About 

Women Now Comprise Half the U.S. Workforce

Kay Kohl, UCEA Chief Executive Officer
UCEA InFocus, October/November 2009 (PDF)

Two-thirds of American women with children under six work outside the home today. Women account for half of the workers on employers’ payrolls. Their earnings have become central to their families’ well-being. The television Leave It to Beaver model family which depicted a father as sole breadwinner and mother as homemaker is obsolete. Only one in five U.S. families with children is characterized by a traditional male breadwinner and a stay-at-home mom. Meanwhile public policymakers as well as many higher education institutions have been slow to take account of this structural change in the American family.

The Recession's Impact on Jobs

The current Recession has served to “amplify and accelerate” fundamental changes in the American family, according to a recent study by Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress. For instance, since the Recession began in December 2007, women wage earners at every economic level have become more important because three out of four of the jobs lost in the current economic downturn were held by men. The loss of some two million manufacturing jobs during the past 24 months has foreshadowed a remaking of the American economy, with the future being one with fewer jobs in manufacturing and a growth in the service sector. It is necessary to revise our image of manufacturing jobs. “Old-time assembly lines populated by millions of blue-collar workers ... no longer describes most manufacturing,” according to Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary. Technology is to blame. Instead of an assembly line, new manufacturing jobs are likely to involve a couple of workers sitting in front of a computer screen and instructing robots. 

An Expanding Service Sector

Women have been less vulnerable to job loss because they are disproportionately employed in the service sector. Working women still tend to cluster in the traditional female majors—that is the “helping professions” in health care and education. Moreover professional and continuing higher education units are major providers of their ongoing education, and working women in the helping professions are a principal constituency of many CE units.

The fact that women now outnumber men earning undergraduate degrees can be traced to the large enrollment of non-traditional women students—re-entry women, financially independent traditional-age students, single mothers, career changers. A baccalaureate degree has come to be viewed as the entry point to a professional position offering opportunities for advancement. While women comprise half of today’s workforce and are more educated than ever before, they still earn less than me—on average 77 cents on the dollar. It is often attributed to the fact that women tend to self-segregate by choosing lower paying occupations. This raises the question as to whether college and university professional and continuing education units might not do a lot more to encourage women to consider engineering and the sciences at a time when many societal challenges such as climate change, public health, and infrastructure development require individuals with scientific and technical expertise. Online education has been a substantial boon to many working men and women eager to boost their educational credentials. However, not all curricula lend themselves to delivery in an online format, especially engineering and the sciences. Part-time engineering degrees, such as those offered by the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, and affordable on-campus child care, such as that available at Utah State University, respond to the needs of non-traditional students trying to juggle a job, child care and studies.

In the majority of families, mothers with children are now in the workforce as either primary breadwinners or co-breadwinners. At the same time, structural changes in the economy mean that earning a postsecondary degree has become ever more important for both men and women. In this context, it is high time for both government and higher education institutions to update their models to take account of these fundamental changes in American life.