4 ms·

Great question, I just went digging. I found three big factors. First, the "labor force" has no age cap, so there are lots more women alive than men. Second, l

Great question, I just went digging. I found three big factors. First, the "labor force" has no age cap, so there are lots more women alive than men. Second, lots of adult men are in the military or prison, so equal numbers of jobs would mean higher male labor force participation. Third, "nonfarm payrolls" doesn't just mean nonfarm, and excludes more employed men than women. But there's one big issue with nonprofit labor I couldn't sort out. (Details in the child post.)

Bartweiss 7y ago
Math for the summary above: From the BLS stats in question (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm), the total "civilian noninstitutional population" (i.e. labor force) is 260 million. Of the 244 million who are ages 20+ and broken out by gender, there are 117.4M men and 126.0M women. Why the difference? - Disabled people are still included for the labor force cohort unless they're hospitalized/institutionalized, so the gender-gap impact is relatively low. - Active-duty military service covers 1.3M adults, 90% male. - Incarceration covers 2.3M adults, 90% male. - The "labor force" has no upper age boundary, so the 20+ cohort has about 6 million more women. (1.5M people are in nursing homes and not counted, but the gender split is fairly even.) That's 6 million more women total, and 3M more men than women excluded from the pool, against a laborforce gap of ~9 million. Looks pretty complete for the denominator. But the raw number of total nonfarm payrolls listed is 76.2 million per gender. That would be 66.9% male LFPR, and 62.3% female LFPR, which we know isn't right. The BLS report instead has a male 20+ LFPR of 84M (71.5%) and female 20+ of 74.5M (59.2%), which is that 12% gap. What gives? - Farm labor is part of the LFPR. That data is extremely messy, but there are ~3M farm workers who appear to be ~75% male. - "Proprietors", or unincorporated self-employed people, aren't counted. That's 9.5M people, roughly 68% male. - Multiple jobs count as multiple payrolls, but one employment. This adds 6-7M non-employment payrolls per gender to help explain why the employment counts don't match payrolls, and up to 0.5M more female payrolls than male. (Although I can't tell what percentage are nonfarm payrolls.) That correction gets us to 70.7% male LFPR and 60.7% female LFPR, which is much closer to correct. Correct for the 16-19 numbers at it gets even closer. Looks good! ...except that apparently nonprofit jobs aren't included in nonfarm payrolls either. And that's 12M people, ~73% female. Which completely blows out the stats, so badly that I can't find any way to fix it. All I can say is either seasonal adjustment, or major differences in raw population counts between the methods (e.g. response rate gaps). Does anyone else know what's up?
CydeWeys 7y ago
Why does being in the military matter? Why would men in the military not count as being part of the labor force? It's a job, that you get paid for. There are plenty of other government jobs that count as being in the labor force.
- occamrazor 7y ago
  Active duty personnel is counted in labour force and as “participating”, however not as a “payroll” employee.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    Why though? They get paid a set amount of money per amount of time. Other federal government employees don't get exempted like this. It seems like an unnecessary distinction to make that "excludes" men from the workforce for no reason.
    - Bartweiss 7y ago
      As far as impact, soldiers (and handymen, etc) aren't counted as "not participating", they're pulled out of the denominator also. But yes, the different pools mean that if men and women have equal LFPR percentages, the in-dataset workforce would be 51.7% female. Even weirder, the "prime-age" and overall labor force participation rates can't simultaneously be equal between genders. All of which contributes to news stories like this one misusing random benchmarks. Why measure it that way? The BLS started collecting civilian labor force data in 1948. Participation rates had a gender gap of more than 50 points, so the implications of equal participation weren't very relevant. But 10 million soldiers had been raised during the war, many by conscription, and that same 10 million were decommissioned between 1945 and 1947 - all against an adult population of 100 million. So it was clear that during wartime any military-included statistic would have no real bearing on what potential workers at home were choosing to do. It's not totally clear to me why government workers were counted at all. They don't get drafted and their numbers don't vary wildly in wartime, so it's less of a data issue, but it would include explicit make-work projects like the CCC. I suppose that if the point is to measure which available workers are choosing to work, CCC employment is more "valid" than conscription? Why keep the stat that way with a comparatively small, all-volunteer military? Continuity, pretty much. Changing definitions or abandoning stats ruins change-over-time data, so the BLS almost always adds new stats instead of changing old ones.

