Women Are Leading Gains in the Monthly Jobs Report, But Still Facing Barriers in the Labor Market

Today’s monthly Jobs Report for April from the Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed continued job growth, moderating at a lower level compared to recent months, but at a healthy 175,000 jobs added. Not only has this recovery been more rapid than that of the Great Recession, but the “she-cession” has turned into a recovery led by women. In fact, the household survey, that asks individuals about their employment status, found that women gained all the jobs added in April while men lost jobs. But how far can a tight labor market take women workers who have historically faced significant barriers to full economic integration?

One significant sign of the tight labor market after the height of the pandemic has been a rise in labor market churning – or people changing jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has found historically high job openings, hires, and quits rate in the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey in the past 3 years. In this dynamic labor market, wages between the top and bottom of the distribution have converged at a historic rate. Women and Black workers gained disproportionately: the gender wage gap decreased by 2 percentage points and the Black-white wage gap decreased by 5 percentage points in the last 4 years alone.

Despite the continued good news in monthly Jobs Reports and other economic data, it’s clear that the work is far from over. Despite progress for women, there still is a gender wage gap. There still are racial wage gaps. And the wage gaps facing different groups of women of color is particularly stark. For example, Hispanic women earn only 61.4% of what white men earn as of 2022. For Black women, it’s 67.4%. And while Asian American women are the closest in earning levels to white men, if they got the same returns to white men given what jobs and locations they work in, they should out earn them.

How can a tight labor market still reinforce these persistent disparities? Well, it depends a lot on what jobs women are going into. While overt discrimination still plays a role in whether women get hired and what they get paid, particularly for women of color like Black women and Latina women, women are also more likely to go to work in low paid occupations. The phenomenon known as occupational segregation is one of the biggest factors that maintains the gender wage gap. This is how women’s employment can be high but women still face significant barriers in their long-term economic wellbeing.

While economists and other researchers are still sorting through how occupational segregation may have changed under the labor market churning of the last few years, we can look to previous research for clues on where things might be going. Research has found that many of the types of jobs where women work are those where you’re less likely to change into a different career path. For example, nurses have lower likelihood of changing out of their occupations due to corporate concentration in the healthcare sector, with large consolidated hospital systems, and occupational licensing. It’s also harder for women to make big geographic changes given they are more likely to work in jobs that require occupational licenses, many of which do not transfer across states.

The factors outside women’s work lives also impacts the types of occupations they can go into. Women spend more time on unpaid caregiving in their families, especially when they are parents, and this means they often have fewer work hours. With limitations on work hours, women may find it more difficult to go into occupations with high hours demands, like either management or construction jobs. This reinforces women’s higher levels of part-time work – the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds that 23% of women work part-time compared to 12% of men. This comes with a part-time pay penalty, which is worse for women. Caregiving outside of work limits what women can do for work.

Even with years of job gains and a low unemployment rate, the tight labor market will not solve for structural inequality facing all women, and women of color in particular who face additional barriers. While women gained an estimated 307,000 jobs in April compared to men losing an estimated 282,000 jobs, employment growth alone isn’t sufficient to solve for gender inequality. The fact remains that men have higher employment rates and higher earnings. Until the labor market becomes less segregated, women can still be held back even as they lead the economic recovery.