By Catherine Rampell
via nytimes.com

Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force.

“I was working part-time at Starbucks for a year and a half,” said Laura Baker, 24, who started a master’s program in strategic communications this fall at the University of Denver. “I wasn’t willing to just stay there. I had to do something.”

Many economists initially thought that the shrinking labor force — which drove down November’s unemployment rate — was caused primarily by discouraged older workers giving up on the job market. Instead, many of the workers on the sidelines are young people upgrading their skills, which could portend something like the postwar economic boom, when millions of World War II veterans went to college through the G.I. Bill instead of immediately entering, and overwhelming, the job market.

Now, as was the case then, one sex is the primary beneficiary. Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. The longer-term consequences, economists say, are that the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.

For now at least, many young women still feel that the deck is stacked against them.

“Almost everyone in my program is female,” said Ms. Baker, who hopes a master’s degree will help her get a job running communications at a nonprofit group. “That’s partly because of the program, but also because as women we feel like we have to be more educated to be able to compete in really any field.”

Women still earn significantly less than men. And in the two and a half years since the recovery officially began, men age 16 to 24 have gained 178,000 jobs, while their female counterparts have lost 255,000 positions, according to the Labor Department.

Apparently discouraged by scant openings, 412,000 young women have dropped out of the labor force entirely in the last two and a half years, meaning they are not looking for work.

Among young men, the labor force fell during the recession but has been flat since the recovery began. Today, across all age groups, an unemployed female worker is 35 percent more likely to drop out of the labor force in the next month than an unemployed male worker.

Some studies suggest that women are pickier about their job choices than men. Already earning lower pay, women are less willing to work when wages fall further, especially if they are able to rely on an employed (and these days, often newly re-employed) husband. Women are also more reluctant to work night or weekend shifts, according to government data on how Americans spend their time, partly because they have more family responsibilities.

“The jobs out there just aren’t very good, and men seem more willing to take them for whatever reason,” said Jonathan L. Willis, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “The women are looking at those same jobs and saying, ‘I’ll be more productive elsewhere.’ ”

Then there are societal influences that affect a person’s willingness to take a lesser job or return to school.

“There is still this heavy cultural message that men should be out there earning money and supporting themselves, and they feel more distressed by losing their breadwinner role,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. “We’ve made much more progress overcoming the ‘feminine mystique’ than this masculine mystique.”

While these roles evolve, community colleges are reporting record enrollment.

Both men and women are going back to school, but the growth in enrollment is significantly larger for women (who dominated college campuses even before the financial crisis). In the last two years, the number of women ages 18 to 24 in school rose by 130,000, compared with a gain of 53,000 for young men.

The education gap aside, in some ways young women will already have an advantage over men in the coming decade. Many of the occupations expected to have the most growth, like home health aides and dental hygienists, have traditionally been filled by women. That is not to say that men cannot take those positions, but they may not want to.

“Today young girls are told they can do anything, go into any occupation. But if boys express any interest in traditionally female occupations, they get teased and bullied,” Ms. Coontz said. “Lots of guys are not understanding what’s happening to traditional low-income or middle-income male jobs.”

Jobs in the male-dominated manufacturing industry and in other sectors involving manual labor have been, and still are, in structural decline. These careers can also be hard to maintain indefinitely because youthful strength eventually fades. And now many manufacturing workers do not have pensions to carry them through when their bodies do break down.

“It doesn’t surprise me that in a poor economy women are ramping up their schooling,” said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization. “The real question is: Why aren’t more men doing that too?”

The main risk in going back to school is the accompanying student loan debt. Tuition increases have been outpacing inflation for years, a trend accelerated by state budget cuts.

“Our funding per student has been cut 25 percent in the last three years,” said Stephen Scott, the president of Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, N.C., which is one of the fastest-growing community colleges in the country. Consequently, class sizes have risen, and so has tuition. But the students — again, mostly women — still pour in.

“We now have 6,000 students on a waiting list because we didn’t have the resources to offer more classes,” he said.

Those attending more expensive private schools, like Ms. Baker, will have an even tougher time guaranteeing that their educational investment pays off. Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.

“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”

via the NYTimes Economix blog

We at Economix have been fairly persistent in demonstrating why college is worth it. Say it together, now: you are overwhelmingly likely to earn more.

