Anybody paying attention to politics lately may have gotten the impression that women are falling behind in the economy. This misconception is just one more reason to tune out politicians.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney recently generated buzz by claiming that women have accounted for 92.3% of all jobs lost since President Barack Obama took office in 2009. That's technically true, given the selective way Romney chose his numbers and the context he chose to leave out. But Romney's startling factoid distorts the role women play in the economy overall, and it especially misrepresents the strides women are likely to make over the next several years -- which will significantly outpace the gains made by men.
Male and female workers tend to be clustered in different industries, which is why they fared differently during the recession. Men dominate fields like construction and manufacturing, which often suffer sharp layoffs early in a downturn. That's why the recession was initially characterized as a "mancession." Women are more prominent in recession-resistant fields, such as health care, education and real estate, where jobs cuts generally came later. As a result, they're enduring more post-recession aftershocks.
Nonetheless, the current unemployment rate among women is 8.1%, compared with 8.3% among men. During the recession, the gap was even greater, favoring women by more than 2 percentage points for many months. The overall trend is likely to persist throughout the recovery. Because women tend to be better educated than men, with more relevant skills, economic power will continue to shift -- as it has for the last 20 years -- toward women. "Women are uniquely positioned to take advantage of jobs in tomorrow's growth industries," Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote in a recent report, "and tend to enjoy stronger earnings growth relative to men."
Women indeed have a striking educational advantage. According to the Department of Education, women will earn 55% of all bachelor's degrees conferred this year, plus 60% of all master's degrees and 53% of all medical degrees. By 2020, those proportions are projected to be even higher. Men today earn a slightly higher portion of professional degrees, such as MBAs, but women will outnumber men in those too by 2020.
Education is still highly correlated with future earnings, despite mitigating factors like some graduates' mounting debt load. So women will get ahead simply by virtue of their knowledge and credentials. Women also tend to have training in those fields projected to grow the most. Merrill Lynch points out that in the fields likely to add the most jobs through 2018 -- including nursing and other medical sectors, accounting and post-secondary teaching -- women have a growing proportion and, in many cases, a majority of the jobs.
Many men, by contrast, work in fields that are shrinking or being dramatically transformed. Construction, for example, could take a decade to recover. Manufacturing has rebounded from the lowest points of the recession, and some analysts think a healthy revival is under way. Even so, the recovery will mostly entail a smaller number of technical jobs, with overall employment levels unlikely to return to the peaks of the 1990s. Meanwhile, big Fortune 500 companies with legions of male gray-flannel-suiters are generally healthy, but they're doing far more of their white-collar hiring overseas than in the United States.
Women face barriers, such as the career disruption caused by having and raising kids, and pay that's still not equal, despite years of gains. Yet women have become an economic force anyway, and policy decisions in Washington have had practically nothing to do with it. In a new book, "The Richer Sex," journalist Liza Mundy predicts that women will soon be the primary breadwinners in the majority of U.S. families, a status that suggests women will increasingly dominate decisions about how money gets spent in America, and therefore how the whole economy evolves. That's likely to happen no matter who's president. But don't tell Mitt Romney.
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