Women are a growing part of the American workforce. In the last 25 years, the number of working women has grown by 44.2 percent, while 59.4 percent of working-age women are currently in the labor force. Sixty percent of women are the primary or co-bread winner for their household.

But despite those historic numbers, most women are still left doing the majority of the house work.

A new report out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics details how both men and women spend their days, and it comes as no surprise that women do a larger portion of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and other chores:

On an average day, 83 percent of women and 65 percent of men spent some time doing household activities such as housework, cooking, lawn care, or financial and other household management.

On the days that they did household activities, women spent an average of 2.6 hours on such activities, while men spent 2.1 hours.

On an average day, 19 percent of men did housework–such as cleaning or doing laundry–compared with 48 percent of women. Forty percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 66 percent of women.

The numbers can be in part explained by the women who don’t work or who have part-time jobs. But the disproportionate burden of housework on women shows that a “second shift” still exists for those who work. While women have earned more rights in the office place (though they still aren’t fairly paid for their work), there is still the burden for them to be the primary housekeepers and caretakers.

When an aspiring rocket scientist abandons ship to join a hedge fund, how much does it actually cost society?

In its annual report, the Bank of International Settlements points to a recent study that attempts to measure the societal cost of a growing financial sector. The study found that the financial industry — which continues to lure top college graduates — hampers productivity and growth in manufacturing sectors that are R&D-intensive, especially when finance booms.

The conventional wisdom is that a robust financial system fueled by young geniuses distributes capital and improves overall economic growth, but according to the study:

The financial industry competes for resources with the rest of the economy. It requires not only physical capital, in the form of buildings, computers and the like, but highly skilled workers as well. Finance literally bids rocket scientists away from the satellite industry. The result is that erstwhile scientists, people who in another age dreamt of curing cancer or flying to Mars, today dream of becoming hedge fund managers. [...]

While they are booming, these industries draw in resources at a phenomenal rate. It is only when they crash, after the bust, that we realize the extent of the over-investment that occurred. Too many companies were formed, with too much capital invested and too many people employed. Importantly, after the fact, we can see that many of these resources should have gone elsewhere.

That many top grads from elite universities eschew science and engineering for Wall Street is well known. Even after the crisis, finance remained the most popular career path for 2011 Harvard graduates. And at Princeton, an astonishing 35.9 percent of 2011′s class were coaxed by the large salaries that finance offers.

But when the financial sector grows, essential industries that are also skilled-labor-intensive — computing, aircraft, engineering, and the like — are disproportionately harmed by the Wall Street brain drain and the competition for financial resources.

– Steven Perlberg

(HT: FT Alphaville)

As ThinkProgress has noted, the city of Glendale, Arizona, has laid of public sector workers and cut social services in order to hand millions of dollars to the Phoenix Coyotes, its National Hockey League franchise. The Coyotes are currently owned by the league itself, after the team declared bankruptcy, and the city had pledged $15 million per year over 20 years to any future owner.

As if that weren’t bad enough, the Arizona Republic reported that the city considered offering both its city hall and its police station as collateral for a loan in order to cover payments to the NHL (and payments related to a baseball spring training stadium in the city):

Glendale officials this week considered offering up City Hall and the main police station as collateral to obtain a $41 million loan to cover sports-related debts.

The city would use the money to cover payments to the National Hockey League and potentially to make payments on Camelback Ranch stadium, the city’s spring-training ballpark.

Glendale officials acknowledged the proposal wouldn’t bring the city any savings. [...]

The City Council on Tuesday decided there were too many unknowns for staffers to proceed with the plan now.

A referendum that would cut the support the city has pledged to the Coyotes could appear on the ballot in November, so the city shelved its plan to offer the buildings as collateral. Meanwhile, Glendale is far from the only city facing a professional sports related budget boondoggle: in five others, teams want taxpayer money to publicly finance stadiums, even though such structures rarely deliver on their economic promise.

Ten current and former employees of the United States Postal Service (USPS) today launched a multi-day hunger strike to protest branch closures and layoffs that are supposedly meant to address the service’s shortfalls. At the center of the protest is a law passed by Congress that is responsible for the Postal Service’s ongoing budget problems.