A new study from the Census Bureau confirms that the more education you get, the better off you are. A worker with a professional degree will receive median annual earnings nearly four times those of a worker with just a high school diploma, for example, and 87 percent higher than those of workers with bachelor’s degrees. (A post by our colleagues at SchoolBook also looks at the findings.)

But though the study concludes that education is the most important determinant of future earnings, the impact of demographic factors is still significant among those with comparable education levels. And even discounting other considerations, the gender gap is striking.

The Census study, by Tiffany A. Julian and Robert A. Kominski, looked at lifetime earnings for a typical worker from 25 to 64, and came up with estimates measured in 2008 dollars.

Among full-time, year-round workers, white men with professional degrees make nearly 49 percent more in lifetime earnings than white women with a comparable education level. The gender gap is narrower for blacks with professional degrees: black men with professional degrees earn 24 percent more in lifetime earnings than their female counterparts.

That gap is still pronounced at the bachelor’s degree level, where white men working full time and year round earn 40 percent more than white women with the same level of education. Black men with bachelor’s degrees earn 13 percent more than black women who also hold bachelor’s degrees.

Hispanic women appeared at the biggest disadvantage. Among those full-time, year-round workers with professional degrees, white men make 104 percent more than Hispanic women over their working lifetimes.

While we wait for this morning’s jobs report, I wanted to make a quick point about the labor market. The fact that men have been faring better in the recovery — since 2009 — has been getting some attention lately. The Washington Post had a front-page article on the subject Thursday, based partly on a Pew Research Center report. Catherine Rampell has come up with my favorite term for the trend: the economic he-covery.

I do think it’s important to point out that this downturn — the recession combined with the weak recovery — has still been far tougher on men than women. That is, men haven’t outperformed women in the recovery nearly as much as men underperformed women in the recession.

Here are the relative changes in employment rates since the recession began, in late 2007:

And here are the changes in inflation-adjusted pay for full-time workers:

Of course, these changes haven’t been nearly enough to close the gap between the sexes: Men remain more likely to work, and more highly paid, than women. Slightly more than 67 percent of men 20 or older were employed in May, compared with 55.2 percent of women. The median weekly pay of full-time male workers, 25 or older, was $880 in the first quarter of this year, compared with $716 for female workers.

By DAVID LEONHARDT, NYTimes Economix Blog

Check out this fantastic interactive map of adults with college degrees! You can filter data by gender, race, income, and county. The added bonus: you can animate the map to see trends from 1940-2009.

Adults with college degrees, 2005-2009

Hispanic adults with college degrees, 2005-2009

via Sociologial Images

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes a cool chart on the gender pay gap for full-time jobs, sorted by industry:

Over all, women who worked full-time in wage and salary jobs had median weekly earnings of $657 in 2009. That’s 80 percent of what their male counterparts earned. But as you can see from the chart above, there’s a lot of variation depending on the industry.

Each dot in the chart represents an industry, and the dot size represents how many people that industry employs. If a dot is farther to the right, it means that there is greater pay parity between the sexes. The construction sector, for example, has relatively little difference in the typical pay received by men and women: Women earn 92.2 cents on the dollar of what men earn.

Additionally, a dot that is further up on the graph means that the typical job in that industry pays more money. Mining, quarrying and oil/gas extraction is far up on the chart, for example, indicating that the women who work in this sector are paid relatively well (median weekly earnings of $873).

Remember, though, that these figures are grouped by industry and not by occupation. Some of the gap within any given industry could be explained by the different types of jobs that men and women may go into, either by choice or opportunity (e.g., if they’re secretaries versus managers).

For more on this subject, there is a map of the gender wage gap by state; a look at how wage gap breaks down depending on how many hours an employee works, since part-time female workers actually earn more than their male counterparts; and a chart showing that the gender wage gap is smaller for younger workers.

By CATHERINE RAMPELL
NYTimes Economix Blog

December 29, 2010
Working (Part-Time) in the 21st Century, NY Times
By KATRIN BENNHOLD

UTRECHT, NETHERLANDS — Remco Vermaire is ambitious and, at 37, the youngest partner in his law firm. His banker clients expect him on call constantly — except on Fridays, when he looks after his two children.

