A posting from Judith Warner on the New York Times blog ‘Domestic Disturbances‘ titled, ‘The Other Home Equity Crisis,’ takes a look at how women are increasingly affected by job loss in times of economic downturn. As further evidence that the opt-out revolution is a myth, beyond Warner’s book, the article cites a report from Congress that was just recently released.
This week, Congress issued a report, titled “Equality in Job Loss: Women are Increasingly Vulnerable to Layoffs During Recessions,” that may — if read in its entirety — finally, officially and definitively sound a death knell for the story of the Opt-Out Revolution. The report, commissioned by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out.
Women — all women, mothers or not — were hit “especially hard” hard by the recession of 2001 and the recovery-that-never-really-was, the report states. “Unlike in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, during the 2001 recession, the percent of jobs lost by women often exceeded that of men in the industries hardest hit by the downturn. The lackluster recovery of the 2000s made it difficult for women to regain their jobs — women’s employment rates never returned to their pre-recession peak.”
While prior recessions tended to spare women’s jobs relative to men’s, that trend has been reversed in the current downturn, thanks in part to women’s progress in entering formerly male industries and occupations, and in part to the fact that job sectors like service and retail, which still employ disproportionate numbers of women, have suffered disproportionate losses. And this — not a calling to motherhood — accounts for the fall, starting in 2000, of women’s labor force participation rates.
Comments 1
Philip Cohen — July 26, 2008
Warner overstates the case that the Congressional case itself overstates. The opt-out phenomenon is real - plenty of women embrace the idea for themselves, as a new way of accounting for the long-standing tendency of some professional women to drop out of the workforce and raise children. But those women are not numerous enough to account for declining women's employment rates. On the other hand, the recession can't explain it either, because women's employment stalled long before the recession - in tandem with stalled integration and shifts away from egalitarian gender attitudes. We need to drop the idea that there is one explanation for the shifting trend. Despite both "opting out" and the recession, of course, the great majority of women are still employed. I posted links and comments on this in the last few days (see link).