AFSCME Information Highway

OAH Hosts National Collaborative for Women's History Sites
Source: National Collaborative for Women's History Sites, Organization of American Historians

The OAH serves as an online host to the National Collaborative for Women's History Sites (NCWHS) web site. NCWHS supports and promotes the preservation and interpretation of sites and locales that bear witness to women's participation in American life. The Collaborative makes women's contributions to history visible so that all women's experiences and potential are fully valued.

Posted by Info Center at 3:05 PM in Labor History | Websites/Databases/Blogs | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Harvard University Library, Open Collections Program

Women Working, 1800 - 1930 focuses on women's role in the United States economy and provides access to digitized historical, manuscript, and image resources selected from Harvard University's library and museum collections. The collection features approximately 500,000 digitized pages and images including:
• 7,500 pages of manuscripts
• 3,500 books and pamphlets
• 1,200 photographs

Posted by Info Center at 3:03 PM in Labor History | Websites/Databases/Blogs | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Rania Antonopoulos, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Working Paper no. 541, July 2008

From the summary:
In order to provide a coherent perspective of gender differences in the world of work, the many intersections of paid and unpaid work must be brought to light. It is well documented that gender-based wage differentials and occupational segregation continue to characterize the division of labor among men and women in paid work; yet unpaid work in social reproduction, subsistence production, family businesses, and the community is often ignored. When it is taken into account, it is usually done in a very limited manner, equating unpaid work with the traditional roles women play in raising children and performing maintenance chores. Beyond the obvious gender inequalities characterizing the latter, unpaid work constitutes an integral part of any functioning economy, and as such is linked to economic growth, government policy, migration, and many development issues. This paper concludes that the "world of work" cannot be treated in complete disregard to unpaid forms of labor, and gender equality must be understood through the lens of the paid-unpaid work continuum.

Posted by Info Center at 1:53 PM in Family & Work | Workforce | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Heidi Hartmann, Institute for Women's Policy Research, IWPR #B260, Testimony presented to the Joint Economic Committee, May 2008

First, I want to stress that the context of women's employment has changed over time. If women ever worked for "pin money" they certainly no longer do. Women's earnings are a large and critical share of the economic support of families in the United States today: Women's earnings constitute 45 percent of all earnings that support families. The most typical family with children today is one in which both parents are working. That and the large number of families supported by working mothers alone mean that just about as many children have working mothers as have working fathers. Women's earnings are especially important to the support of children who do not live with their fathers. Even though the typical woman who works full-time, year-round earns only about ¾ of what the typical man earns, more than 7 million families with children relied solely or mainly on the mother's earnings in 2006.

Posted by Info Center at 1:29 PM in Economy | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Erica Williams, Institute for Women's Policy Research in partnership with The New York Women's Foundation, June 2008

From the press release:
Women in New York State fare worse economically than they did in 1989, according to The New York Women's Foundation's new report, The Economic Status of Women in New York State.

The report, researched and authored by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), examines how women in New York State fare in two areas: employment and earnings and social and economic autonomy. While the report finds substantial potential for women's economic progress, it also depicts a stark and alarming portrait of poverty in a wealthy society, particularly for women of color.

Posted by Info Center at 1:26 PM in Income Inequality/Gap | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Institute for Women's Policy Research, Press release, 2008

The Institute for Women's Policy Research has found that improving pay equity between women and men would create substantial economic gains for women and their families. IWPR finds that in 2008 dollars the typical woman worker would gain $5,710--an economy-wide gain of a staggering $319 billion--if equal pay were the norm. Over a 35-year working life, the typical woman would gain $210,000.
See also:
Equal Pay for Working Families: National and State Data on the Pay Gap and its Costs, 1999

Posted by Info Center at 1:24 PM in Income Inequality/Gap | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Hannah Riley Bowles, and Kathleen L. McGinn, Harvard Business School NOM Working Paper No. 08-095, May, 13 2008

From the abstract:
We propose a two-level-game perspective on gender in job negotiations. At Level 1, candidates negotiate with the employers. At Level 2, candidates negotiate with domestic partners. In order to illuminate the interplay between these two levels, we review literature from two separate bodies of literature. Research in psychology and organizational behavior on candidate-employer negotiations sheds light on the effects of gender on Level 1 negotiations. Research from economics and sociology on intra-household bargaining elucidates how negotiations over the allocation of domestic labor at Level 2 influence labor force participation at Level 1. In conclusion, we integrate practical implications from these two bodies of literature to propose a set of prescriptive suggestions for candidates to approach job negotiations as a two-level game and to minimize disadvantageous effects of gender on job negotiation outcomes.

