Closer To The Ideal

For the first time in history, women are expected to become 50% of the workforce in America during 2010. Partly this is because they are getting more jobs, partly this is because of men leaving the workforce.

The article downplays some of the obstacles that women still face, though it mentions:

Only 2% of the bosses of America’s largest companies and 5% of their peers in Britain are women. They are also paid significantly less than men on average.

The interesting flip side of women’s increasing participation in the workforce is the declining participation of men. Men have been leaving the workforce for decades – first slowly, then more quickly:

(Graph is from Brad Delong’s blog)

In the 1950s and 1960s men lost jobs when agriculture automated. A lot of these were black males and racist laws kept them from moving to other parts of the economy. At the time, Ralph Abernathy said “Black men face a race between the civil rights movement and the tractor.” He meant that black men needed to gain the right to go to college and get highly skilled jobs, before the last of the farm jobs disappeared. That the disappearance of the farm jobs lead to a permanent increase in black male unemployment suggests that America failed to adapt quickly enough.

Male participation in the workforce never dipped below 90% before 1973, but it will probably drop as low as 80% during 2010. In the past the decline in workforce participation may have largely been confined to racial minorities, but now it seems to be effecting everyone.

Economists are divided about where these men are going, or why they are leaving the workforce. This graph only shows men of working age – between the age of 25 and 54 – so the large number of men who are of retirement age would not effect this graph.

It probably says something important about how deindustrialization has effected certain areas, that the male participation rate never dipped below 90% before 1973 but it never again rises above 90% after 1979. The loss of low-skilled industrial jobs (for instance, the loss of the textile industry during the 1970s) seems to have lead to a permanent increase in male unemployment, though it is hard to say why these men didn’t simply get low-skilled jobs in the retail sector – which is what a lot of unskilled women seem to have done.

The end of the graph (the last 3 years) is really dramatic – male participation in the economy has fallen off a cliff.

The peak on this graph is in 1952. The decline has been going on for 58 years. I wonder when this trend will reverse?

This entry was posted on Friday, January 1st, 2010 at 2:32 pm and is filed under economics, gender. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.