Low-Wage Job Growth, Polarization, and the Limits and Opportunities of the Service Economy

Figure 6.

Job Growth Across Care Jobs, Stacked by Women and Men

Source: Authors' analysis based on 1983–2017 data from the Current Population Survey (NBER 2019).

Note: Jobs are defined by the cells in a matrix of detailed occupations by economic sectors. Job-wage terciles are defined by jobs ranked by median hourly wage: job cells are rank-ordered on the basis of median hourly wages, and these rank-ordered job-cells grouped into equal population terciles at the beginning of each period. The top (third) tercile thus represents the one-third of the employed labor force in the best-paying types of jobs and the bottom (first) tercile represents the one-third of the employed labor force in the worst-paying types of jobs. The number of categories varied for different periods because of occupation and sector coding changes in the CPS. The care domain includes occupations and industries that contribute to the health and development of people. Occupations include nurses, doctors, allied health professionals and aides, teachers, childcare workers, professors, allied education professionals, social workers, and religious support workers. Industries include educational service, hospital service, other medical services, and social services. Alternative measures of care work include what is sometimes termed reproductive labor, including food preparation, house cleaning, and other related physical labors of care. We exclude here, but note that if we included those jobs, the bottom tercile would show higher levels of growth given the concentration of reproductive labor jobs at the bottom (Duffy 2011).