Women in the workforce: We explore 70 years of US data

Women in the workforce: We explore 70 years of US data

3/9/21 7:00PM

Monday was International Women's Day. To celebrate the day we've dug out the data on women in the workforce, to see how things have changed in the last 70 years.

The data reveals just how big of a gap there was between men's and women's participation in the workforce back in the mid 20th century. In 1950 more than 85% of men were involved in the workforce, compared to just 33% of women (data from the BLS).

Since then, things have changed a lot. The next 50 years saw a seismic shift in our labor force as more women entered the formal workforce, and more men left it. Today, women's participation in the US labor force stands at ~56%, around 11-12% below that of men's — a gap that has remained fairly constant for much of the last 20 years.

This chart only represents participation in formal (paid) work, but an interesting recent report from the UN found that the increased burden of unpaid and informal work had fallen more on women during the pandemic.

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