Today’s Jobs Report Shows Women #WorkWorkWorkWorkWork
This morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the most recent employment numbers for September, which got us like:
Today’s jobs report is pretty much unchanged from last month’s —the overall unemployment rate for September remained low at about 5.0 percent, and the unemployment rate for all women ages 20 years and up was below the overall rate at 4.4 percent.
Here were our reactions to some of the other numbers.
When we saw that the economy added only 156,000 non-farm sector jobs, the smallest gains since April, and that only about a third of these gains were made by women:
Gains for women were mostly in the professional and business services sector which include good-paying managerial work but also include administrative assisting and temporary office work. Women also make up over half of the public sector workforce (57.5 percent), which lost 11,000 jobs in September.
When we found that women, especially single women, are more likely to hold down multiple jobs:
Many of the low-wage jobs held by women are in the retail, and leisure and hospitality industries. This includes tipped workers who under federal law are only entitled to a minimum cash wage of $2.13 an hour—a wage that has been frozen for a quarter of century.
When we realized that similarly unchanged from last month are disparities in the unemployment rate for certain groups of women:
- Black women (7.0 percent) had almost double the rate of unemployment of white women (3.8 percent) in September.
- Hispanic women (6.4 percent) also had greater unemployment rates than white women.
- Single moms (6.4 percent) were more than twice as likely to be unemployed than married women and men (3.0 percent).
- Women with disabilities (10.8 percent) were more than twice as likely to be unemployed in September as women without disabilities (4.7 percent).