The jobs market has undergone some big changes that favor women, though they could also make women more vulnerable.
The pandemic was so bad for working women, especially mothers, that it was known in some quarters as the “she-cession.” But the recovery — and can we please not call it the “she-covery” — has been pretty good for them.
In the last few years, after decades of stagnation, women have made progress at closing both the labor gap and the wage gap. The jobs market has undergone some big changes that favor women — though they also make women more vulnerable if it turns.
For most of the industrial era, women’s work was an afterthought. Not only did women face discrimination in the workplace, but there was an expectation they’d stop work once they had a family. When social norms and technology changed, however, so did women’s leverage in the labor force. Women made progress through the second half of the 20th century: By the year 2000, more than 75% of women between the age of 25 and 54 were working, up from the 40s in the 1960s, while the wage gap (how much a woman makes for every dollar a man makes) went from 62.3 cents in 1979 to about 77 cents.
Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
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