Last Friday was that day-- the benchmark unemployment rate fell to 7.9%-- a decline of .5 percentage points. This number is from the Household Survey. The Establishment Survey showed a net of 660,000 jobs were added to payrolls
What to make of this? Well, certainly, it is better news than hearing that the unemployment rate went up or that the economy lost jobs. (Note: the massive layoffs by airlines, Disney and others happened this week and won't show up till the November report). But, the pace of job gain has slowed (there were 1.4 new jobs in August, 1.7 in July). The numbers suggest that jobs are clawing their way up, but still have a ways to go before getting back to February levels.
While the trend in economic indicators is heading in the right direction, it is hard to ignore the base levels-- just the sheer numbers.
Over ten million adults who want jobs cannot find them (unemployed), 26 million people are still collecting unemployment (1.4 of those just started last week, from the Labor Department), The number of persons not in the labor force who currently want a job is at 7.2 million, and 6.3 are underemployed. And here is something super concerning-- 865,000 women dropped out of the U.S. workforce last month. That's four times the number of men.
Let's talk about this for a bit.
The wage gap between men and women is well-documented. Given the this disparity in relative earnings, if a couple face a situation where one person must stop working to take care of children or sick family members, it is often the woman because she is the one making less money. While this seems like the "rational" decision given there is a wage gap, it still does not resolve the problematic issue of the wage gap itself. That is, a woman will earn less than a man with the exact same profile ad qualifications. The pandemic is just showing how an economic crisis can exacerbate the wage gap.
Matthias Doepke, an economics professor at Northwestern University writes about the gendered impacts of this recession in the New York Times:
Dropping out of the work force completely has long-term consequences not just for the woman trying to re-enter the work force down the line but also for women’s overall position in the work force. First of all, it takes some time to find a new job “but what’s actually more important is that it’s even more difficult to find a job that is comparable and to get back to the same career position. So we see that even decades after a recession, people who lost their jobs often have low earnings.... this recession will likely widen that gap by five percentage points, further perpetuating the conditions that drove women out of the workplace this year
Here is the McKinsey Report that shows some survey data on how COVID19 is having a disproportionately negative impact of women in the corporate workplace. This infographic below shows that mothers are more likely that fathers to scale back or leave the workforce completely due to the pandemic:
