Stephanie Brown, a single mother of a 2-year-old, was recently laid off as a bank teller in Lansing, Mich. Despite sending out a flurry of résumés, she's finding the hunt for a new job - especially one with benefits - difficult.

"It's been weeks, and I haven't had one bite on my résumé," says Ms Brown. "And I've got quite a lot of experience in office and clerical work."

Brown's predicament is part of a growing phenomenon in the American workforce: Job insecurity among women.

For decades, even in the worst of times, women continued to steadily join the workforce, catching up to men in terms of the percentage of the population with a full-time paycheck. But during the most recent downturn, more women left the workforce than came in for the first time in more than 40 years. One economist calls it the first equal-opportunity recession.

Now, as the economy recovers, the central question is whether job growth among women will pick up again and how quickly. That could help determine whether the number of women joining the workforce has finally peaked. At the least, structural changes in the economy seem to have made it just as difficult for women as for men to find a good job with benefits.

"Working women are telling us it's a much tougher job market now," says Karen Nussbaum of the AFL-CIO in Washington.

Part of the decline in women's job growth, of course, can be explained by simple demographics. As more women have entered the workforce, it's inevitable that the influx would plateau at some point: There are only so many women available to work.

But shifts in the economy have played a part as well. The US economy has moved away from male-dominated manufacturing toward service-sector jobs, where women have traditionally outnumbered men at the cash register and behind the counter. Consequently, when layoffs occur, they now can hit women hard.

And then there's the impact of 9/11. Economically, it hit the female-dominated travel and tourism industries harder than many others. So when it came time to issue pink slips, women got their fair share here, too.

Yet cultural forces are also contributing to the decline. Women have essentially shifted from the family's traditional homemakers into essential breadwinners. In many households, women now contribute a majority of the family income.

That means that when a recession occurs, many women no longer just drop out of the workforce as they used to. Most desperately try to find another job, which adds to the unemployment statistics: People not looking for work aren't counted on the official jobless rolls.

"Something has profoundly shifted," says Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington. "It's part of the simple fact that women are such an integral part of the economy now. They don't just drop out when they lose their jobs as they sometimes did in the past."

Page: 1 | 2