The USPS will start closing 48 mail processing plants in July, and by the time current plans are completed in 2014, it will have closed or consolidated 229 plants, eliminating 28,00 jobs in the process. Those cuts likely wouldn’t have to take place, however, if Congress reversed a law it passed in 2006 mandating that the USPS prefund its pension benefits for 75 years, costing the postal service billions of dollars a year, as CNN Money notes:

They also want Congress to eliminate a mandate that has been a major financial drag on the service — annual $5.5 billion payments to prefund health care benefits for future retirees. The strikers say say eliminating the mandate would solve the Postal Service’s financial problems.

“That payment is causing great hardship to the Postal Service,” said Nannette Corley, a Maryland mail clerk for the past 19 years who is taking unpaid leave to join the hunger strike. “We are the people. What is it that Congress wants us to do? Starve and make everybody homeless?”

Under the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA), which was passed by a Republican-led Congress in 2006, the Postal Service is forced to prefund its retiree pension and health programs for the next 75 years in just a 10-year window. That’s a requirement that doesn’t exist for any other government agency or private corporation, and without it, USPS would actually face a $1.5 billion surplus instead of a $20 billion shortfall.

Massachusetts Rep. Steven Lynch (D) introduced bipartisan legislation in April 2011 that would allow USPS to pay down its debts instead of prefunding the pension plan, but it never even saw a vote in committee.

According to an analysis by the pay research group Equilar, compensation for top bank CEOs grew by nearly 12 percent last year. The Financial Times noted that these increases occurred “despite widespread falls in profits and share prices“:

Top US and European bankers, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, have enjoyed double-digit annual pay rises averaging almost 12 per cent, despite widespread falls in profits and share prices, Financial Times research shows. [...]

The analysis of total pay awarded to 15 bank chiefs by Equilar, a US pay research group, shows they received an average 11.9 per cent pay rise last year to $12.8m, the second increase in a row. However, the pace of growth has slowed.

Bankers such as Brian Moynihan at Bank of America, Citigroup’s Mr Pandit and JPMorgan’s Mr Dimon enjoyed the largest gains.

According to a different estimate by Bloomberg News, Wall Street CEO pay grew by 20 percent last year. At the same time, worker wages grew by only 2.1 percent. And inflation adjusted wages actually declined by 0.6 percent between March 2011 and March 2012.

At the moment, in fact, wages as a percentage of the economy are near all-time lows:

Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay.

Last November, 60 Minutes aired a report showing that House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus (R-AL) made tens of thousands of dollars trading stock as he was receiving private economic briefings during the height of the 2008 financial crisis. Due to weak insider trading rules, Bachus was cleared of any legal wrongdoing by the Congressional Ethics Committee, but the case still motivated Congress to pass the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which supposedly prevents lawmakers from profiting off information they receive in private briefings with top economic officials.

However, the problem may go far beyond just Bachus. As the Washington Post reported on Monday, 34 lawmakers — including Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) — shuffled their investment portfolios during the financial crisis, after speaking to high-ranking economic officials:

Boehner is one of 34 members of Congress who took steps to recast their financial portfolios during the financial crisis after phone calls or meetings with [Treasury Secretary Hank] Paulson; his successor, Timothy F. Geithner; or Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, according to a Washington Post examination of appointment calendars and congressional disclosure forms.

The lawmakers, many of whom held leadership positions and committee chairmanships in the House and Senate, changed portions of their portfolios a total of 166 times within two business days of speaking or meeting with the administration officials. The party affiliation of the lawmakers was about evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, 19 to 15.

After speaking with Paulson, Boehner shifted $50,000 to $100,000 out of a risky mutual fund, and spent tens of thousands of dollars more on a less-risky fund. Other lawmakers who were making investment decisions after receiving private information at the time included Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE). The lawmakers contend that their investments are overseen by outside advisers and that the private information had no bearing on their portfolio moves.

The STOCK Act would not have prevented this sort of trading, according to the Post. “If this was going on in the private sector or it was going on in the executive branch, I think the SEC would be investigating,” said University of Minnesota securities law Prof. Richard Painter. While the trades were permissible for members of Congress, members of the executive branch could not legally have made the same trades.

At the time it passed, the STOCK Act faced criticism for being too weak. And if dozens of members could trade securities as they received private information about the extent of the economy’s troubles, perhaps that is the case.