NOW Opposes "Disappearing" of Women Workers in Data Collection

October 12, 2005

Ignoring strong public objection, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in the Department of Labor, decided in August to discontinue collecting data on working women. Earlier this year, NOW joined with the Institute for Women's Policy Research and many other women's rights organizations to protest this action and urged our supporters to send thousands of messages to the BLS - but our objections went unheeded and as of August 6, the monthly data collection on working women was halted.

Of the BLS action, NOW President Kim Gandy said, "We know what's behind this 'disappearing of data on working women' - it's part of the larger right wing effort to downplay women's economic roles and, more onerously, to thwart women's effort to build the case for equal pay."

To counter this cavalier dumping of working women as an important category of data collection, NOW and allies are turning to Congress for help. We are signing on to a joint letter to House and Senate members asking them to mandate data collection on working women through an amendment to the upcoming Labor/HHS/Education Appropriations bill. We hope this strategy is successful, but if it fails we will also be pushing for separate, free-standing legislation directing the department to reverse their decision.

Collection of employment data on women workers is done through the Current Employment Statistics Survey (CES), a monthly nationwide survey of payroll records that includes the "Women Worker Series" requesting that employers answer a question about the number of women they employ.

The Department of Labor acts as if information about women is insignificant, but research shows that it is essential. The BLS data demonstrates women's important and growing influence on the nation's economy, providing the only accurate picture of whether women are gaining or losing jobs, and in which industries. Considered to be the most reliable data for tracking month-to-month changes in employment, it is often used by lawmakers in the formation of public policies that affect women.

Because women tend to work in different sectors of the labor market than men, combining data about men and women workers may disguise critical differences in their experiences, earnings and employment.. The Department of Labor's insistence on combining data on men and women is in effect an attempt to erase the unjustifiable inequalities that exist between men and women in the workplace. For that reason alone, women's rights activists should stridently object to the data collection deceit.

One of the bogus reasons the BLS has cited for discontinuing data collection, specific to data on working women, is that the figures were little used. Just the opposite is true: the figures are frequently used by researchers to track employment changes, by lawmakers in forming public policy and for other economic and policy research initiatives. Another reason given by the BLS is that the data collection places a burden on employers, when in reality the survey is only mandatory in five states: California, Oregon, Washington, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In addition, the process of documenting this data on women is simple and many employers, in their official comments to the Department of Labor, want the data collection to continue. The BLS also asserted that the quality of the women worker data is poor because of a 14 percent non-response rate from employers. In fact, the 86 percent response rate is the second best in the data set, following the first question's response rate that signals the employer's desire to be included in the survey. In effect, the BLS has no basis upon which to support the agency's claims, and no good excuse for excluding women workers from their data collection. This is the Bush Administration's political desire to marginalize women and obscure the inequities that women face in the workplace.

The BLS has attempted to mute objections to their action by stating that women's employment data will continue to be provided through the Current Population Survey (CPS). But, as the Institute for Women's Policy Research notes, the CPS is not an adequate replacement on women workers data since it does not allow for analysis of women's and men's employment behavior month-by-month, or across the business cycle. The CPS is also not an adequate substitute because its data are collected from households and individuals, not from businesses.

It is disturbing that the Bureau of Labor Statistics would discontinue collecting data on women workers when the evidence of the data's use and importance is so significant.

Leaders of national and state women's rights organizations have signed onto a letter which will be sent to Congress the week of October 17, asking them to require the BLS to continue collecting the "Women Worker Series" data on the CES survey. You can learn more about this letter and add your organization's name by contacting Lara Hinz at IWPR by phone (202) 785-5100 or email.