Mr. Moderate

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) seemingly makes it hard to extract some facts about the workforce. I won’t dig deep enough to even begin to conclude that it is a deliberate attempt to hide some inconvenient truth. But I will note that the figures normally presented for women in the workforce seem to be almost deliberately misleading of the truth.

A typical statistic asserts that 76.1% of men over the age of 20 participate in the labor force while only 59.5% of women over the age of 20 participate. From these statistics you might conclude that there are still a lot of “stay-at-home moms” out there who are staying home with the kids and not participating in the workforce. Nothing could be further from the truth.

If you compare the percentage of women workers in the labor force, as compared to the total labor force, you will discover that woman have recently been making up over 48% of the total workforce. When the government began collecting this statistic back in 1964 (and long after large numbers of women began to enter the workforce), the percentage of women workers was under 32% of the total size of the workforce.

What distorts the participation numbers, above, is the fact that the total non-institutionalized male population over the age of 20 is 103,143,000 while the total non-institutionalized female population over the age of 20 is 110,964,000. The extra 7.8 million women are presumably elderly women who have outlived their male counterparts. In my view, it is entirely bogus to include anybody over the age of 70 when computing employment statistics. The number of male workers over the age of 20 is 78,452,000 while the number of female workers over the age of 20 is 67,487,000. If we compare those numbers to the total non-institutionalized male population over the age of 20 (103,143,000) we get participation rates of 76.1% (the figure reported) for men and 65.4% for women (considerably larger than the value reported).

It is possible to easily compare the labor force numbers for men and women aged 16 to 19. Here, there are 3,592,000 (51%) men and 3,447,000 (49%) women, or nearly equal numbers of men and women aged 16 to 19 who are in the workforce. The 49% rate for women aged 16 to 19 is almost equal to the percentage of total women in the workforce (48.7%), so it does not seem likely that there is much age variation in the employment statistics. It would seem that economic forces compel women to work to almost the same degree as they compel men to work, almost without regard to age.

Of course, it is possible that women older than age 20 and younger than (say) age 40 are “out of the workforce” in larger numbers for the purpose of childbearing and child-rearing. However, for the percentage of women in that age range to be less than the average for women overall it would require that there be an excess of women over age 40 in the labor force as compared to equivalently-aged men. (It certainly does not show up in the age 16-19 numbers, above.) Based upon my experience in the workforce, and the fact that the percentage of women in the workforce has been steadily growing since the 1960s, I would find it difficult to believe that there is an excessive number of older women in the workforce. But of course, the BLS makes it impossible to even guess what those numbers might actually be. No age breakdown for ages over 20 is reported.

However, the BLS does prepare a separate report on the percentage of mothers with children under the age of 18 who work, and that report says this:

The labor force participation rate for all mothers, at 70.9 percent, was little changed in 2006; it most recently peaked at 72.3 percent in 2000. The participation rate of married mothers (68.6 percent) was also about unchanged in 2006. The proportion of unmarried mothers–those who were widowed, divorced, separated, or never married–who were in the labor force in 2006 was 76.6 percent, about the same as in the prior year.

Now, go back and read the above with the statistic for men firmly in your mind: “76.1% of men over the age of 20 participate in the labor force.” Female heads of households participate in the labor force at the rate of 76.6% while men over the age of 20 participate at the rate of 76.1%, which is virtually identical. Married mothers with children participate in the labor force at the rate of 68.6%, a rate that is only 8% less than the rate for unmarried women with children and the total population of men over the age of 20. (I will grant you that the numbers for men over the age of 20 includes a lot of elderly men who are presumably retired; again, it is very difficult to extract actual numbers that are directly on point with what I’m discussing here.) The BLS offers this statistic we can use to try to home in on what the real truth is here:

Among married-couple families, 97.3 percent had an employed parent in 2006, up from 97.1 percent in 2005. The proportion of married-couple families in which both parents were employed rose by 0.7 percentage point to 62.0 percent in 2006.

So, in 97.3% of all two-parent families at least one parent was employed, while in 62.0% of all two-parent families both parents were employed. By simple subtraction this yields 35.3% of all families have one parent employed (without in any way specifying the sex of the employed parent). The total number of married couple families with children under 18 is only 25,022,000 so the number of “stay at home parents” is on the order of (2.7% + 2.7% + 35.3%) 10,184,000 married “stay at home” parents, not all of whom are women. To compute the percentage of kids where there is no parent at home, we take 62% of married two-parent families (or 15,516,000 families), add that to the 71.2% of families headed by a working female head of household (or 6,054,000 families), and add that to the 83.1% of families headed by a working male head of household (1,818,000 families), and we get to a total of 23,388,000 families where all of the parents in the household have jobs. Out of a total of 35,605,000 families, that would imply that 65.7% of families (and presumably an equivalent percentage of all kids) have no non-working parent living with the kids.

What this all seems to boil down to is that there are actually very few “stay-at-home moms” left out there. Maybe 10 million at the most (and probably less) out of a female “potentially working” population of more than ten times that amount. This would imply that something like 90% of all women who are of working age and otherwise “employable” (to the same extent that men are equivalently “employable”) will work at some kind of a job that reports itself to the BLS. This is an astonishing number due to its broad cultural implications: most kids (nearly two-thirds, or 65.7% as per the above) are not being raised most of the time by either of their parents. Instead, they are passed off to relatives, neighbors, schools and day care facilities to have “strangers” spend more waking hours with the kids than either parent does.

One final statistical note: with 10 million to 12 million non-working parents who might be persuaded to enter the labor force if conditions permitted it, that is not a huge pool of untapped labor by any means. The total labor force is about 153 million people, with about 146 million of them employed at some job or another. Adding 12 million new workers to the 7 million who are already unemployed would raise the unemployment rate to only about 11.5% and quite frankly, there would most likely never be a situation that would persuade all of those parents to find jobs of one sort or another. The key point here is that there just is not a lot of room for more “working parents” to make themselves available to bolster the family income even if the jobs would come available to try to lure them into the workforce. In other words, we are nearly fully-employed in the almost literal sense: the people who are not working by and large can’t (or won’t) work. The labor market would be even tighter if the government takes any serious action against the 12 to 20 million illegal workers inside the United States right now. After performing this analysis I really do believe that the government is probably correct in asserting that our economy actually does need those workers.

In conclusion, I would surmise that the majority of women in the workforce are working to make ends meet. They literally “need” their jobs in order to pay the bills as each paycheck comes in. Certainly that is the case for unmarried women, and it seems to be increasingly the case for even married mothers. We have transitioned to become a nation where two paychecks per household is a necessity, not a luxury. And frankly, I don’t see that as being good for our kids or our society. Something ought to be done. But when the money doesn’t stretch to pay the bills, what can be done?