Women will become, in the next few months, the majority of the American workforce, passing the 50% threshold, according to The Economist‘s Dec. 30, 2009 issue. Here are a few items from the article highlighting this accomplishment, and pointing out the challenges.
High points:
Women run many of the world’s great companies, e.g. PepsiCo in the United States and Areva in France.
There is a demand for female brains. Woman are a majority of professional workers in the U.S.
Women make up the majority of university graduates; by 2011 there will be 2.6 million more female than male university students in America.
Challenges:
Only 2% of the bosses of America’s largest companies are women.
Women continue to be paid significantly less than men, on average. In America, childless women earn almost as much as men, but mothers earn significantly less.
The U.S. is the only rich country that refuses to provide mothers with paid maternity leave.
Read the entire Women and Work: We did it! article. Two additional articles in that issue look more closely at Female Power: Women in the Workplace and Womenomics: Feminist Management Theories.
It has always seemed strange to me that business, which otherwise is obsessed with efficiency, would voluntarily, and with forethought, deliberately undervalue and underutilize as much as one-half of one of its resources. With a new majority hopefully the paradigm will continue to shift to equality.
“Women’s economic empowerment is arguably the biggest social change of our times,” says The Economist. “Societies that try to resist this trend will pay a heavy price in the form of wasted talent and frustrated citizens.”
Steve Lange
Palo Alto Software
I guess this isn’t really news, because it’s pretty much what everybody expected. But still: The ADP National Employment report came out again today. The part that interests me most, the small business portion, shows yet another 284,000 jobs lost last month in the small-business portion of the economy–businesses with fewer than 50 employees.
That’s the worst yet. The number was 270,000 for February, and 232,000 the month before that.
How bad is it? I downloaded historical data to produce this a chart of small-business job growth and loss over the last 24 months:
You can click to get a larger view of that. The hard-to-read vertical axis shows job loss or gain in thousands, with a high of 78,000 jobs gained in November of 2007, and a low of 284,000 jobs lost last month.
Joel Prakken, chairman of macroeconomic advisors, said:
“Despite some recent indications that stock prices, consumer spending and housing activity may be bottoming out, employment, which usually trails overall economic activity, is likely to remain very weak for at least several more months.”
Here’s a good news angle on more bad news: In his post last Friday, Steve King of Small Business Labs suggests that we may be hitting bottom.
The February jobs numbers were not good, with non-farm employment falling 651,000 jobs and the unemployment rate increasing to 8.1percent. And according to the ADP Employment Report, small businesses cut 251,000 of those jobs.
But the good news is job losses do not appear to be accelerating. The U.S. economy lost 681,000 jobs in December and 655,000 in January.
March will likely be another bad month, but the economy should see some benefits from the stimulus package beginning in the second quarter. Modest, middle-class tax cuts will start and government hiring should go up due to federal hiring increases and state and local hiring stabilizing due to stimulus money.
King based that on the ADP Employment Report, which I’ve been following on this blog for the past few months as it went up in September and then fell every month since.
On the other hand–and good news seems to come with an “other hand” these days–ADP reports another 262,000 jobs lost last month in small business, and that’s compared to 175,000 lost the month before. But–these things are rarely that simple–both of those figures were better than the 281,000 jobs lost in December.
I think we’re all tired of all the successively bad news. What a relief to see the stock market finally go up for a couple of days, although I hope it doesn’t get jinxed and go down today.
Honestly, I wasn’t paying much attention to these ADP reports until the downturn really went sour last September. I posted on them a couple of times when small business employment grew, slightly, in the midst of bad news almost everywhere else. And now it seems like cheating if I don’t keep up with it, as the bad news rolls in.
Small businesses lost 281,000 jobs in December. That was 80,000 in manufacturing and 201,000 in services. By the way, ADP defines small business as having fewer than 50 employees. That works for me.
The source document is at www.ADPemploymentreport.com.
I downloaded some statistics as an Excel file available from that site. It turns out that goods-producing small businesses have lost more than half a million jobs since the high point of January of 2007, when they employed 8.1 million people. Service sector small businesses have lost more than half a million jobs since their high point of just last April 2008, when they employed 43 million people.
What’s surprising to me, also, is that this new data isn’t surprising. I’m not sure I’m going to continue to post these monthly results. I don’t want to be predictable.
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