To follow up on last week’s post showing how women are still more likely to be working multiple jobs than men (both among the employed and among their total populations), here’s a reminder that not all women are the same. Let’s look at multiple jobholders as a share of employed, across race and age categories.
Black women are substantially more likely to hold multiple jobs than any other race categories of women. Notably, while multiple jobholding fell for all groups in the spring when unemployment peaked (and number of overall jobs in the economy cratered), multiple jobholding as share of employed has already (as of September) returned to a “normal” level for Black women but not for other women.By age categories, the youngest of working women (ages 20-24) have always been the most likely to hold multiple jobs, because they are most likely to have to piece together multiple part-time jobs (often in the leisure/hospitality sector) to make a living. These women were most likely to lose at least one of their multiple jobs at the start of the pandemic, and regain work as businesses reopened in the summer.
There are many factors that could explain the differences by race, probably most significantly that Black women are more likely to be sole earners in their households (as well as single parents) yet also more likely to earn lower hourly wages. The different trends by age reflect that multiple part-time jobs are often the closest a young adult (even a college-educated one) can come to a full-time job–and that the human-service-intensive jobs many young women work in were the ones that disappeared the most at the start of the pandemic and have not and will not likely fully come back even when the public health crisis eventually wanes. The Pandemic Recession — or “She-cession”– has not just been hard on women because of the severity of the lowest depths of job loss experienced, but because it’s really “jerked around” the women who were already the most economically vulnerable.
Last summer –as in all the way back in 2019–I wrote this post about how multiple jobholding had become more common in the labor force overall and how this seemed to be a “new normal” for the (very strong 2019) economy–something no longer limited to recessionary times when people might be forced to piece together several smaller jobs when they couldn’t get a full-time job. I underscored my finding that multiple jobholding was becoming especially more prevalent among working women, and I hypothesized on some reasons why, including: (i) women need multiple jobs to add up to the pay of one job (because women typically earn less than men); (ii) women choose to work multiple jobs to add up to the hours of one full-time job–yet with the greater flexibility/control over work schedule that multiple part-time jobs allow; and (iii) women often choose to “work” not to maximize earnings but for personal fulfillment, which often calls for a variety of work whether paid or underpaid or unpaid, rather than just one job.
In 2019 all these reasons were already, in the slow-but-steady recovery from the Great Recession, becoming part of the “new normal” of an economy and labor market increasingly dominated by women. Last week I learned of this new Census analysis based on a new measure of multiple jobholding:
We create a measure of multiple jobholding from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics data. This new series shows that 7.8 percent of persons in the U.S. are multiple jobholders, this percentage is pro-cyclical, and has been trending upward during the past twenty years. The data also show that earnings from secondary jobs are, on average, 27.8 percent of a multiple jobholder’s total quarterly earnings. Multiple jobholding occurs at all levels of earnings, with both higher- and lower-earnings multiple jobholders earning more than 25 percent of their total earnings from multiple jobs. These new statistics tell us that multiple jobholding is more important in the U.S. economy than we knew.
“A New Measure of Multiple Jobholding in the U.S. Economy,” by Keith A. Bailey and James R. Spletzer, Working Paper #CES-20-26, September 2020.
So the Census researchers conclude that multiple jobholding is pro-cyclical (no longer just a “make ends meet in hard economic times” phenomenon), has been rising in prevalence over the past 20 years (not even just since the Great Recession), and “is more important in the U.S. economy than we knew.” They might as well have said that the role of women in the workforce, and how women choose to work, is more important than we knew.
This prompted me to go back to my summer 2019 blog post and update the data through September 2020 (the latest monthly employment statistics from household survey data) to see what the past year looks like in terms of multiple jobholding and its prevalence among workers overall and men vs. women. Here are some charts that look at multiple jobholding as share of people who are employed, in the workforce (“labor force” meaning employed or unemployed/looking for work), and relative to total population–and then comparing each of the three shares for men vs. women. All charts show BLS unadjusted monthly household employment survey data for populations age 16+, from January 2018 through September 2020:
Shares of total (men+women) population measures: Overall, multiple jobholding dropped dramatically from February to April 2020 at the start of the Pandemic Recession as the number of jobs in the overall economy plummeted, and as of September is still below what had been the “new normal.”As share of total employed, comparing men (blue) vs. women (orange). Note that multiple jobholding in the recovery (thus far) from the Pandemic Recession first rose for both men and women, but since July has decreased among working men while increasing among working women.As share of those in the labor force, we see basically the same story as among those employed; since July, women’s multiple jobholding has increased while men’s has decreased.And even as a share of their total population, women are more likely to be multiple jobholders than are men.
