Poor economy puts the brakes on women's decades of progress

Across the country, women in their prime earning years, struggling with an unfriendly economy, are retreating from the work force, either permanently or for long stretches.

They had piled into jobs in growing numbers since the 1960s. But that stopped this decade. For the first time since the women's movement came to life, an economic recovery has come and gone, and the percentage of women at work has fallen, not risen, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. In each of the seven previous recoveries since 1960, the recovery ended with a greater percentage of women at work than when it began.

When economists first started noticing this trend two or three years ago, many thought the women themselves decided to stay home — to raise children or because their husbands were doing well or because, more than men, they felt committed to running their households.

But now, a different explanation is turning up in government data, in the research of a few economists and in a recent congressional study that followed the women's story through the end of 2007.

After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing.

Hard Times

Hard times in manufacturing certainly sidelined Tootie Samson of Baxter, Iowa. Nine months after she lost her job on a factory assembly line, Samson, 48, is still not working. She could be. Jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour are easy enough to land, she said. But like the men with whom she worked at the Maytag washing-machine factory, now closed, near her home, she resists going back to work at less than half her old wage.

Samson knows she will have to get another job at some point. She and her husband still have a teenage daughter to put through college, and his income as a truck driver is not enough. So Samson, now on unemployment, is going to college full time — leaving the work force for more than two years — hoping a degree will enable her to earn at least her old wage of $20 an hour.

The Joint Economic Committee of Congress study cites the growing statistical evidence that women are leaving the work force "on par with men," and the consequences for families.

"Women bring home about one-third of family income," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., the vice chairwoman of the panel. "And only those families with a working wife have seen real improvement in their living standards."

The proportion of women holding jobs in their prime working years, 25 to 54, peaked at 74.9 percent in early 2000 as the technology bubble was about to burst. Eight years later, in June, it was 72.7 percent, a seemingly small decline, but those 2.2 percentage points erase more than 12 years of gains for women. Four million more in their prime years would be employed today if the old pattern had prevailed through the expansion now ending.

The pattern is roughly similar among the well-educated and the less-educated, among the married and never married, among mothers with teenagers and those with children under 6, and among white women and black.

The women, in sum, are for the first time withdrawing with the same uniformity as men in their prime working years. Ninety-six percent of those men held jobs in 1953, their peak year. That is down to 86.4 percent today.

Median pay drops

Pay is no longer rising smartly for women in the 25-to-54 age group. The median pay has fallen in recent years, to $14.84 an hour in 2007 from $15.04 in 2004, adjusted for inflation, according to the Economic Policy Institute. (The median wage for men today is $2 more.)

Not since the 1970s has that happened to women for so long — and because this is a new experience for them, "women may be even more reluctant than men to accept declining wages," said Nancy Folbre, University of Massachusetts economist.

Lisa Craig, 42, is struggling to find work. Raising three sons in her native Chicago, she had worked only occasionally since high school and started receiving welfare benefits in 1993. For the next seven years she took courses in office skills, was a volunteer in a day-care center and an unpaid intern for a college vice president.

And then in 2000 she went to work. For most of that year she earned $10 an hour as a salesclerk, but when she got a divorce, she moved to Milwaukee with her children to be near her sister. There, over the last eight years, she has worked only sporadically struggling to supplement a $628-a-month welfare check that goes almost entirely to rent, plus $500 a month in food vouchers. The longest tenure, 11 months, was as a salesclerk earning $7.75 an hour at Goodwill Industries. Samson, the former Maytag worker, said she could afford to stay off work because she qualified under the terms of the plant closing for two years of unemployment as long as she was a full-time student.

Her husband's $40,000 income as a truck driver and her $360 a week in jobless benefits gets them by while she goes to school.

"If I were a single parent or did not have benefits," Samson said, "I would have had to find a job. I could not have gone back to school to get my degree and the promise it holds of a better job."