Impact of Demographic and Lifestyle Factors on Employment

Time is a universal experience. It serves as a defining characteristic of everyday life while influencing the decisions people make on a daily basis. Understanding how people spend their time and the factors that can influence it is necessary in order to identify trends and patterns to ultimately improve quality of life amongst different groups of people. Demographic and lifestyle factors, such as gender, race, and educational status, can be utilized to reach a better understanding of different groupings of people.

Employment is an integral factor of life that influences how people spend the majority of their time. For those who are employed, the majority of their time will occur at their place of work throughout the year. Conversely, those who are not employed will spend the majority of their time completing other activities such as watching television, searching for a job, etc. Time data can be a helpful tool to examine different groups of people who are employed and unemployed to visualize some sort of trend amongst the two groups.

According to time use data dating back to 2003, there has been roughly a 1% increase in general employment rates. This increase could be attributed to multiple different factors, such as access to the internet which allows for more resources and educational opportunities. The level of education completed also suggests an influence on employment rates. Completion of higher-level education, ranging from an associates degree beyond, suggests better rates of employment within the United States. Those who possess a high school diploma or less than a high school diploma show significantly higher rates of unemployment compared to those who have received higher education.

Gender, oftentimes, influences many parts of the workplace. Over time, there have been a multitude of debates on workplace inequalities and how unemployment can be compared to sex and gender. The female sex is characterized by a -.79% difference in employment compared to the male sex. Additionally, over the course of 20 years, female data shows a much higher rate of high school incompletion than male data, which correlates to educational status and employment rate. However, recent data suggests that gender workplace indifferences are beginning to minimize to create a more equitable future. For instance, according to an article, “Women Now Outnumber Men in the U.S. College-Educated Labor Force,” there are now “more women ages 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree or more education in the labor force than before the pandemic…than college educated men ages 25 and older in the labor force” (Fry, Richard).

Race is an additional type of demographic important to examine in relation to unemployment rates. Since 2003, black citizens have experienced the highest rates of unemployment followed by Native Americans. Although this should not come as a surprise due to media and news coverage of this issue, it demonstrates the need for improvement in society. Most drastically, black women face the highest rate of unemployment especially in 2020 when the height of the pandemic took place. In the article “Jobs and unemployment”, there is an indicator of a shift in payroll employment from April 2020 to May 2020 implying a change from a height of unemployment towards recovery (Staff, EPI, and Elise Gould).

Employment rates in the United States have changed and progressed greatly from 2003 to 2020. The trends suggest that change is occurring in these rates surrounding gender, race, and educational status. The near future will show how society will continue to progress since recovering from the pandemic. However, the patterns demonstrate that those with lower-levels of educational background, people of color, and women tend to be the most at risk for unemployment in the United States.Time is an ultimate shared experience that influences how people spend their days. Through understanding how people spend their time and the multitude of factors that influence it, it is made possible to improve life for different groups of people across the country.

Works Cited:

Fry, Richard. “Women Now Outnumber Men in the U.S. College-Educated Labor Force.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 12 Oct. 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/09/26/women-now-outnumber-men-in-the-u-s-college-educated-labor-force/.

Staff, EPI, and Elise Gould. “Jobs and Unemployment.” Economic Policy Institute, https://www.epi.org/indicators/unemployment/.