This is an absolute train wreck of a headline, and story. But it’s a great example of how the media so often engages in activism instead of news. Here’s the breakdown of this false claim.
▪️First, women didn’t outnumber men in the US workforce a year ago, or any other year. If you look at the BLS chart A-1, it lists the number of men and women employed. In Dec 2019, there were almost 10M more men employed than women (84M men vs. 74.7M women). If you look back at the historical chart, women have certainly narrowed the gap in employment over the past decades, but have never been close to parity. I’ll post the historical graph in the comments.
▪️So how does the headline and story claim this? They used the percent of employees statistic from the BLS establishment survey, in which women made up 50.04% of payroll jobs in Dec 2019 (which is now 49.7%).
▪️A layman might consider this to mean that women made up more than half of the workforce, but the establishment survey doesn’t include self-employed, agricultural workers or private household workers. The establishment survey samples businesses, while the household samples households.
▪️Thus the household survey is more expansive and should be used in this case. It shows that men made up ~53% of the workforce in Dec 2019. This mistake could be excused by someone who isn’t well versed in BLS data, but not from a news outlet which specializes in the economy!
▪️The next claim that women accounted for 100% of the jobs lost in Dec is an attempt to sever statistics from reality. The article makes this leap from taking the overall number of women’s jobs lost in Dec (-156K) and the overall drop in payrolls (-140K) to conclude all of the job losses were due to women. But this is ridiculous.
▪️In many sectors, women gained jobs. For example, they gained 1K in mining and logging, 5K in construction, 14K in manufacturing, 25K in retail trade and 96K in professional and business services. But they lost 282K in leisure and hospitality, which was hard hit by the lockdowns.
▪️Similarly, men lost 216K jobs in leisure and hospitality, but ended up gaining 16K on net due to gains in other sectors. It just happened that men work more in the sectors that had gains last month, but this can and does easily change each month. And there were hundreds of thousands of men who lost jobs.
▪️To highlight the absurdity of the 100% claim, since women on net lost 156K, which was more than the total net job loss of 140K, they actually lost 111% of the jobs last month by that logic! That tells you that this statistic has no basis in reality.
▪️The truth is that men in the workforce have been hurt just as much during the last year. Adult men currently have a higher unemployment rate than women (6.4% vs. 6.3%) despite starting with a lower rate a year ago (3.1% vs. 3.3%). There are 4.5M fewer men employed compared to a year ago, and 4.4M fewer women. One could easily make a similarly manipulative headline in reverse.
▪️Of course, the real reason for this story was not to inform, but to make a political push. Which comes at the end of the article, when it advocates for paid family leave and more bailouts in the child care sector. How much you ask? $50B for child care.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm
https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat02.htm
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t17.htm
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t21.htm
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/women-account-for-100percent-of-jobs-lost-in-december-new-analysis.html
As with the leftist freak out over “banned books” this is not banning books, it’s still easy to get Harry Potter and bookstores should be able to limit whatever books they want for whatever reason. But not only does it show a double standard, the rationale is far less justifiable than removing certain content from school libraries. At least there the justification was the content of certain books are inappropriate for children, clearly not every book should be available in a school library. Here, there’s no argument about the content they just don’t like the author’s politics!
Because news came out about his letter to the FBI, revealing he was a nutcase. The letter was rambling and incoherent, claiming he was trained by the US military off the books, and that Walz had instructed him to kill Amy Klobuchar so he could run for Senate. None of it made any sense (Walz is not running for Senate) and none of the assassinations made any sense, even in a diabolical way.
Nearly all of his hit list was Democrats (including Walz) and abortion clinics, but he was supposedly working for Walz?! Plus, one of the guys he killed wasn’t even on his list, and others were no longer in office or deceased. None of it makes sense from any coherent angle.
Basically, it appears the guy was mentally ill and neither the left or right can use the incident to push their agendas anymore, so the story was dropped.
This is so dumb. First, this means LA began as Spanish land founded to support Spanish missions (i.e. colonialism). Which contradicts their entire premise. But the reality is that Los Angeles is a quintessential American city.
▪️When the US acquired California in the 1840s, LA was a small town of less than 2,000 people. It was basically nothing. It became large only after the gold rush and the railroads completed in the 1870-80s, which brought thousands of new settlers and a booming commercial center.
▪️But LA had a major issue limiting its growth, no water. It wasn’t until Mulholland found a water source and built an aqueduct down from Northern California that LA had the infrastructure to grow into a major city.
▪️Then, a combination of oil, real estate and the film industry caused it to boom in the early 1900s. Post WWII, industries like aerospace continued its spectacular growth. Calling this “Mexican land” is a brain dead take. Neither the Mexicans, Spanish nor ...
