Older Women Re-enter US Work Force in Growing Numbers - Building Gender Balanced Business

• It’s something we have seen from Australia to Europe: Older women are a fast-growing, and in Canada the fastest-growing, demographic in an otherwise bleak jobs market.

• Like the new female majority in the workplace in countries like Canada, the significant uptick in older working women is the result of the economic downturn, as fewer men (including not a few husbands of women who left the workforce) are working.

• The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the number of college-educated married women ages 25 to 44 working or looking for work was 78.4% in the first six months of 2009, against 76% in the first six months of 2007. By contrast, 97.1% of similar men were working, down from 97.4%.

• The New York Times noted that economists are surprised by the growth in older female employment, as usually recessions lead non-employed people to despair of finding a job and thus not be in the workforce.

• The women cited in the Times article are among the affluent minority who were able to stop working because their resources — in many cases, the husband’s salary — and the issue of how many such women exist, and why some leave work and others don’t has long been hotly debated. Their re-entry is refueling the controversy over what led them to exit in the first place.

• “According to some economists, these women … are now collateral damage of the recession — not forced out of work, but back into it,” The Times reported.

• The women face a difficulty beyond even those related to the recession and rusty skills: Studies show that women face a 10% pay penalty on average for every two years they are out of work.

• But not all older women returning to work have decided to do so because of unemployed husbands — or other financial setbacks like investment losses amid the markets’ crashes in 2008. Some are going back to work simply because they are tried of being at home or no longer feel they need to be.

• Of course, it is rarely easy to re-enter the workforce after a long hiatus, and the Times article cited successes and tough paths alike in profiles of such women: One lawyer, after two decades at home with her two children, described herself as fortunate because a friend hired her for a prestigious California firm. Another lawyer has decided to start her own practice because “it’s hard to find jobs after 16 years”.

The New York Times report