Fourteen of the 33 lawyers in Mr. Vermaire’s firm work part time, as do many of their high-powered spouses. Some clients work part time, too.

“Working four days a week is now the rule rather than the exception among my friends,” said Mr. Vermaire, the first man in his firm to take a “daddy day” in 2006. Within a year, all the other male lawyers with small children had followed suit.

For reasons that blend tradition and modernity, three in four working Dutch women work part time. Female-dominated sectors like health and education operate almost entirely on job-sharing as even childless women and mothers of grown children trade income for time off. That has exacted an enduring price on women’s financial independence.

But in just a few years, part-time work has ceased being the prerogative of woman with little career ambition, and become a powerful tool to attract and retain talent — male and female — in a competitive Dutch labor market.

Indeed, for a growing group of younger professionals, the appetite for a shorter, a more flexible workweek appears to be spreading, with implications for everything from gender identity to rush-hour traffic.

There are part-time surgeons, part-time managers and part-time engineers. From Microsoft to the Dutch Economics Ministry, offices have moved into “flex-buildings,” where the number of work spaces are far fewer than the staff who come and go on schedules tailored around their needs.

The Dutch culture of part-time work provides an advance peek at the challenges — and potential solutions — that other nations will face as well in an era of a rapidly changing work force.

“Our part-time experience has taught us that you can organize work in a rhythm other than nine-to-five,” said Pia Dijkstra, a member of Parliament and well-known former news anchor who led a task force on how to encourage women to work more. “The next generation,” she added, is “turning our part-time culture from a weakness into a strength.”

On average, men still increase their hours when they have children. But with one in three men now either working part time or squeezing a full-time job into four days, the “daddy day” has become part of Dutch vocabulary.

“From our conservative Dutch philosophy about motherhood comes this urgent wish to spend more time with the family,” said Karien van Gennip, a former trade minister who runs private banking and investment at ING.

Ms. Van Gennip has felt the change, and its almost accidental nature, firsthand. In 2004, to fierce criticism from Dutch media, she was the first cabinet member pregnant in office. In 2011, her bank is phasing in the second stage of replacing employees’ personal computers with laptops fully equipped for remote work.

“For a long time our part-time culture looked backwards,” she said. “Now that is changing because it has taken us closer to what everybody is looking for: work-life balance.”

Wouter Bos, a former finance minister and now four-day-a-week partner at the accounting firm KPMG, concurs: “More men want time with the family, but without giving up their careers. And more women want careers, but without giving up too much time with the family.”

He predicts “a huge fight” for the best workers, with flexibility the key.

The Netherlands once sought to keep women at home. Between 1904 and 1940, 12 different bills banned various categories of married women from paid work, perpetuating the tradition of domestic motherhood. If a woman wanted to work, a Dutch joke went, she had to become a nun.

The first part-time jobs for married women came with early labor shortages in the 1950s. But it wasn’t until 1996 that the government gave part-time employees equal status with full timers; in 2000 came the statutory right to determine work hours.

Seventy-five percent of Dutch women now work part time, compared to 41 percent in other European Union countries and 23 percent in the United States, according to Saskia Keuzenkamp at the Netherlands Institute for Social Research. Twenty-three percent of Dutch men have reduced hours, compared to 10 percent across the European Union and in the United States; another nine percent work a full week in four days.

When Jan Henk van der Velden, one of Mr. Vermaire’s law firm partners, joined 21 years ago, there were no female partners and no man would have dared ask to work part time. Today, six of the nine partners do. It works because the lawyers are flexible — when Mr. Vermaire has a court hearing on a Friday, for example, he swaps with his wife, who is normally off Mondays.

Of the 85 specialists at the Ziekenhuis Amstelland hospital south of Amsterdam, 31 are female and two-thirds work part time. Some surgeons even train part time, meaning a daily struggle to unify treatment of patients by several doctors.

“This would have been unthinkable even 10 years ago,” said Jacques Moors, the hospital’s chairman. “But if we insisted on full-time surgeons we would have a personnel problem: Three in four of our junior doctors are female.”

In male-dominated fields, the picture is more mixed. After Martina Dopper, a civil engineer at the company Ballast Nedam, requested a three-day week in 2007, she was given to understand that part time meant no promotion.

