Women are missing out on workers’ newfound bargaining power

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Good morning, Broadsheet readers! The New Yorker goes inside Britney Spears’ conservatorship, Wimbledon found its breakout star, and too many women are still sidelined from the labor force. Have a terrific Tuesday.

– Re-entry woes. Just before the holiday weekend in the U.S., the country got good economic news. The economy added 850,000 jobs in June, t he biggest one-month gain since last summer.

The upbeat report signaled that women are regaining some of the jobs they lost in a crisis that disproportionately hurt female workers. Women accounted for 47.6% of the new jobs added, and 148,000 women re-entered the workforce, meaning they either found work or are actively looking for it.

But the uptick in women’s workforce participation comes with a wrinkle: of those who rejoined the labor force, just 3% had a job, according to analysis from the National Women’s Law Center. Meanwhile, of the 232,000 men who reentered the workforce in June, 88% were employed. NWLC director of research Jasmine Tucker told BI that disparity may be due to sexism and women being penalized for leaving the workforce for caregiving duties.

All told, women’s unemployment rate actually increased last month to 5.5% from 5.4% in May. That’s for all women; 8.5% of Black women and 7.9% of Latinas were jobless last month.

Those figures also mask how many women have left the workforce entirely—meaning they’re not even looking for a job—during the pandemic. If they were accounted for in the unemployment rate, women’s joblessness would be 7.6% instead of 5.5%.

A childcare shortage may be keeping some women from seeking jobs. The childcare sector added 25,000 jobs last month, but the industry still has 115,000 fewer jobs than it did in February 2020, an 11% decline.

As the U.S. Economy stages a rebound, workers are in high demand and employers are offering bonuses and perks to new recruits. Wages have grown modestly, up 3.5% over the year. But it’s important to remember that women still sidelined from the labor force are missing out on the fruits of that bargaining power.

Claire Zillman
[email protected]
@clairezillman

The Broadsheet, Coins2Day’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women, is coauthored by Kristen Bellstrom, Emma Hinchliffe, and Claire Zillman. Today’s edition was curated by Claire Zillman.

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