As if things weren't tough enough for U.S. women trying to save for retirement, now there's another handicap to consider: a shrinking position in the workplace.
A report from HRDive says that in addition to coping with lower salaries, prolonged absence from the workplace and longer lifespans that necessitate higher, not lower, savings rates, women's very presence in the workplace is losing ground.
In fact, the report cites a New York Times op-ed column that says women had it better in 2000, when their employment level hit its peak. Since then it has declined.
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According to the op-ed, women's workforce participation has fallen from its 2000 level of 60 percent to its current level of just slightly more than 57 percent—continuing a decline that Federal Reserve statistics indicate began with the 2001 recession.
But that's not all the bad news—no, indeed. The report also cites data from two Cornell University economists that indicate U.S. women have lost their position as the sixth highest female population in the workforce globally to fall all the way down to 17th place. "Statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development," says the report, "showed that as U.S. women disappeared from the workforce, the number of working women from other industrialized nations, such as Germany, France, Japan and Spain, rose."
And that's not good news for women struggling to navigate not just the workplace but prepare for eventual retirement. If they aren't working, they aren't saving.
Where does the blame lie for this situation? The NYT piece "criticized President Donald Trump for not doing more for equal pay for women and supporting subsidized childcare. It also criticized the federal government for not adopting paid family leave, flexible work schedules and childcare subsidization," says the report.
In addition, HRDive says, working women report that flexible work schedules and paid family leave benefits would go a long way to supporting their efforts to stay in the workforce even as they get saddled with more caregiving responsibilities. However, another series of studies indicates that women said they're penalized much more often than men for wanting flexibility, and they're also passed over for promotions or coveted projects.
The final insult? They're generally considered less serious about their careers than men.
Employers experiencing recruiting difficulties because of a skills gap, HRDive says, should consider looking among the highly skilled women who have dropped out of the workforce, as well as low-income women who generally have fewer advanced skills. The former can provide greater diversity in the workforce, particularly in the tech arena—which has an obvious problem with diversity in recruitment and retention—and the latter, if provided with training and/or apprenticeships, can be the vanguard of a whole new workforce.
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