Stacey Vanek-Smith

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2,095 appearances 7 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 19 Sep

Stacey Vanek-Smith’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 7 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 2.

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And so in honor of her, I wanted to look at something that has been going on in the economy for a little while.

Uh, it is so this is my chart.

It is the female labor force participation rate.

So this is essentially the sh of all the women.

in the economy, uh, the number of them who are working in the formal economy.

So this doesn't count like if you're, you know, obviously child care, elder care.

That was an enormous amount of work, but it's not you don't get you're not getting necessarily a paycheck from that.

So this is the n the share of women who are in the workforce.

So this was climbing, climbing, climbing.

Uh since nineteen forty eight when this they started collecting data on this.

Uh climbing, climbing, climbing all the way up, and you can see a COVID, it all it hit fifty-eight percent.

The COVID it just plunged.

Um, this was a time when a lot of a lot of especially women were dropping out of the workforce for childcare.

Then after COVID, you see the numbers start to climb, climb, climb, climb again.

Now, what I think is especially interesting is starting like just before 2025, through 2025, and now the number starts coming down.

Which is interesting for a couple of reasons to me.

One, the cost of childcare is apparently looming very large.

Just the cost of childcare is going up, the availability of childcare is going down.

That's just one f uh factor.

About sixty percent of the women, uh in a there was a large survey of women why they were leaving the workforce.

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