Women made up 32% of all manufacturing employees in 1990, a share that is now at 27%, the lowest rate since 1971
Secretary of Defense Leone Panetta signed a memorandum ending the 1994 ban on women serving in combat. In this photo, United States Marine Corps Staff Sgt. Jason Itro yells at recruit Nancy Carbins after she grabbed another recruit in the pool in an attempt to stay afloat during swim training in Parris Island, S.C. For more photos of women serving in combat, go here
All funny memes aside, was there any truth to Romney’s “binders full of women” statement?
According to Bernstein, there was in fact a “binder full of women,” but it wasn’t commissioned or compiled by Romney or his aides — it was put together by a collective of Massachusetts women’s organizations called MassGAP before the 2002 election. MassGAP’s goal was to get more women into cabinet positions irrespective of which party won the election. “They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions,” writes Bernstein. “They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.” After flipping through it, Romney did truthfully appoint a commendable number of women to senior-level positions in his cabinet (42 percent overall), but, as Bernstein notes, “those were almost all to head departments and agencies that he didn’t care about — and in some cases, that he quite specifically wanted to not really do anything.”Simon Owens is an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report. Follow him on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+. Email him at sowens@usnews.com
Why Women Will Rock the Economic Recovery
But women tend to be better educated than men, with more relevant skills, which means economic power will continue to shift toward women, as it has been for the last 20 years. The unemployment rate for women, for example, is 8.1 percent, while it’s 8.3 percent for men. During the recession, the gap was much bigger, favoring women by more than two percentage points for many months. That overall trend is likely to persist throughout the recovery. “Women are uniquely positioned to take advantage of jobs in tomorrow’s growth industries,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote in a recent report, “and tend to enjoy stronger earnings growth relative to men.”
Five Reasons Washington, D.C. Has the Happiest Single Women
5. No blonde jokes. Men here are very respectful of women, for the most part, in part because they know it’s a good rule that in politics, you should never burn a bridge. Today’s receptionist could be tomorrow’s legislative director. Men actually hold doors open for women around here, and I can’t tell you how many men apologize before they cuss when I’m around. Women love that.
While More Men Are Finding Work, Women Continue to Lose Jobs
Some economists began to refer to the depths of the recession as a “mancession,” since the bulk of the jobs lost were among men in male-dominated industries such as construction and manufacturing. During the recession (defined as December 2007 to June 2009), the economy shed more than 7 million jobs. Men fared worse in the recession, suffering more than 70 percent of the job losses. But strikingly, in the midst of a slow recovery, women have lost 117,000 jobs while men gained 1,140,000—a staggering difference of about a million jobs.
5 Money Lessons Every Woman Should Learn
Because they live longer and take more time out of the workforce, women face some unique financial challenges.
