More Jobs Context

Heather Boushey on some lesser-known elements of the jobs report:

The share of the U.S. population with a job is now at 59.9 percent, which is lower than any time since 1985. This is especially striking since so many women have entered the labor market since then. The fall off in the employment rate has been larger among men than women, and there are fewer men at work than at any point since the BLS began tabulating this data after World War II: 68.2 percent of U.S. men age 20 and over had a job in March, down 4.1 percentage points from a year ago. Among women, 56.8 percent had a job in March, down from 1.4 percentage points from a year ago. The unemployment rate for men aged 20 and over was 8.8 percent in March, while it was 7.0 percent for women—a difference of 1.8 percentage points, which is larger than at other time since 1949. [...]

Nominal wages grew at an annualized rate of 2.8 percent last quarter. The Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers fell by 0.5 percent from February 2008 to February 2009, so workers are taking home more in inflation-adjusted terms compared to a year ago. But with hours dropping and jobs being loss, this isn’t much of a silver lining, and it is unlikely to persist.

It’s interesting to speculate as to whether we might not emerge from this recession with a less gender-skewed division of labor between employment and household tasks. I would imagine that at the moment we’re looking at a record number of married couples in which the wife is employed and the husband is not.