Posted by Info Center at 4:56 PM in Family & Work | Working Women | Permalink

Source: National Women's Law Center, 2008

From the summary:
Making the Grade on Women's Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card is the first-ever report card to assess the overall health of women at the national and state levels. The Report Card is designed to promote the health and well-being of women in the United States by providing the most comprehensive assessment to date of women's health.
See also:
Key Findings

Posted by Info Center at 1:32 PM in Health Care | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Delia Furtado, Heinrich Hock, IZA Discussion Paper No. 3506, May 2008

The negative correlation between female employment and fertility in industrialized nations has weakened since the 1960s, particularly in the United States. We suggest that the continuing influx of low-skilled immigrants has led to a substantial reduction in the trade-off between work and childrearing facing American women. The evidence we present indicates that low-skilled immigration has driven down wages in the US child-care sector. More affordable child-care has, in turn, increased the fertility of college graduate native females. Although childbearing is generally associated with temporary exit from the labor force, immigrant-led declines in the price of child-care has reduced the extent of role incompatibility between fertility and work.

Posted by Info Center at 11:14 AM in Child Care Workers | Children | Family & Work | Working Women | Permalink

Source: EBN Industry inBrief, July 10, 2008

Women live an average of 22 years after retirement, compared with just 19 years for men. The longevity difference, combined with the disparity in pay between the sexes, does not portend well for women, according to a new study by Hewitt Associates.

Posted by Info Center at 1:37 PM in Income Inequality/Gap | Retirement | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Maria Fitzpatrick, US Census Bureau Center for Economic Studies, Paper no. CES-WP-08-04, March 01, 2008

Three states (Georgia, Oklahoma and Florida) recently introduced Universal Pre- Kindergarten (Universal Pre-K) programs offering free preschool to all age-eligible children, and policy makers in many other states are promoting similar policies. How do such policies affect the participation of children in preschool programs (or do they merely substitute for preschool offered by the market)? Does the implicit child care subsidy afforded by Universal Pre-K change maternal labor supply? I present a model that includes preferences for child quality and shows the directions of change in preschool enrollment and maternal labor supply in response to Universal Pre-K programs are theoretically ambiguous. Using restricted-access data from the Census, together with year and birthday based eligibility cutoffs, I employ a regression discontinuity framework to estimate the effects of Universal Pre-K availability. Universal Pre-K availability increases preschool enrollment by 12 to 15 percent, with the largest effect on children of women with less than a Bachelor's Degree. Universal Pre-K availability has little effect on the labor supply of most women. However, women residing in rural areas in Georgia increase their children's preschool enrollment and their own employment by 22 and 20 percent, respectively, when Universal Pre-K is available.

Posted by Info Center at 3:20 PM in Children | Education | Family & Work | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Stephanie Luce and Eve Weinbaum, New Labor Forum, Vol. 17, Issue 2, Summer 2008

The labor movement's future success depends on its ability to organize increasing numbers of workers of color and women workers who are concentrated in low-wage jobs. Scholars and activists have focused on questions of how to organize these workers, how to promote women's activism and develop leadership, and how to diversify union staff and leaders to better represent the workers they are organizing. If organizing low-wage women workers is essential, then we need a better understanding of who these women workers are, and what they are doing. Who makes up this low-wage workforce? Where do they work? How do we define low wages? What has worked to raise wages and improve working conditions for these women--job training, career mobility, organizing? And what are unions doing to address the needs of this group of workers?

Posted by Info Center at 5:49 PM in Future of Unions | Organizing | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Leslie E. Tower
Review of Public Personnel Administration
Vol. 28, No. 2, 144-165 (2008)

Women in the workforce, especially those in professional and management positions, are doubly burdened by social traditions that expect workers to meet masculine standards at the office while maintaining their feminine role of nurturer at home. This article studies the social costs of female career progression using a survey of 1,600 respondents from different levels of the public sector. The results show that working women have an increased incidence of being single or divorced, married working women tend to have more housework responsibilities, and working women have fewer children or are childless. The article concludes that government and business organizations need to pay serious attention to this hidden problem of social costs that affect women and men disproportionately.

