The current economic turmoil is disproportionately impacting male employment according to the New York Times.
Men have been hard-hit by this recession, accounting for about 80 percent of United States job losses, and that is pushing more women into the work force. Many of those women are former stay-at-home mothers, thrust back into jobs sooner than they had planned.
From the Depression through the recessions of the early 1980s and ’90s, financial necessity has forced women at home with children to head into the work force, said Katherine A. S. Sibley, chairwoman of the history department at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, who researches women’s history.
During World War II, about 36 percent of American women worked outside the home, Ms. Sibley said. During the recession of the early 1980s, about 48 percent of women were working and, in the downturn of the early 1990s, about 54 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Today, 55 percent of women are working, and they make up nearly half the work force.
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