Latinos in the US

NYTimes.com
Published: February 5, 2009

With the recession on the brink of becoming the longest in the postwar era, a milestone may be at hand: Women are poised to surpass men on the nation’s payrolls, taking the majority for the first time in American history.
The reason has less to do with gender equality than with where the ax is falling.
The proportion of women who are working has changed very little since the recession started. But a full 82 percent of the job losses have befallen men, who are heavily represented in distressed industries like manufacturing and construction. Women tend to be employed in areas like education and health care, which are less sensitive to economic ups and downs, and in jobs that allow more time for child care and other domestic work.
“Given how stark and concentrated the job losses are among men, and that women represented a high proportion of the labor force in the beginning of this recession, women are now bearing the burden — or the opportunity, one could say — of being breadwinners,” says Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Center for American Progress.
Economists have predicted before that women would one day dominate the labor force as more ventured outside the home. The number of women entering the work force slowed and even dipped during the boom years earlier this decade, though, prompting a debate about whether women truly wanted to be both breadwinners and caregivers.
Should the male-dominated layoffs of the current recession continue — and Friday’s jobs report for January may offer more insight — the debate will be moot. A deep and prolonged recession, therefore, may change not only household budgets and habits; it may also challenge longstanding gender roles.
In recessions, the percentage of families supported by women tends to rise slightly, and it is expected to do so when this year’s numbers are tallied. As of November, women held 49.1 percent of the nation’s jobs, according to nonfarm payroll data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By another measure, including farm workers and the self-employed, women constituted 47.1 percent of the work force.
Women may be safer in their jobs, but tend to find it harder to support a family. For one thing, they work fewer overall hours than men. Women are much more likely to be in part-time jobs without health insurance or unemployment insurance. Even in full-time jobs, women earn 80 cents for each dollar of their male counterparts’ income, according to the government data.
“A lot of jobs that men have lost in fields like manufacturing were good union jobs with great health care plans,” says Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project. “The jobs women have — and are supporting their families with — are not necessarily as good.”
Nasreen Mohammed, for example, works five days a week, 51 weeks a year, without sick days or health benefits.
She runs a small day care business out of her home in Milpitas, Calif., and recently expanded her services to include after-school care. The business brings in about $30,000 annually, she says, far less than the $150,000 her husband earned in the marketing and sales job he lost over a year ago. “It’s peanuts,” she says.
She switched from being a full-time homemaker to a full-time businesswoman when her husband was laid off previously. She says she unexpectedly discovered that she loves her job, even if it is demanding.
Still, her husband, Javed, says he and their three children — who are in third grade, junior college and law school — worry about her health, and hope things can “return to the old days.”
“In terms of the financial benefit from her work, we all benefit,” he says. “But in terms of getting my wife’s attention, from the youngest daughter to our oldest, we can’t wait for the day that my job is secure and she doesn’t have to do day care anymore.”
Women like Ms. Mohammed find themselves at the head of once-separate spheres: work and household. While women appear to be sole breadwinners in greater numbers, they are likely to remain responsible for most domestic responsibilities at home.
On average, employed women devote much more time to child care and housework than employed men do, according to recent data from the government’s American Time Use Survey analyzed by two economists, Alan B. Krueger and Andreas Mueller.
When women are unemployed and looking for a job, the time they spend daily taking care of children nearly doubles. Unemployed men’s child care duties, by contrast, are virtually identical to those of their working counterparts, and they instead spend more time sleeping, watching TV and looking for a job, along with other domestic activities.
Many of the unemployed men interviewed say they have tried to help out with cooking, veterinarian appointments and other chores, but they have not had time to do more because job-hunting consumes their days.
“The main priority is finding a job and putting in the time to do that,” says John Baruch, in Arlington Heights, Ill., who estimates he spends 35 to 45 hours a week looking for work since being laid off in January 2008.
While he has helped care for his wife’s aging parents, the couple still sometimes butt heads over who does things like walking the dog, now that he is out of work. He puts it this way: “As one of the people who runs one of the career centers I’ve been to told me: ‘You’re out of a job, but it’s not your time to paint the house and fix the car. Your job is about finding the next job.’ ”
Many women say they expect their family roles to remain the same, even if economic circumstances have changed for now.
“I don’t know if I’d really call myself a ‘breadwinner,’ since I earn practically nothing,” says Linda Saxby, who assists the librarian at the Cypress, Tex., high school her two daughters attend. Her husband, whose executive-level position was eliminated last May, had been earning $225,000, and the family is now primarily living off savings.
Historically, the way couples divide household jobs has been fairly resistant to change, says Heidi Hartmann, president and chief economist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
“Over a long, 20-year period, married men have stepped up to the plate a little bit, but not as much as married women have dropped off in the time they spend on household chores,” Ms. Hartmann says. This suggests some domestic duties have been outsourced, as when takeout substitutes for cooking, for example. And as declining incomes force families to cut back on these outlays, she says, “women will most likely pick up the slack.”
A severe recession could put pressure on these roles.
“It has definitely put a strain” on my marriage, says Debbie Harlan, an executive assistant at a hospital system in Sarasota, Fla. Four months ago, her husband closed his 10-year-old independent car sales business, and the couple have been asking their children to help with bills. “So far we’ve worked through it, but there have been times when I wasn’t sure we could.”
The Mohammeds say things are not as stressful as they were the last time Mr. Mohammed lost his job. He has been helping out with the cooking and with paperwork for his wife’s business, and she says she works to prop up family morale.
“Things are not happy in the house if I blame him all the time, so I don’t do any of that anymore,” Ms. Mohammed says. “I know he is doing his best.”

