Latina women gaining jobs as economy widens

The United States economy Monday hit a milestone, reaching its longest expansion on record. Just a decade ago, the nation was mired in a severe recession that had erased trillions of dollars in wealth and left millions of people out of work.

While the recovery has delivered uneven gains, Hispanic women have emerged as the biggest job market winners in an economy that has now grown for 121 straight months, assuming data released in coming months confirms continued growth.

Employment rates for Hispanic women between 25 and 54, prime working years, have jumped by 2.2 percentage points since mid-2007, the eve of the Great Recession. That is the most of any prime-age working group. Black women came in second, adding 1.6 percentage points.

While employment rates have risen for minority women, they are far from the expansion’s biggest winners by other measures. The richest 1 percent of earners — who are heavily white and male — have notched outsize earnings throughout the expansion and recovery. The top 1 percent also received nearly 17 percent of the total firstyear benefit from the Trump administration’s $1.5 trillion tax cut, according to the Tax Policy Center.

“We have an issue with wage inequality, income inequality and wealth inequality where most of the growth is going to the top,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Economic Policy Institute’s program on race, ethnicity and the economy. “Those people are less likely to be women and much less likely to be women of color.”

But the economic and social trends that have long kept minority women from making job and wage gains appear to be shifting. Hispanic women have historically worked less than any other demographic, earned fewer degrees than white and black women, and had among the highest fertility rates. That is changing: Hispanic women have posted a major fertility decline during the past decade, and they have steadily raised college attainment.

The recent job gains show that prolonged economic growth, combined with those social changes, has the power to lift long-marginalized minorities. The pattern also offers hopeful news for employers: As these women come into more jobs, they are providing a new source of labor in an economy in which workers are increasingly scarce.

Starting around 2012 and picking up around 2014, Hispanic women between 25 and 34 began pouring into jobs, contributing heavily to the group’s overall progress. They now work at their highest rates on record. Hispanic women concentrate heavily in service jobs including health care, which have grown throughout the expansion.

“It does seem like there’s something structural happening,” said Ernie Tedeschi, policy economist at Evercore ISI.

Education is a big part of the story. While the share of whites and blacks ages 18-24 who were enrolled in college actually dropped slightly between 2010 and 2016, the share of Hispanic women going for a degree jumped to 41 percent from 36 percent.

Smaller families might be allowing more Hispanic women time to devote to careers. Age-adjusted fertility rates for Hispanic women plunged between 2008 and 2016, based on an analysis by the Institute for Family Studies.

Both changes — education and fertility — bring Hispanic women more in line with other American racial and ethnic groups. The group’s millennials are more heavily U.S.-born, so they’ve been raised within American culture, smoothing the way for that convergence.

But economic opportunity seems to have been the spark that enabled a longrunning cultural change to catch fire. While young women had been improving their education rates and delaying motherhood for years, their employment rate picked up in earnest only midway through the expansion, as available jobs outpaced available workers. Black workers’ experience underlines the hot labor market’s role. While black women are also having fewer children, the group’s employment has historically moved in lockstep with the economy. That pattern has held in this business cycle: As companies hired steadily, black workers’ labor force participation climbed.

Now, the question is whether those gains will prove sustainable. Policymakers sometimes point out that some minorities suffer from a last-hired, first-fired phenomenon. Black women saw their employment rate drop 9.4 percentage points from its peak to its trough in the last crisis. Hispanic women had a similar but more muted response, losing about 6 percentage points.

Even if that pattern repeats itself come the next downturn, the fact that minority women are finding jobs now could leave them with more experience for their future resumes and more money in the bank.

“Shoring up labor market experience and earnings is a good thing,” said Heather Boushey, executive director at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. “I think it is an unambiguous good.”