In summary, we see that multiple jobholding has come down and then back up during the pandemic, along with jobs and employment in general. Women still juggle a lot of jobs, whether paid work in the labor market or unpaid work at home. Even as workers have lost some of their multiple jobs and have yet to fully regain them, we see that multiple jobholding is a significant phenomenon in the U.S. economy and one that is not necessarily a bad thing if it has made it easier for workers–especially working women–to better tailor their work opportunities to their personal circumstances and preferences. Women have always chosen multiple part-time jobs so that work fits into the rest of their lives better, even pre-pandemic. With the pandemic placing only more burdens and constraints on women’s time (with kids and elderly parents to care for), multiple jobholding will become an even more important way for women to stay connected to the workforce. But multiple part-time jobs have never added up to the level of economic reward one can get from one full-time job–whether it be in the form of wages or benefits (such as subsidized health insurance, childcare assistance, and paid leave). Women are too easily relegated to “secondary earner” status (read: “you should be the one to stay at home now”) which makes it too common for them to disengage from market work when family circumstances change. The way women juggle their different jobs at home and at work will require a lot more attention and focus from economic policymakers if we want our economy to not just “survive” this pandemic recession but to actually “thrive” over the longer term.
10/22/20: Belated UPDATE through September data to charts below, originally shared on Twitter here. (I’ll make future updates here as well in order to keep in one place where some might look thanks to the new Center for American Progress report by Mike Madowitz and Diana Boesch published today.)
Today the BLS released their monthly “Employment Situation” report –and the report’s underlying data (which you can access here), including numbers on Asian women separated from Asian men which are not included in the report. Here’s a small, mostly quantitative update to my original post (with Mina Kim) from last month. First, the bottom-line/main-story bar chart:
… and below, the updated table with detailed unemployment stats by race and gender:
One thing I decided to adjust in the bar chart and add as note to the table is that April 2020 was when the unemployment rate peaked for the workforce overall as well as for most of the race-gender categories–except that the peak for Asians (both men and women) and for Black women (and Black overall but not Black men) happened in May. So the bar chart compares the absolute change in unemployment rate during the (aftermath of the) Great Recession compared with the change from this February to either April or May–whichever was the worst point for each race-gender category.
Some findings worth highlighting (or repeating):
Asian women fared the best in the Great Recession in that their absolute change in unemployment rate from the start of the recession to peak unemployment was the smallest of all race-gender categories;
From the start of the Pandemic Recession (Feb. 2020) to either peak unemployment in April or May, or to the latest data for September, White men have fared the best (their September unemployment rate is just 2.8 percentage points higher than in February);
Hispanic women fared the worst in the Pandemic Recession through this spring (April)–but up through September, Asian women have seen the largest increase in unemployment (+6.7 percentage points);
While Asian unemployment peaked in May at 16.6% for women and 13.2% for men, both had failed to recover as much as for other race-gender categories through August. Unemployment rates in August were 11.5% for Asian women and 10.0% for Asian men, still higher than they ever got even in the depths of the Great Recession. By September, Asian male unemployment (at 8.0%) was lower than at its peak in the Great Recession, yet Asian female unemployment (at 9.7%) was still higher than at any time in the last recession–and in fact, higher than ever measured in the BLS data.
As I hinted at in my first post on this subject, there are many different possible explanations for why this Pandemic Recession has been so hard on women (it’s the “She-cession”) and Asian women in particular. The intersection of Asian and female provides a uniquely-focused lens into what’s so different about this recession and how it’s affecting all workers through the roles and demands that Asian women just happen to disproportionately represent. To be continued!
