Womenomics 101

Women play a greater role in the American economy today than at any time since Rosie the riveter gave up making bombers for the baby boom after World War II, but American corporations -- enabled by a political class dominated by men -- continue to punish them for the high crime of being female.

The irony is that if public and corporate policies were to take the needs of working American women seriously, it wouldn't just give a boost to working families, it would also strengthen the economy; doing the right thing in this case also happens to be good for the bottom line.

The American workforce has one of the highest rates of female participation in the world. Between 1955 and 2002, the percentage of working-age women who had jobs outside the home almost doubled, while men's workforce participation fell by more than 10 percent.

That transition took place just as it became harder for a single-earner to keep a family afloat. Economist Doug Henwood showed that a worker making an average manufacturing wage had to work 62 weeks in order to earn the median family income in 1947. By 1973 that had risen to 74 weeks, and in 2001 it was 81 weeks.

So we can thank women's participation for a significant chunk of the American economy's much-vaunted "dynamism." Highly educated women entering the workforce in the 1990s added to America's "productivity miracle." Harvard economist Richard Freeman studied labor stats in 1998 and found that women moving into the workforce increased the employment rate by almost 10 percent. Forget about "business-friendly" regulatory environments and the wonders of "Rubinomics" -- that injection of fresh workers accounted for almost two-thirds of the difference between the unemployment rate in the U.S. and other advanced economies.

And women are a big part of that entrepreneurial class that we worship in this country. According to the Center for Policy Alternatives (PDF), one in four Americans now work for women-owned businesses; those firms grew at twice the rate of all new businesses between 1997 and 2002. It's part of our national edge -- American women start up almost five times as many new businesses as women in other high-income countries (PDF).

But for all they do to boost the economy, women continue to get the shaft across the American workplace. It's not just the wage gap -- which remains at around 20 percent four decades after equal wages were made the law of the land (According to the AFL-CIO, the average 25 year-old woman will lose almost a half million dollars over her working life). And it's not just the "glass ceiling" (white men make up les than a third of the workforce, but hold almost 95 percent of top corporate positions, women make up 46 percent of the workforce, but hold less than five percent). The real problem facing working women in the U.S. is that we have the most inflexible workplaces in the developed world.

According to Harvard's Project on Global Working Families (PDF), the United States is one of only five countries out of 168 studied that doesn't mandate some form of paid maternal leave. The only other advanced economy among those five was Australia's, where women are guaranteed an entire year of unpaid leave. That puts the U.S. -- the wealthiest nation on the planet -- in the company of Lesotho, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland.

That means that women in America face a unique burden. Regardless of how enlightened we believe we are, the yoke of housework and childrearing and eldercare still fall disproportionately on women. The legendary progressive economist Marilyn Waring was the first to consider the economics of unpaid housework in the 1980s. Waring estimated that if what has traditionally been thought of as "women's work" were counted economically, it would constitute the world's single largest service and production sector.