The United States has a participation problem that is easy to miss because the country has jobs. Plenty of them. The question is who is taking them.
Fewer than six in ten women participate in the labour force, against closer to seven in ten men — even though women now outnumber men among university graduates. The gap has barely moved in two decades. Raising women's participation even six percentage points would add materially to national output, on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
Caring responsibilities are the binding constraint
The divide widens sharply for parents. Among adults living with a child under five, women's participation falls far below men's — the drop is among the steepest of any developed economy.
Women are also disproportionately found in the contingent workforce: part-time, temporary, contract and casual arrangements that carry no benefits, no pension and no security. That is not a preference. It is what the labour market does to a workforce it expects to be available for other people's schedules.
What we are asking for
An opportunity of this scale deserves to be treated as a national priority, alongside innovation, infrastructure and tax reform.
- Affordable, accessible childcare treated as a work expense rather than a private cost.
- Equal pay, so participation is rewarded rather than penalised.
- Portable benefits for contingent and part-time workers.
- Rethinking the working day around care, not around the remnants of a male breadwinner model.
We graduate in larger numbers and participate in smaller ones. Something is being lost in between.