Matthew Nessler

speaker

38 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 15 Mar

Matthew Nessler’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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WSJ What’s News · The State of Women in 2026: Progress, Pay Gaps and Participation · 15 Mar 2026 podcast

So post-COVID, there's been a bit of a whiplash where there was that decline and then there was a sharp increase.

And what my research is focused on is that over the past couple of years, some of that has started to decline again.

And we saw both the higher highs and lower lows in particular among those with a college education.

who benefited disproportionately from the expansion of remote work, flexible work arrangements.

And that is one of the main reasons now over the past couple of years, there's been a sharper decline is as that has started to be pulled back a little bit.

Economists often talk about the difference between the overall participation rate, which to some degree is based on the aging population.

We would expect that to decline somewhat.

If you look at women in prime working age, so 25 to 54, January actually hit an all-time high in participation.

But those aggregate figures can mask a lot of differences underneath the hood.

And that's where we've seen some of those declines.

We've seen them pop up in a lot of different industries.

They're in health care, education.

But in other industries, there have been some gains in information and manufacturing as well.

Industries you might not necessarily think to the same degree for this specific group of prime age women with young children.

One of the interesting findings was that over the past couple of years, that particular group, moms with young children under five, there's been a decline in employment, but also of participation.

And that is different from the past two cycles during COVID and during the financial crisis, where employment fell for this group, but participation did not because unemployment rose.

So a quick side definition, if over the past four weeks you have looked for a job, you are classified as unemployed and thus in the labor market.

And so that has been one of the striking differences, how this has happened, A, outside of a formal recession, but that, B, we've seen this decline in participation.

Now, coming back forward all the way to today, over the past six months, we've seen a little bit of increase in participation.

But a lot of that has been driven by active job search or an increase in unemployment.

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