Women are finding work in
the industries where more jobs are growing.
By Bernice Napach | January
13, 2020 at 12:20 PM | The original version of this story was published on ThinkAdvisor
For the
first time in nearly 10 years, women hold more than half the jobs in the U.S.
According
to the Labor Department’s latest monthly jobs report for December, women held
50.04% of jobs, based on payrolls excluding farm workers and the
self-employed. More specifically, they held 76.246 million jobs, or 109,000
more than men.
“This
is significant even if the percentage doesn’t stay at that level,”
said Ariane Hegewisch, program director for employment and earnings
for The Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “The gap has narrowed and
narrowed for quite a while.”
“Women
are working where jobs are growing,” Betsey Stevenson, an associate
professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan Gerald
R. Ford School of Public Policy, tweeted about the latest jobs report. “Health
care added more jobs in 2019 than 2018, while jobs growth slowed substantially
in mining, construction, transportation & warehousing, and construction.”
According
to the December jobs report, women continue to hold the majority of jobs in
certain sectors: government (58%), financial activities (56.4%), leisure and
hospitality (both 53%) and more than three-quarters of jobs in education and
health services (77.4%).
Women
hold 54% of nonfarm private-sector service jobs, which account for 84% of all
nonfarm private sector jobs, according to Stevenson.
But
more men are working. According to another section of the jobs report known as
the household survey, just over 81 million men over 20 said they were employed
in December compared with 72 million women over 20.
If the
data seems contradictory, there’s a reason for that. According to the Wall Street Journal, more
men could be working at jobs not on a payroll, such as the self-employed, and
they wouldn’t have shown up in the payroll survey. But there’s also another
reason, it says – “women are more likely to hold more than one job.”
The
participation rate of women in the workforce is also lower: 59.2% versus
71.5%.
While
women also continue to earn less than men in the aggregate, at 79 cents for every dollar a man
makes, the gap is negligible when comparing pay scales between men and women
with the same job title, years of experience and location — just two cents,
according to PayScale.com.
The
December jobs report showed a moderate growth in total payrolls of 145,000 with
notable job gains in retail trade and health care, where women tend to
dominate, and notable job losses in mining. The unemployment rate was unchanged
at 3.5%.
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