Federal Reserve Economic Data

The FRED® Blog

Posts tagged with: "LNS11300001"

View this series on FRED

Women in the labor force

Today is International Women’s Day, declared by the United Nations, which falls within Women’s History Month in the United States. FRED offers a lot of data by gender, so we can reflect on at least some ideas and data that specifically illuminate women’s experiences in the economy.

The first FRED graph shows how the labor force participation rates of men (in blue) and women (in red) have evolved over the past few decades. The red line reveals an impressive increase since 1948 in women’s overall participation in the formal labor force. But that increase seems to have stalled since the turn of the century, and there appears to be a new steady state in comparison with men’s participation rate.

If equality is the goal here, then overcoming the initial obstacles (say, the hiring of women after they’re married or hiring more women engineers) hasn’t been enough to close the gap.

The second graph depicts another front in the effort toward equality: the gender pay gap. This comparison has its subtleties and can’t be completely analyzed with only aggregate statistics. Why?

Although some narrowing of the gap is clear, the end goal of equal opportunities and equal pay for equal qualifications requires more-complex measurement: Women and men do not choose the same education and career paths in equal numbers. Currently, a majority of university students are female; but a majority of graduates in the highest-paying fields are still male. Women’s professional careers are also disproportionately obstructed because they accommodate family duties more than men do. Again: These subtleties can’t be distinguished in the aggregate data. Fortunately, though, economists do perform much more detailed data analysis, as in this Economic Synopses essay.

How these graphs were created: For the first graph, search for “labor force participation men” and click on the best result. From the “Edit Graph” panel, use the “Add Line” tab to search for and select the corresponding series for women. For the second graph, repeat the same exercise for “wages.”

Suggested by Christian Zimmermann.

View on FRED, series used in this post: LES1252881900Q, LES1252882800Q, LNS11300001, LNS11300002

Gender labor force participation gaps

In a recent article in the Regional Economist, Li Li and I plotted gender gaps in labor markets of G7 countries in 1991, 2001, and 2011. We focused in particular on two gender gaps: labor force participation (the difference in labor force participation rates for men and women) and unemployment (the difference between the unemployment rate for men and women).

While we used data from the World Bank and OECD, we could have just as easily transformed FRED data series to obtain these gaps. In the graph, we show the gender labor force participation rate gap in the United States and the G7 country with the largest gender labor force participation gap in the most recent data: Italy.

In the United States, the labor force participation rate for men has been trending down since World War II, while the labor force participation rate for women has been trending up—that is, until the Great Recession, when it began trending down in parallel with the rate for men. The gap has shrunk to about 10 to 12 percent. In Italy, the trend of the gap is very similar, but it’s shifted to the right and to date the gap is still almost twice as large as that in the United States.

How this graph was created: After finding the first series (men, United States) and the second series (women, United States), create your own data transformation using the formula a-b. After finding the same two series for Italy, apply the same transformation.

Suggested by Silvio Contessi

View on FRED, series used in this post: ITALFPMNA, ITALFPWNA, LNS11300001, LNS11300002


Subscribe to the FRED newsletter


Follow us

Back to Top