By the Numbers: Women Worker Series and the Bureau of Labor Statistics: Where Have All the Women Gone?

This article focuses on the women worker series. It is a series within the Current Employment Statistics (CES) program, conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in cooperation with state employment agencies. The CES survey is sent out to approximately 160,000 businesses each month, providing information about employment, workers, hours, and earnings on non-agricultural payrolls. According to the BLS, CES data on employment, hours, and earnings are among the timeliest economic indicators measuring each month the health of the economy, earnings tends and inflation, and short-term fluctuations in demand. CES data also is used to provide input into major economic indicators such as personal income, industrial production, index of leading economic indicators, index of coincident indicators, and productivity measures. BLS began collecting and releasing data about women workers from the CBS in 1964, allowing researchers to look at historical tends of the American work force and the role of women across industries.