Women’s Employment Update: Adult Women’s Unemployment Hits Four-Year Low Despite April’s Tepid Job Growth

Here’s a highlight for you in the release of last month’s jobs data: in April, adult women’s unemployment rate fell to its lowest point in more than four years. That’s right, the last time unemployment was this low was in the first months of 2009.

But hey there, hold your horses. Don’t get too excited yet!

While this number may be looking pretty good, the overall story just isn’t quite as nice. April brought in another month of slow job growth and slow monthly gains mean that it still could take years to recover fully from the recession. Over at the Economic Policy Institute, economist Heidi Shierholz writes, “In good times this would be fine, but at a time of persistent economic weakness, it represents an ongoing disaster.”

So what else stands out in today’s jobs report? Here’s what caught my eye as we crunched the numbers for today’s NWLC analysis:

• 6.7 percent: This represents the good. Unemployment rates continue to fall, and women’s unemployment rate hit a four-year low last month at 6.7 percent. In April, adult men’s unemployment rate ticked up slightly, while the overall unemployment rate fell ever so slightly, also to a four-year low. Overall, we’re doing better, but we’re gaining jobs at a crushingly slow pace, especially compared to earlier recoveries.
• 165,000 jobs: In April, the economy added 165,000 jobs. All of the job gains were in the private sector, while the public sector lost 11,000 jobs. And in fact, women gained more than 70 percent of the jobs added to the economy in April. However, this pace of adding jobs just isn’t enough. Ezra Klein called the recovery “durable" and the “kind of recovery that, if it can go for several more years, will eventually get us out of the muck.” But then he then me made the more critical point: “But it is also slow enough that the human toll of the crisis will be long and enormous.”
• More than four in ten: That that’s the percent of jobless adults who were unable to find work after more than six months of searching in April. In April, 42.8 percent of adult women and 42.9 percent of adult men had been looking for work since at least November. As we’ve mentioned before, this figure continues to stay high. Making matters worse for these jobless workers? The sequester is cutting their unemployment benefits.

  

For workers who are unemployed, a recovery that will take several more years to get us out of the mess just isn’t enough. And to make matters worse, we’re just beginning to see the effects of the sequester. Government workers are starting to experience furloughs and vital programs are being cut. As the negative effects of the sequester escalate, the limited progress we’ve seen could easily unravel.