77 cents: Recession spreads pay-gap pain

Chart from Center for American Progress report,"Not Working:
Unemployment Among Married Couples" (click to enlarge)

The 2007-09 Great Recession often has been referred to as a "mancession" due to the cutbacks and job losses seen in industries populated by men.

But now comes word that we all soon could be paying a price for the wage gap that long has plagued women in the workplace because the recession turned them into the prime breadwinner in many families.

Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank in Washington, D.C., has published a paper, "Not Working: Unemployment Among Married Couples," that makes just that point:

"With so many wives — and women more generally — supporting families, there could not be a more important time to ensure that women are paid fairly. The typical woman earns an average of 77 cents on the male dollar, and so when a husband loses his job the family suffers since her earnings are typically lower than his."

Boushey also notes that older couples are particularly vulnerable, given the man's longevity on the job (= higher wages) and the likelihood the woman took time off to raise children (= lower wages). Add to that the hit the couple's nest egg took during the recession as the financial markets skidded and the equity they may have lost in their house as the bottom dropped out of the real estate market. The resulting outlook for retirement isn't pretty, and there could be implications for Social Security in the future.

Plus, as data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been showing month after month, older workers laid off in the recession are finding it harder to get back into the job market. As of January 2010, Boushey says, that included two-thirds of unemployed men and women aged 55 to 64 vs. just 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women aged 35 to 44.

Boushey's conclusion? "Addressing pay equity should be a key priority as we address the recession."

More weekend readings in journalism

(via Flickr: jj_pappas423)

Here's some food for thought:

"A Note to Our Readers on the Times Pay Model and the Economics of Reporting" (FiveThirtyEight): The headline on the New York Times politics blog may be a mouthful, but this is the bottom line: "A very small number of news outlets account for a very large share of the English-language reporting that is of national or international interest." That's according to Nate Silver, who tracked which publications were cited most often by everyone for their original reporting on a topic. It's an experiment he did to support the idea that good journalism isn't free and that the pay-to-read model -- like the Times' new metered plan -- is worth the price of subscribing.

" 'Who Needs Newspapers' Project Documents the State of Newsrooms Nationwide" (Editor & Publisher): Valid Sources, a nonprofit focused on finding outstanding practitioners of journalism, is about six months into its year-long effort to lay the foundation for a database that will highlight smaller newspapers that serve their communities well. The year-long project, called "Who Needs Newspapers," expects to identify one newspaper per state each week that deserves recognition; in year two and beyond, local press associations will help to grow the list. One commonality among the papers: they recognize the need to embrace the Internet and new media, and to work both to their advantage.

Visual interlude: The blog 10,000 Words calls "Bloggers vs. Journalists: It's a Psychological Thing" one of the five must-see presentations on digital journalism. The slides were prepared for the recent South by Southwest confab in Austin by Jay Rosen (New York University) and Lisa Williams (Placeblogger) for a discussion on the continuing debate between the two groups.

"Recent College Graduates and the Labor Market" (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco): Switching gears (a bit) from journalism, this report should lay to rest the debate over whether the current "jobless recovery" -- persistent unemployment -- is structural or cyclical. "Structural" argues that workers no longer have the skills desired by employers; "cyclical" says there's less demand for workers, period -- until the economy is firing on all cylinders. "Structural," to me, is demoralizing because it's akin to telling us jobless that we're suddenly unqualified for work; "cyclical" is less damning to individuals because the problem lies elsewhere, in the (im)balance of supply and demand. The San Fran bank, using recent college graduates as the control, concluded that the current downturn and recovery closely mirrors the 2001 recession and its aftermath, which was deemed cyclical. (Whew!)

"The Employment Situation, February 2011: Unemployment Down for Older Women but Not for Men" (AARP Public Policy Institute; pdf): If you're 55 or older and unemployed, according to this monthly report, you're screwed. "Once unemployed, older workers, on average, are out of work longer than their younger counterparts," it says. For the 55-and-older crowd, the length of unemployment rose in February to 45.5 weeks, from 44.4 weeks in January. (For younger workers, it also was up, but stood at 35.2 weeks.) Adds the report: "The recession may be over, but average duration of unemployment has continued to rise, increasing for the older unemployed by 48 percent between the start and end of the recession (December 2007-June 2009) and by 52 percent since the recession ended (June 2009-February 2011)."

Musical fadeout.