Since President Obama moved into the White House, the unemployment picture has gone from bad to worse. Unless things turn around, 2011 may be the third consecutive year with unemployment exceeding 9 percent, a first since the Labor Department began tracking the stat in 1948.
Yet more troubling are the higher rates of joblessness -- and bleaker employment prospects -- for men ages 25–54 relative to their female peers. Unemployment in this critical demographic may not seem like an outlier (also around 9 percent since 2009).
But it follows a steady drop in the labor-force participation rate of these men of nearly 7 percentage points since 1970, along with declines in their relative wages. In all, one fifth of men in their prime have either dropped out of the workforce or are unemployed.
Meanwhile, women are not only experiencing lower unemployment (about 7.5 percent since 2009), but also a leap in their labor-force participation rate, per the adjacent chart, of more than half since 1970, along with rising relative earnings. In fact, the participation rate of married mothers has more than doubled since 1965.
Set aside whether these labor shifts have strengthened the market or home economy. Is the reversing of sex roles what Americans really want? While politicians of both parties and the media have cheered the movement of women out of the home and into paid employment, the Pew Research Center has found that most Americans have second thoughts.
In a 2007 survey, before the economy tanked, Pew found American mothers expressing a largely negative attitude to their new roles as working stiffs. Only 22 percent of at-home mothers, and 34 percent of employed mothers, consider increases in maternal employment good for society.
Moreover, only 16 percent of at-home mothers and 21 percent of employed mothers consider full-time employment as their ideal “work choice,” both down significantly since 1997.
And although Labor Department data indicate that 24 percent of mothers working outside the home are employed part-time, 60 percent of employed mothers said they would prefer part-time jobs.
American fathers, in contrast, expressed no such reluctance to work outside the home: 72 percent view full-time work, and 12 percent prefer part-time, as ideal.
Such traditional sentiments would naturally shock elites, if they were paying attention. But despite most Americans’ misgivings, even center-right observers seem resigned to the notion that economic forces have produced, and will sustain, this feminization of the workforce.
David Brooks recently lamented in the New York Times, “More American men lack the emotional and professional skills they would need to contribute.” In “Manning Up,” author Kay Hymowitz explains how the transition from an industrial- to a knowledge-based economy favors the weaker sex, particularly younger college-educated women.
Yet neither acknowledges how federal policies have propped up the new regime. Sex-based affirmative action, a form of rent-seeking with which big business eagerly complies, has of course favored women over men in the job market since the 1970s.
But in “Redeeming Economics,” John Mueller maintains that lower levels of male employment cannot be understood apart from the expanding means-tested welfare, where the Nanny State substitutes for the personal exchange of economic and social “gifts” carried out in intact families that depend on bread-winning husbands.
Whatever has caused the altered division of labor, it’s not what most women -- or men -- want. Along with the continuing Great Recession, that’s enough for a reassessment of all the factors that have debased the economy.
And that starts with an repeal of policies, from sex-based affirmative action to means-tested welfare, that have debased the family by moving breadwinning fathers to the sidelines.
Robert W. Patterson is editor of The Family in America: A Journal of Public Policy.