This month, however, she was promoted. “I hope this means more of my male colleagues will get an opportunity to spend more time with their families,” she said. So far, her own husband, also an engineer, does not dare for fear of jeopardizing his career.

Dutch fathers are becoming more vocal. A crop of recent books and Web sites advise men on combining career with family. Last year, a women’s magazine, Lof, set up the “Working Dad Prize,” which went to a man who won a court case against his employer enforcing his right to work part time.

The government awarded its own “Modern Man Prize” for breaking gender stereotypes. Rutger Groot Wassink won for co-founding a campaign that promotes part-time work for men — and for working four days a week himself. “Men have been excluded from this debate for too long,” said Mr. Wassink, noting a poll showing that 65 percent of Dutch fathers would like to work less.

Part-time work imposes its own rigidities. When so ubiquitous, part-time work “locks many people in,” said Janneke Platenga, professor of economics at Utrecht University. “When everyone at your daycare center works part time, do you really want to send your child five days a week and have him taken care of by several different teachers?”

At the Olefantje daycare center in Utrecht, only a handful of some 120 children come five days a week. Most teachers work four days, some three. One, Mary Chisham, takes pride in doing without daycare: she has her son Fridays, her husband, a car salesman, Mondays, and the other three days the grandparents are in charge.

“Three days is the maximum a child should spend in daycare,” she said, a view echoed in dozens of interviews with women and men.

The Netherlands may be famously liberal — marijuana is tolerated and prostitutes can join a union — but traditional gender stereotypes are strong, and for years, a labor code that empowered employees to reduce their hours has reinforced them by encouraging women to take time off during their child-bearing years.

At 70 percent, Dutch female employment is high — but Dutch women work on average no more than 24 hours a week. They earn 27 percent less than men and 57 percent are considered financially dependent, earning less than 70 percent of the gross minimum wage, or €997 a month — the equivalent of $1,300. Only four of 20 members of the current cabinet are female and 60 percent of the companies listed on the Amsterdam Euronext have no women on their boards.

According to Ellen de Bruin, the author of “Why Dutch Women Don’t Get Depressed,” Dutch women don’t seem to mind too much. She notes that 96 percent of Dutch part timers tell pollsters they do not want to work more; the Netherlands is that rare country where — even taking housework and child care into account — women work less than men.

A 2006 study showed that only 16 percent of Dutch urban women aim to reach the top and just 10 percent would sacrifice family time for a career. “We always rank low in the gender equality rankings,” said Ms. de Bruin, a journalist, “ but we rank high on happiness.”

“Spoiled princesses” is what commentator Elma Drayer calls her Dutch sisters: “Women should behave like grownups, men do it, too. At least they should be financially independent.”

More and more Dutch companies promote flexible work hours. In Tilburg, near the Belgian border, Radboud van Hal leads talent recruitment at Achmea, the largest Dutch insurance company. He has breakfast and dinner with his family, and plays soccer on Wednesday afternoons. He still works a 40-hour week.

“I work from home in the mornings and travel to work when the roads are clear,” he said. At his 19-story office building, employees have smart phones, laptops and lockers but no designated desk. The present seven work spaces for every 10 staff members will drop to six next year.

Indeed, working flexibly does not always mean working less. At Dutch Microsoft headquarters in Schiphol, Ineke Hoekman, head of human resources and mother of two, used to work part time. But in 2008, when the company moved into a space without designated work stations and employees were told to work “anywhere, any time,” she gradually went back to full time. Her team lives with Friday conference calls from her son’s soccer practice.

Aspects of this “new world of work” concept have been exported to other Microsoft offices, including Norway, France and Australia — though not yet to U.S. headquarters — but the flexibility remains broadest in the Netherlands.

Ninety-five percent of Dutch Microsoft employees work from home at least one day a week; a full quarter do so four out of five days. Each team has a “physical minimum;” some meet twice a week in the office, others once a quarter. Online communication and conference calls save time, fuel and paper waste. The company says it has cut its carbon footprint by 900 tons this year.

Even in the Netherlands, this remains the exception — but it is gaining ground. In a 24-hour world, flexibility and job sharing are inevitable, said Martijn de Wildt, chief executive of the human resource consultancy Qidos.

“Part time is an obsolete concept,” he said. “But so is full time.”