Recovery

We're back this Friday with your monthly analysis on the BLS jobs numbers. September brought some good news, and here is what you need to know:

1. In September, adult women’s unemployment rate hit a three and a half year low. Last month, adult women’s unemployment rate dropped to 7.0 percent – the lowest it’s been since February 2009. Similarly, adult men’s unemployment rate dropped to 7.3 percent – the lowest level since November 2008. The declines in unemployment rates from August to September show that we’re continuing to move in the right direction.
2. Vulnerable groups of women shared in the drop in unemployment this month. While their unemployment rates remain much higher than for women and men overall, adult African American women (10.9 percent), adult Hispanic women (9.8 percent), and single moms (11.3 percent) all saw declines in their unemployment rates this month. These rates are still too high, but it’s good to see a variety of groups of women sharing in the positive change.
3. Women and men shared equally in September’s job gains. This month women and men each gained 57,000 jobs, but women continue to lag behind men in the recovery overall due to public sector losses.

We’re back this Friday with your monthly update on the BLS jobs numbers. Other things are back too – cooler temps are back, Monday night football is back, and kids are back to school – but one thing that isn’t back are teachers. Local education lost jobs last month, capping a year of losses totaling over 83,000. In fact, since the recovery started in June 2009, local education has lost 301,000 jobs. This is bad news for kids and for women, who make up over 70 percent of the positions in this sector.

These education losses are just part of the ongoing public sector losses. I know we hammered it home last month, but the big story for women this month is still public sector job losses. Over the recovery, women’s public sector job losses have wiped out a whopping 45 percent of their private sector gains. Since June 2009, women have now lost 450,000 public sector jobs, while they gained 999,000 private sector jobs.

Though the month wasn’t great all around - the economy added 96,000 jobs in August and the overall unemployment rate dropped slightly to 8.1 percent, hovering near the level it has been at since the start of 2012 - one positive trend is a slight decline in adult women’s unemployment rate– it is now 7.3 percent, the lowest rate since April 2009, though not by much. Read more »

It’s officially back-to-school season and the shopping is in full swing. Families around the country are out buying school supplies, new clothes, or maybe picking up a few things for that last summer project they haven’t quite finished yet.

But this August, you may have noticed a difference at your local stores – more men staffing the cash register, the customer service desk, or helping you search the aisles for that elusive item on your shopping list.

That’s because since the recovery began in June 2009, men have gained 395,600 jobs in retail – almost 2.5 times the number of jobs that women have lost (163,400) in the same period.

Two steps forward, one step back. That’s the story of the recovery for women.

Our analysis of April’s monthly jobs data brought fairly positive news for women, who gained 73 percent of the 115,000 jobs last month, the largest share of monthly job gains for women since the start of the recovery. But the total monthly job gains in April were the lowest in 2012. And the story for women during the recovery overall isn’t as rosy.

Women have gained only 16 percent of the nearly 2.5 million jobs added during the recovery, and their slow gains are driven largely by public sector losses. In fact, for every two jobs women gained in the private sector during the recovery, they lost one in the public sector. Men also have lost public sector jobs during the recovery, but their public sector job losses are smaller both in absolute terms and relative to their private sector job gains, as the chart below shows.

Other fast facts you should know:

• Unemployment rates dropped slightly. April brought a slight decrease in the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent overall. Men’s unemployment rate also dropped slightly, to 7.5 percent. However, the unemployment rate for women held steady at 7.4 percent. The decreases in the unemployment rates are largely due to people leaving the labor force.

It’s the first month of jobs data for 2012 and January is off to a good start, according to NWLC’s number crunching this morning. The newly released jobs data for January brought some good news – drops in unemployment and job gains for both women and men this month.

Here are a few things you should know from today’s jobs data:

• Women’s and men’s unemployment is the same for the first time since the start of the recession. When the recession officially began in December 2007, the unemployment rate for both women and men stood at 4.4 percent. Over two and a half years later, their unemployment rates finally meet again – at 7.7 percent. Since the start of the recovery in June 2009, men’s unemployment has dropped 2.2 percentage points, while women’s unemployment has essentially remained flat – rising slightly from 7.6 percent in June 2009.

Today’s jobs data seemed to have some good news – overall unemployment dropped to 8.6 percent, a level of unemployment we haven’t seen since before the start of the recovery.  However, our analysis shows some troubling trends. Despite the decreased unemployment in November, single mothers, black women, and black men saw their unemployment rise. And the reason for the drop in overall unemployment isn’t a big surge in the number of Americans finding work. In fact, more workers dropped out of the labor force last month than found jobs—and all of the workers who left the labor force last month were women and female teens.

More numbers behind the headlines:

• Public sector losses continue. Last month the public sector lost 20,000 jobs for a total of 568,000 jobs lost in the public sector since the recovery began in June 2009. Nearly 66 percent of the public sector losses over this time are women’s job losses.

Today’s jobs data brought surprising news – not only did women gain jobs, they actually gained most of the jobs added to the economy in October. However, our analysis shows that the news isn’t all good – overall unemployment was 9.0 percent and women’s unemployment dropped by just 0.1 percentage points to 8.0 percent, still higher than the 7.7 percent unemployment they had at the beginning of the recovery.  In fact, since the official start of the recovery in June 2009, women have actually lost 117,000 jobs, despite the fact that the economy added more than 1.0 million jobs during that time.

The data show that the job market remains bleak.  The unemployment rate overall hardly dropped, nearly 14 million Americans are officially unemployed, and millions more are underemployed or have given up on finding work. Despite these numbers, just yesterday, the Senate blocked yet another jobs bill, the Rebuild America Jobs Act, which would have created hundreds of thousands of jobs. This bill was just one of three blocked in the last month by the Senate, which also blocked the American Jobs Act and another of its components, the Teachers and First Responders Back to Work Act. Read more »

With the Labor Day holiday around the corner, today’s jobs data leaves no room for celebration. This month, the modest recovery ground to a halt – with no jobs added to the economy in the month of August. Our analysis shows that the news was even worse for women, whose unemployment rate inched up in August. While both women’s and men’s small gains in the private sector were wiped out by public sector job losses in August, since the start of the recovery in June 2009, men have gained 984,000 jobs, while women have lost 345,000 jobs. Read more »