Posted by William at 8:51 AM in Working Women | Permalink

Source: Heidi Shierholz and Emily Garr, Economic Policy Institute, Snapshot, May 7, 2008

This Mother's Day, we reflect on the critical but often overlooked issue of maternity leave. In a selection of 19 countries with comparable per capita income, the United States provides the fewest maternity leave benefits in both length of leave and paid time off (see chart). This is considered separate from any disability insurance for which one may qualify. In fact, the United States falls two weeks short of the International Labor Organization's basic minimum standard of at least 14 weeks general leave. It is also the only country not to guarantee some amount of leave with income.

Posted by Info Center at 10:41 AM in Family & Work | Leave Programs | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Sunhwa Lee, Lois Shaw, AARP Policy & Research, Pub ID: 2008-03, February 2008

From press release:
Women are nearly twice as likely to be poor as men as they reach pre-retirement and retirement ages, according to a new report by AARP's Public Policy Institute (PPI). The study, titled "From Work To Retirement: Tracking Changes in Women's Poverty Status," found that variables such as marital status, labor force participation, and health status affect the risk of poverty for women as they age.

Women's longer life expectancies play a large role in determining their lifetime financial security. They are more likely to lose a spouse - nearly 40 percent of women 65 and older were unmarried and living alone compared to only 16 percent of men - and they are also more likely to encounter health related problems.
▪ In Brief
▪ Summary

Posted by Info Center at 1:54 PM in Income Inequality/Gap | Poverty | Retirement | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Tallese D. Johnson, U.S. Census Bureau, P70-113, February 2008

From the press release:
Two-thirds of women who had their first child between 2001 and 2003 worked during their pregnancy compared with just 44 percent who gave birth for the first time between 1961 and 1965, according to a report released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The report, Maternity Leave and Employment Patterns: 1961-2003, analyzes trends in women's work experience before their first child, identifies their maternity leave arrangements before and after the birth and examines how rapidly they returned to work.

Women are more likely to work while pregnant than they were in the 1960s, and they are working later into their pregnancies. Eighty percent who worked while pregnant from 2001 to 2003 worked one month or less before their child's birth compared with 35 percent who did so in 1961-1965.

Posted by Info Center at 4:54 PM in Leave Programs | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Catherine Chubb, Simone Melis, Louisa Potter, Raymond Storry, International Trade Union Confederation, February 2008

From the press release:
Brussels, 6 March 2008: On the eve of International Women's Day, a new ITUC report, the Global Gender Pay Gap reveals that on average, women are paid 16% less than their male counterparts. The report includes detailed analysis of statistics from official sources in 63 countries around the world. Data from an online salary survey covering more than 400,000 workers in 12 countries is also included in the new study.

Posted by Info Center at 3:38 PM in Income Inequality/Gap | Working Women | Permalink

Source: National Woman's Law Center (NWLC) and Oregon Health & Science University Center for Women's Health (OHSU)

From press release:
While some states made some small gains in critical indicators for improving women's health, the nation as a whole and most states are falling behind in their quest to meet national goals for women's health, a comprehensive analysis of state policies and women's health status finds.

Released today, Making the Grade on Women's Health: A National and State-by-State Report Card is the fourth in a series of triennial reports to grade and rank each state based on 27 health status benchmarks developed largely using goals set by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Healthy People 2010 initiative. The report is a project of the National Women's Law Center and Oregon Health & Science University. With major support from the Bristol-Myers Squibb Foundation as well as a number of other funders, this report reflects the importance of improving women's health and the substantial commitment required to do so.

Making the Grade gives the nation an overall grade of "unsatisfactory" for meeting only three of 27 benchmarks - the percent of women 40 and over who receive regular mammograms, the percent of women who annually see a dentist, and the percent of women 50 and over who receive screenings for colorectal cancer.

