoff column is now up at Recessionwire.com. It’s titled “Back to Work”. Marco is freelancing again! Househusband, interrupted indeed. I’m happy, but I’m mixed…

Since I was busy puking my guts out this morning (month 6! when will the nausea end?!), Marco filled in for me over at Recessionwire.com.  I think his post is better than any of mine.  Check it out: he’s stepping out as “The Man Behind the Curtain.”

Well now isn’t this interesting: Just as we learn that the world’s wealthy are losing faith in their fund managers, we are also learning that the VAST MAJORITY of fund managers are…guess what, surprise surprise…white and male.  Perhaps it’s time to shake things up with a little (say it with me) di-ver-sity on Wall Street?  You think?  Come on boys, why not just give it a try.

According to a new report covered yesterday in the Times Online (UK), almost half of the world’s 8.6 million wealthiest investors have lost confidence in their fund manager.  The report itself lays bare how the credit crunch has damaged people’s personal fortunes.  According to the article, “Investors’ lack of faith prompted a quarter of those with financial assets of more $1 million to pull funds from a manager or dismiss their adviser last year…”

Ouch.  But wait!  Here’s the good news:

Yesterday, nearly 300 people gathered at the Bloomberg headquarters here in NYC for the release of a report by my ladies at the National Council for Research on Women, aptly titled “Women in Fund Management: A Road Map to Achieving Critical Mass—And Why it Matters.”

To learn more about the report’s important findings, and the splashy launch, check out Kyla Bender-Baird’s live-blogging from the event, NCRW President Linda Basch’s oped yesterday over at the Christian Science Monitor, and the report’s very own website, right here.

My heartfelt kudos to all involved in the creation of this timely piece of research, and especially to Purse Pundit, aka Jacki Zehner, for making it happen, being a role model and postergirl for the advancement of women on Wall Street, and keeping it real.  Jacki’s latest on this all is up at Huffington Post, “Shattering the Ceilings for Good.”

And more importantly, what can be done?

Come hear the answers this Wednesday at the launch of a new report by The National Council for Research on Women.

From the release:

In the last year, we have all been stunned by stories of financial crises, of the sudden demise of long established institutions, and the failures of leading investment professionals. In this report, The National Council for Research on Women calls for fundamental change in the systems, oversight, and leadership of our financial services sector to ensure that the talent pool for the industry includes a diversity of perspectives, including moderating and cautionary approaches, to ensure a stable, healthy, and sustainable financial system. Specifically, they call for a critical mass of women in financial institutions, resulting in greater size and quality of the talent pool and decreasing potential for group-think. They examine the proven benefits of greater diversity in business; the historical and cultural barriers for underrepresented groups; and offer solutions to overcome those barriers.

With crisis comes opportunity – in this case, an opportunity to bring greater diversity to the rarified realms of finance and to infuse the global marketplace with new thinking, broader perspectives, greater transparency, and more sustainable solutions. A panel of experts will discuss how we can take this opportunity to promote women’s leadership in fund management and throughout the corporate space.

Speakers:
Melinda Wolfe, Head of Professional Development, Bloomberg L.P. — Welcome
Linda Basch, President, National Council for Research on Women
Jacki Zehner, Founding Partner, Circle Financial Group and
Board Member Emerita, National Council for Research on Women

Additional speakers to be announced.

Please RSVP to ncrw@ncrw.org

A must-read this morning: WGL panelist Courtney Martin expounds on many of the themes we discussed at Saturday’s panel in her column this week at The American Prospect. Thank you, Courtney, for so beautifully summing up some of the issues, and then taking it the next step.

For another great post-Father’s Day fix, try this latest interview with Jeremy Adam Smith, author of The Daddy Shift, over at Salon, “Daddy on Board”, where Jeremy discusses why dads are spending more time with their kids.

A simply-must-read over at American Prospect, “When Opting Out Isn’t an Option”, offers a four-part look at the under-explored side of the current recession:  How is recession affecting women who have to balance caregiving with wage-earning, and who make up an immense but largely invisible workforce, including nannies, maids and retail clerks?

Contributors include Heather Boushey, Ann Friedman, Dana Goldstein, Janet C. Gornick, Harriet B. Presser, Caroline Batzdorf and Elissa Strauss. Need I say more?

(Thanks to CCF for the heads up)

My latest, up at Recessionwire.com today!  Today’s post questions whether laid off men’s (ok, Marco’s) values are changing, now that they’re spending more time at home.  Hint: It’s all about the eggs. I’d love your comments!