By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 11 years ago

Chart of the Day: Only 30 percent of new jobs have gone to women

charts comparing men's and women's workforce participation

According to these NYT charts, of the 5.3 million jobs added during the economic recovery over the last few years, only 30 percent of them went to women. In part, that’s because more jobs held by men were lost in the recession (remember the endless talk about the “hecession“?) But, Pat Garfola notes at ThinkProgress, “austerity is also contributing to this problem, as government job losses disproportionately hurt women.”

And the gender skew to the recovery has meant that the decades-long trend of women making up an ever-increasing portion of the workforce has stalled for the first time since the ’50s. In fact, a smaller percentage of women over 20 are working today than at the bottom of the recession. Last month, 54.6 percent of women over the age of 20 had jobs, compared to 67.6 percent of men.

Check out the rest of the charts here.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

Read more about Maya

Join the Conversation

Related Content

▪▪