How Are Women Doing in Post-Recession America?

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You come to Mother Jones for unique journalism, and we love doing it for you. That's it. That's the upshot of our fall fundraising drive, and we're hoping to raise $250,000 in a shorter than normal three-week window so we can keep right on doing it.

The Washington Post reports on job losses among women in the retail industry:

Between October 2016 and October 2017, women who worked in the country’s stores lost 160,300 jobs, while 106,000 men found new work in the field, the analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found. “We’ve seen many news reports of the decline in retail jobs, jobs, but few have noted that the picture in retail is much different for women and men,” researchers at the Washington think tank wrote.

That’s peculiar. But is it a more general phenomenon? Here’s the employment picture for women overall:

Women’s share of the job market has been basically flat ever since 2011. In the past year, their share of the job market has increased slightly. So if women are losing jobs in retail, it must be because they’re moving to jobs in other sectors. Is that a step up or a step down? It turns out that women’s wages have risen slightly more than men’s, but probably not enough to mean anything. Most likely everyone is moving around fairly laterally, rather than into better or worse jobs.