Bartweiss 7y ago

Math for the summary above: From the BLS stats in question (https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm), the total "civilian noninstitutional population" (i.e. labor force) is 260 million. Of the 244 million who are ages 20+ and broken out by gender, there are 117.4M men and 126.0M women. Why the difference? - Disabled people are still included for the labor force cohort unless they're hospitalized/institutionalized, so the gender-gap impact is relatively low. - Active-duty military service covers 1.3M adults, 90% male. - Incarceration covers 2.3M adults, 90% male. - The "labor force" has no upper age boundary, so the 20+ cohort has about 6 million more women. (1.5M people are in nursing homes and not counted, but the gender split is fairly even.) That's 6 million more women total, and 3M more men than women excluded from the pool, against a laborforce gap of ~9 million. Looks pretty complete for the denominator. But the raw number of total nonfarm payrolls listed is 76.2 million per gender. That would be 66.9% male LFPR, and 62.3% female LFPR, which we know isn't right. The BLS report instead has a male 20+ LFPR of 84M (71.5%) and female 20+ of 74.5M (59.2%), which is that 12% gap. What gives? - Farm labor is part of the LFPR. That data is extremely messy, but there are ~3M farm workers who appear to be ~75% male. - "Proprietors", or unincorporated self-employed people, aren't counted. That's 9.5M people, roughly 68% male. - Multiple jobs count as multiple payrolls, but one employment. This adds 6-7M non-employment payrolls per gender to help explain why the employment counts don't match payrolls, and up to 0.5M more female payrolls than male. (Although I can't tell what percentage are nonfarm payrolls.) That correction gets us to 70.7% male LFPR and 60.7% female LFPR, which is much closer to correct. Correct for the 16-19 numbers at it gets even closer. Looks good! ...except that apparently nonprofit jobs aren't included in nonfarm payrolls either. And that's 12M people, ~73% female. Which completely blows out the stats, so badly that I can't find any way to fix it. All I can say is either seasonal adjustment, or major differences in raw population counts between the methods (e.g. response rate gaps). Does anyone else know what's up?

CydeWeys 7y ago

Why does being in the military matter? Why would men in the military not count as being part of the labor force? It's a job, that you get paid for. There are plenty of other government jobs that count as being in the labor force.

occamrazor 7y ago
Active duty personnel is counted in labour force and as “participating”, however not as a “payroll” employee.
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  Why though? They get paid a set amount of money per amount of time. Other federal government employees don't get exempted like this. It seems like an unnecessary distinction to make that "excludes" men from the workforce for no reason.
  - Bartweiss 7y ago
    As far as impact, soldiers (and handymen, etc) aren't counted as "not participating", they're pulled out of the denominator also. But yes, the different pools mean that if men and women have equal LFPR percentages, the in-dataset workforce would be 51.7% female. Even weirder, the "prime-age" and overall labor force participation rates can't simultaneously be equal between genders. All of which contributes to news stories like this one misusing random benchmarks. Why measure it that way? The BLS started collecting civilian labor force data in 1948. Participation rates had a gender gap of more than 50 points, so the implications of equal participation weren't very relevant. But 10 million soldiers had been raised during the war, many by conscription, and that same 10 million were decommissioned between 1945 and 1947 - all against an adult population of 100 million. So it was clear that during wartime any military-included statistic would have no real bearing on what potential workers at home were choosing to do. It's not totally clear to me why government workers were counted at all. They don't get drafted and their numbers don't vary wildly in wartime, so it's less of a data issue, but it would include explicit make-work projects like the CCC. I suppose that if the point is to measure which available workers are choosing to work, CCC employment is more "valid" than conscription? Why keep the stat that way with a comparatively small, all-volunteer military? Continuity, pretty much. Changing definitions or abandoning stats ruins change-over-time data, so the BLS almost always adds new stats instead of changing old ones.