Why are American women leaving the workforce?

 Jessica Grose, NY Times - By any metric, America’s working women are doing poorly compared to men. Since January 2024, women’s employment rates are down about 2 percent from where men’s are, according to Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute. Put another way — as Time magazine did — 212,000 women left the work force between January and August of this year, while 44,000 men entered. The gender wage gap is widening, notes the economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, and, she said, “There is no racial group or educational class within the working population in which women outearn men.”

The picture is even worse for specific subsets of women. The share of mothers of young children in the labor market fell almost 3 percentage points in the first half of the year. Unemployment for Black women has risen disproportionately over the past two years, and cuts to the federal work force have hit Black women particularly hard. According to analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, as of 2023, 45 percent of mothers overall and 69 percent of Black mothers were breadwinners for their families. When women lose their jobs, they, their families and the broader economy suffer.  This administration seems unconcerned about these statistics. More