U.S. Latinas by the Numbers
October 28, 2008

Latinas, or Latino women, are quickly becoming a large and influential segment of the U.S. population. Currently, 14.4 million Latinas call the United States home, and these numbers are expected to increase since Latinos are the fastest-growing minority in the country. Latinas are more likely to enroll in college than their male counterparts, and they are also increasingly choosing careers in politics. However, they face many challenges. For example, 53 percent of Latinas lived in low-income households in 2007, and in that same year over a third lacked health insurance.
The following by-the-numbers look examines the current state of Latinas in the United States, illustrating the gains they are making as well as the struggles they are encountering.
Population
14.4 million: Number of Latinas in the United States in 2008.
48 percent: Percentage of Latinas in 2007 who were born in the United States or born abroad to a U.S. citizen parent.
52 percent: Percentage of Latinas in 2007 who were not born in the United States.
41: Median age for Latinas in 2007, which was younger than the median age of 47 for non-Latinas.
Language
55 percent: Percentage of Latinas in the United States in 2007 who spoke only English or spoke English very well.
86 percent: Percentage of native-born Latinas in 2007 who spoke only English or spoke English very well.
76 percent: Percentage of immigrant Latinas in 2007 who spoke English less than very well.
Education
36.1 percent: Percentage of Latinas who had less than a high school diploma in 2007 (5,215,000).
73 percent: Percentage of Latinas who completed high school in 2006, versus 63 percent of Latino men.
9.1 percent: Percentage of Latinas who had a bachelor’s degree in 2007 (1,320,000).
61 percent: Percentage of first-time, full-time Hispanic freshmen in four-year colleges and universities in 2006 who were women. In 1975, Hispanic males accounted for 57 percent of Hispanic freshmen while women represented 43 percent.
31 percent: Percentage of college-age Latinas enrolled in college in 2008, versus 21 percent of college-age Latino men.
3 percent: Percentage of Latinas with an advanced degree in 2007 (453,000).
Health
36 percent: Percentage of Latinas without health insurance in 2007 (5,179,000).
39 percent: Percentage of Latina workers who had employer-provided health insurance in 2001, versus 50 percent of white women and 53.8 percent of black women.
46 percent: Percentage of Latinas who suffered from depression in 2003 versus 19.6 percent of Latino men.
21 percent: Percentage of Latinas who died of AIDS out of all female AIDS deaths in the United States in 2006. Latinas are one of the fastest-growing groups of people living with HIV/AIDS, with AIDS rates over seven times higher than non-Hispanics.
Jobs and wages
12 percent: Percentage of the employed female population represented by Latinas in 2007.
56 percent: Percentage of Latinas who were employed in the labor force in 2007 (8,027,000).
61 percent: Percentage of employed native-born Latinas in 2007 (4,185,000).
51 percent: Percentage of employed immigrant Latinas in 2007 (3,843,000).
$460: The median weekly wages for Latinas who worked full time in 2007, earning much less than non-Latinas, whose weekly wage was $615.
55 cents: Amount Latinas earn to every one dollar a man earns.
2.8 million: The number of Latinas estimated to join the U.S. labor force between 2002 and 2012.
Entrepreneurship
8 percent: Percentage of privately held firms owned by women that had Latina owners in 2002.
39 percent: Percentage of privately held firms owned by minority women that had Latina owners in 2002.
553,618: Number of privately held firms owned by Latinas in 2002.
121.3 percent: Percentage increase in Latina-owned businesses between 1997 and 2006.
$44.4 billion: Amount in sales that Latina-owned, privately held firms generate, an increase of 64 percent between 1997 and 2004.
61 percent: Expected percentage of Latinas in the U.S. workforce by 2020.
Poverty
53 percent: Percentage of Latinas who lived in low-income households in 2007 (7,645,000).
20 percent: Percentage of Latinas who lived in poverty in 2007 (2,864,000).
8.4 percent: Percentage of Latinas who lived in extreme poverty in 2007 (income below 50 percent of the federal poverty line).
46.6 percent: Percentage of Latina-headed families with children living in poverty in 2007.
Politics
9,100,000: Number of Latinas eligible to vote in the 2008 elections.
40 percent: Percentage of Latina U.S. citizens who were not registered to vote in 2004. Eighteen percent of those registered did not cast ballots in the 2004 election.
54 percent: Percentage of the Latino votes cast in the 2008 general election that are expected to be made by Latinas.
31 percent: The Latina share of all Latino elected officials in 2007, up from 24 percent in 1996.
74 percent: Percentage increase in the number of Latina elected officials between 1996 and 2007, versus a 25 percent increase in male Latino officials.
75: Number of Latina state legislators in the United States in 2008, which includes 20 senators and 51 representa tives serving 22 states (1,741 women state legislators nationwide).
One of the most important steps Latinas can take to address these challenges is to become more engaged in the political process and vote. In the 2004 election, 40 percent of Latinas who were U.S. citizens were not registered to vote. If every one of them had voted, turnout would have increased by 4.2 million votes.
This year, 17.9 million Latinos are eligible to vote, and 9.1 million of them are women. Their sheer size, combined with the fact that many live in critical states, could have a huge effect on this election. By turning out to the polls, Latinas can have a powerful and lasting impact to create and advance an agenda to improve their health care, education, and living standards.

"This material [article] was created by the Center for American Progress Action Fund" (online)