Bryce Covert

How Does the Next Generation of Women Workers Feel About the Workforce?

Bryce Covert on March 16, 2012 - 12:11 PM ET

There’s been a lot of talk of women in the changing workforce recently, some optimistic, some not as much. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic recently wrote an enthusiastic article on “the triumph of women in the workplace,” which “has been one of the great success stories of the last 100 years.” Women recently hit the 50 percent mark in the workforce (before they dipped during the hecovery). They get more degrees than men and dominate fast-growing industries. Thompson predicts a rosy future for the American female worker. (I’m much more pessimistic.)

A lot of this, however, will play out (or is already playing out) in the next generation of female workers, the Millennials. But we don’t have to wait to find out how they’re faring in the workforce; Accenture surveyed them and captured some of its findings in an interesting infographic:

The Artificial Line Between Social and Economic Issues: Exhibit A, Andrew Cuomo

Bryce Covert on March 15, 2012 - 10:43 AM ET

The bright line that we often draw between the economic and social can lead us to ignore one at the expense of the other. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is a perfect example of that. He became a hero of the left when he helped usher through the legalization of gay marriage in July. But the rest of his agenda is so fiscally conservative that he’s currently embroiled in a fight with public sector unions over decreasing retirees’ pension payments and benefits for new workers.

In the very same year that Cuomo was lauded by the left for his stance on gay rights, he was busy implementing a budget that refused to raise taxes and filled a fiscal hole with huge cuts to services. The enacted 2011 budget reduced overall spending by 2 percent from the year before, “largely through cuts to services and State operations, as well as streamlined government actions,” the Human Services Council reports. But the enacted budget was much kinder than the one Cuomo originally proposed: he would have cut $400 million to health and human services, while the enacted budget added $271 million back. HSC concludes, however, that even with those restorations, “the final budget [did] not meet the need for services in New York’s communities.”

Those service cuts had a huge impact on what we likely categorize as a social issue: domestic violence. The current budget eliminates the TANF non-residential domestic violence initiative, leaving women seeking services but not in need of a shelter out of luck. Meanwhile, cuts to programs for the homeless will impact women fleeing domestic violence. Abuse leads to homelessness for 28 percent of families. Yet the current state budget proposes the elimination of its share of the Advantage housing subsidy program, which helps the homeless move from shelters to permanent housing. The city will also drop its commitment, meaning that $192 million in funding for housing subsidies will disappear. Both cuts mean far less support for women fleeing abusive situations.

Why Employers Should Want Their Workers Using Contraception

Bryce Covert on March 14, 2012 - 11:37 AM ET

Arizona, seemingly determined to take bad ideas and make them worse, is moving ahead with a bill that both makes explicit and codifies into law the current fights over contraception coverage. Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Republican Debbie Lesko, allows employers with religious or moral objections to contraception to deny insurance coverage of it to their employees. This is in response to the Affordable Care Act’s provision that insurance be required to cover contraception without a co-pay; the Obama administration already made a compromise that should protect religious employees. Yet conservatives have had a hard time letting it go.

The interesting thing about Arizona’s bill, however, is that it does have an exception built in for women who don’t use birth control for sex. If it is for other medical reasons, employers are required to cover it. The tricky question is, How would anyone know the difference? The bill takes care of that conundrum by allowing employers to ask their workers for proof that their baby pills are not being used during baby making time. Some are speculating that this opens up the door to employers firing their employees because they’re on the pill.

Here’s the crazy thing: employers should want their employees to use birth control for reproductive purposes. As Annie Lowrey recently wrote, “A number of studies have shown that by allowing women to delay marriage and childbearing, the pill has also helped them invest in their skills and education, join the work force in greater numbers, move into higher-status and better-paying professions and make more money over all.”

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The Shecovery Meets a Swift Demise

Bryce Covert on March 13, 2012 - 4:49 PM ET

Credit where credit is due: David Leonhardt wrote a follow-up post on the so-called “shecovery” in which he makes a clarification about flaws in his data. As a recap, Leonhardt saw a big jump in women’s employment from December to February, leading him to wonder if we were in another version of a mancession, this time during the recovery. But Mike Konczal pointed out that the jump was mostly artificial, due in large part to the BLS reworking its data. It’s important to stay on top of these things when they crop up, given the outsized mancession meme during the height of the Great Recession. Beware those who once again start wringing their hands the second that women start to take part in job growth more substantially.

But don’t worry, that’s not likely to come anytime soon. On the heels of Leonhardt’s follow up was more news that portends job losses for women: states are planning another wave of layoffs. Soaring healthcare and pension costs, coupled with depleted stimulus funding, “means another round of cuts for many states,” the Wall Street Journal reports, including a plan by Florida to scrap 4,355 jobs. Women, who hold more government jobs than men, will keep finding themselves out of work.

Faced With Unequal Pay, Some Women Opt Out

Bryce Covert on March 13, 2012 - 12:29 PM ET

Feminists have long debated the veracity of the “opt-out revolution” meme, but a forthcoming study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (described by Reuters) does in fact find college-educated women whose spouses are similarly educated dropping out of the workforce. The study shows a drop in these women’s workforce participation of .1 percent a year between 1993 and 2006, in contrast to growth in their ranks of 2.4 percent between 1976 and 1992.

This trend seems to be heavily influenced by the pay gap. In 1975, the pay for men and women who graduated from college was about even: they both made 43 percent more than non–college graduates. But by 2008 male grads were making 92 percent more, while women were making 70 percent more, a gap of 22 percentage points between them. In fact, as Amanda Hess recently pointed out, at every level of education beyond high school, women experience a shortfall in comparison to their male peers. Overall, men with post–high school education make over $800 more per month than women with the same level of education. The gap only gets worse the more education they take on: for example, men with a bachelor’s degree in business make $1,000 more each month, and men with advanced degrees in business make $1,400.

This should throw some cold water on all of the excitement around the fact that women are getting more college degrees than men. There have been a lot of predictions that women’s gains in higher ed will give them a huge edge in the future economy. But if they are shelling out tuition or taking on loads of debt to end up making less than men, and then dropping out of the workforce altogether, the idea that their education levels will mean economic dominance evaporates.

Have We Gone From a Mancession to a Shecovery? Not Quite.

Bryce Covert on March 12, 2012 - 2:25 PM ET

The jobs numbers that came out on Friday looked so much better than what we’re used to—or at least didn’t suck quite as hard as usual—that there was some victory dancing in the blogosphere. And there are certainly some positive signs. But a premature victory for women once again reared its head. The fears of a mancession have returned in a new shape, as David Leonhardt wondered if we’re about to move out of the “hecovery” period—in which men made job gains while women lost them—to a “shecovery.” He points out that over the past two months, the number of employed men only rose by 83,000, while women were up 192,000 jobs.

There may be a problem with this data. A large part of the jump that Leonhardt saw in women’s employment is because the BLS, as it sometimes does, updated its population estimates, “finding” more women workers than had been previously accounted for. Yet it didn’t add those women evenly across the year. As Mike Konczal notes, “December showed women gaining 584,000 jobs as a result of statistical population adjustments that, in reality, should have been smoothed across a longer time frame.” The jump in women’s jobs is mostly artificial.

Still, the picture is starting to look better for women. Just as recently as August women were losing jobs, while men were getting back to work. Now women are starting to join in the economy’s very slow job creation: according to the National Women’s Law Center, they gained about one-third of the roughly 200,000 jobs added in January and February.