No state receives an overall "satisfactory" grade for women's health status, although three states receive a "satisfactory minus." This is down from eight states that received a "satisfactory minus" in 2004. Vermont receives a "satisfactory minus" and ranks No. 1, followed by Minnesota and Massachusetts. Twelve states receive failing grades, up from six states that failed in 2004. Mississippi ranks last. The other 11 failing states are Louisiana, Arkansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, Texas and Alabama. The remaining states receive "unsatisfactory" marks.

National Report Card
Key Findings
State by state reports are also available.

Posted by Info Center at 9:23 AM in Health Care | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Report 1000, September 2007

In 2006, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median weekly earnings of $600, or about 81 percent of the $743 median for their male counterparts. This ratio has grown since 1979 (the first year comparable earnings data were available), when women earned about 63 percent as much as men.

Posted by Info Center at 6:12 PM in Income Inequality/Gap | Working Women | Permalink

Source: National Partnership for Women and Families

Social Security was established nearly 70 years ago to provide a critical safety net to protect our most vulnerable citizens. Now, citing a fictitious "crisis," President Bush wants to overhaul Social Security and change the way benefits are calculated and distributed, including having workers invest part of their contributions into private accounts. These proposals will severely undermine the Social Security safety net and disproportionately harm women and minorities. Social Security - the guaranteed foundation for most seniors' retirement - must be strengthened, not whittled away.

The Social Security reform plan that President Bush is promoting would exacerbate those problems by diverting one-third of a worker's Social Security contributions to private accounts. The result would be lower guaranteed benefits for ALL future retirees, regardless of whether they open individual private accounts. Lower benefits would cause great harm to women, who are much more likely than men to depend on Social Security's guaranteed benefits to avoid poverty.

See also:
National Partnership for Women and Families: Social Security Page

Posted by Info Center at 5:01 PM in Social Security | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Vicky Lovell, Elizabeth O'Neill, and Skylar Olsen, Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), Fact Sheet, IWPR #A131 August 2007

From the press release:
WASHINGTON - A new fact sheet released by the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) reports that nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of the best employers for working mothers provide four or fewer weeks of paid maternity leave, and half (52 percent) provide six weeks or less. Nearly half of the best companies fail to provide any paid leave for paternity or adoption. While more than one-quarter of the best companies (28 percent) provide nine or more weeks of paid maternity leave, many of the winners' paid parental leave policies fall far short of families' needs. IWPR's analysis is based on data provided by Working Mother Media, publisher of Working Mother, regarding the 2006 list of Working Mother 100 Best Companies.

Posted by Info Center at 4:45 PM in Leave Programs | Working Women | Permalink

Source: Heidi Hartmann, Olga Sorokina, and Erica Williams, Institute for Women's Policy Research, IPWR Briefing Paper R334, December 2006

Women have made dramatic economic progress throughout the United States, especially since the 1960s. Yet, women have fared much better in some states than in others, and in no state do women fare as well economically as men. On several indicators, women have experienced important gains in the nearly two decades that the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) has been tracking these data. For example, women are more likely than men to be employed in managerial or professional jobs and to have health insurance coverage. At the same time, women still earn less, are less likely to have a Bachelor's or professional degree, or to own a business, and are more likely to live in poverty than men across the states. With median annual earnings of $31,800, women employed full-time, year-round in the United States still earn only 77.0 percent of what men earn. Of all civilian women aged 16 and older, only 59.2 percent are in the labor force, compared with 71.8 percent of men.

Posted by Info Center at 4:04 PM in Income Inequality/Gap | Working Women | Permalink

Source: W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm, Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas Economic Letter, Vol. 2 no. 5, May 2007

Recent decades have seen a revolution in women’s work, marked by gains in labor force participation, college study, occupations and entrepreneurship. A commitment to education and work suggests U.S. women will continue to fare better at work, but it’s hard to imagine they’ll match recent decades’ rate of progress.

The growth of their labor force participation has leveled off in recent years, suggesting the surge of women into the job market has run its course. Women’s share of business ownership has risen only modestly. With a large portion of today’s women already seeking higher education, further increases in the share of college graduates will come only slowly. Women approach or have achieved parity in many professions.

The past 50 years’ experience suggests, however, that U.S. women will respond to incentives and opportunities. They’ve shown a desire to channel their efforts into sectors and occupations that are likely to grow. It’s a good formula for further progress in the workplace.

Posted by Info Center at 4:04 PM in Workforce | Working Women | Permalink