Thank you to the Joint Economic Committee for drawing attention to rising unemployment among women-headed families in its new report, “Women in the Recession: Working Mothers Face High Rates of Unemployment.”
With so much public attention being paid to job loss among men, which, don’t get me wrong, is and should be of deep concern, the challenges for women have too often been overlooked.
How many others – besides we at The Women’s Foundation and those who attended our May 2009 Stepping Stones Research Briefing– would know that the national unemployment rate for women who are heads of households was 11 percent in May – higher than the 9.8 percent rate among men?.
Our national response to rising men’s unemployment, particularly in the manufacturing and construction sectors, has been to increase funding for job training and education and engage in job creation. In fact, this was a key focus of the stimulus package passed earlier this year – and the President has also been talking about this even more in the last few days.
Don’t get me wrong – I think it is always good public policy to fund job training and job creation. But I can’t help but compare this response to “welfare reform” of the 1990s, where low-income women heads of households were forced into “work first” and “rapid labor market attachment” models that basically forced them to take a job, any job, and offered only barriers to education and training. (This “work first” approach was also a hallmark of the Workforce Investment Act, which reformed the public workforce training system.)
A recent paper demonstrates quite strongly just how counterproductive this approach is. Research concluded that welfare reform decreased the probability of both high school and college attendance among young adult women by 20 to 25 percent. In other words, welfare policies have kept women from the very education and training that would help lift them and their families out of poverty and, ironically, offer more protection against unemployment. (Unemployment among individual without a high school diploma is 14.8 percent, compared to 4.4 percent for college graduates.)
I hope that as the Administration and Congress turn their attention to programs serving primarily women and that they will continue to be solidly committed to job training and creation.
Gwen Rubinstein is a Program Officer at The Women’s Foundation.
