Not so Fast
By Well this is depressing.
After moving into virtually every occupation, women are being afflicted on a large scale by the same troubles as men: downturns, layoffs, outsourcing, stagnant wages or the discouraging prospect of an outright pay cut. And they are responding as men have, by dropping out or disappearing for a while.
“When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids,” Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.”
It should not be surprising that with a slowing economy and men losing more jobs than in recent years, women too are losing more jobs. But I guess a study like this sort of undercuts all that hysteria about women dropping out of the workplace and a return to 1950s values, eh? I’m hoping so because that line of thinking is not doing professional women any good.