By Liane Schalatek, Heinrich Böll Stiftung North America
When the massive recession of 2007-2009 hit the United States, the worst economic downturn in the country’s history since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the position of working women in the United States seemed the strongest it had ever been: American women are the breadwinners or co-breadwinners of two thirds of American households. They now constitute almost 50 percent of all U.S. workers. They are responsible for 83 percent of all consumer purchases in the United States. They hold 89 percent of the U.S. bank accounts and 51 percent of all personal wealth and as a group are worth more than $5 trillion in consumer spending power – larger than the entire Japanese economy.
American women have also been more likely to stay employed during the recession than men, so much that some American media outlets described the U.S. economic downturn as “Mancession.” Men were the victims of two thirds of the 11 million jobs lost since the American recession began in 2007. In August 2009 with U.S. male unemployment at 11 percent, 8.3 percent of the women labor force was unemployed, making this the largest unemployment gender gap in the postwar era. According to labor market surveys, jobs more often held by men in construction and manufacturing in the United States have decreased by 39 percent since 2007. Meanwhile, jobs in health services where women are employed at a higher rate have actually increased by 4.5 percent. Women are also expected to dominate in the majority of the dozen job categories forecast to grow the most in the next decade, several of them in health and social services sector. This is not surprising given the growing demand in an American society where the baby-boomer generation hits retirement, old age and declining health.
However, this seemingly good news is in truth at best a mixed blessing. It points to persistent gender segregation in the U.S. labor market that goes hand-in-hand with an enduring gender wage gap. More than 50 years after the United States Supreme Court ruled racial segregation unconstitutional, men and women in the American workforce are still separate and not equal: in 2009, women working full-time continued to earn only 77 cents for every one dollar their male co-workers made. A new U.S. law, the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, aims to combat pay inequality by improving the rights of women to sue their employers. Yet, this and other equal employment opportunity laws also need to be better enforced to affect change. In fact, after considerable efforts towards more integrated occupations in the 1970s and 80s, progress to eliminate occupational gender segregation in the United States has completely stalled since the mid 1990s, regardless of the education-level of job-seekers. Younger American women today are not more likely than much older women to work in integrated occupations. In the racially diverse U.S. job market, working in typical “women jobs” is likeliest for Hispanic women and least likely for Asian Americans. And wage levels in the United States – where income inequality in the labor market has grown overall during the past several decades – are particularly low for workers in the occupations predominantly done by women, among them many of the “growth” categories of the U.S. job market, such as domestic service work, health care and home-based care.
This has an effect on families and their income: in the United States, more than 2.1 million wives, whose husbands are unemployed as a result of the great recession, are sustaining their families – with lower wages. And women continue to shoulder three quarters of unpaid household labor in the United States – irrespective of whether women and men are employed or not. Thus, it is inevitably women and girls in the United States that bear the burden of more unpaid household work when families are forced to shift their consumption patterns. Add to this mix the fact that fewer unemployed women than men collect unemployment insurance benefits and for shorter periods, and it is not surprising that during the recession the poverty-rate for people in female-headed households jumped to over 31 percent, with 19 percent of all U.S. children now living in poverty.
These numbers – and the impacts of the great recession on American women - would have been even worse had it not been for some stimulus actions by the Obama Administration, most notably the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) and the Jobs for Main Street Act of 2010, which expanded food stamps, provided tax benefits for families with children (although few of them targeted women directly), increased assistance with health insurance for the unemployed and saved jobs in education and health-care, which employ large pools of women. However, this does not detract from the fact that American stimulus spending in 2009 and 2010 was concentrated at unemployment insurance and infrastructure, both areas that underaddress women, because the jobs that women are holding on to typically lack benefits, retirement savings plans, or pensions. Many more billions have gone primarily into “shovel ready” projects, meaning construction jobs were women make up less than 15 percent of the industry, than into injecting stimulus funds into the social sector with its highly feminized workforce.
So, was the U.S. recession really male and is the recovery really female, as some observers opined? Hardly. In light of persisting gender disparities in pay, poverty rate, with respect to unpaid household work, and gender-based occupational segregation of the workforce in the United States, this message was not only oversimplifying at best, but is just plainly wrong. Indeed, although the great American recession as of July 2009 was officially declared over, for many women in the United States and their families, particularly low-income women of color with children, the worst is not over yet. With federal stimulus funds running out and renewal unlikely in the face of the worst federal deficit in U.S. history and the recent political shifts in Congress, social services across American – instead of being buttressed and expanded – are now being radically cut by states trying to meet constitutional balanced budget requirements. And an end is not in sight.
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