Why are so many women dropping out of the workforce?
For half a century after World War II, women barreled into the job market in numbers that surged higher every year. They drove most of the rise in real household income for decades and boosted the economy’s total output at a time when men were dropping out of the job market.
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Then, all of a sudden, they stopped. Since 2000, the share of women working in their prime earning years has declined.
In 1948, just over a third of prime-age women had a job or sought one. By 1999, after five decades of unrelenting progress, 76.8 percent of those women were in the workforce.
Since then, the participation rate slipped to 74.3 percent, and the number of women not looking for work grew by more than 12,000.
And it has nothing to do with misogyny.
But top economists now are pointing to another explanation. Women seem to be leaving the workforce for some of the same reasons that men are: Middle-class jobs are in short supply and working at the bottom pays less than it used to.
Single women without children drove most of the downturn in women’s workforce participation from 1999 through 2007, according to a study by professor Robert Moffitt of Johns Hopkins University.