Businesswomen urge BLS to continue gender-specific reports

Businesswomen urge BLS to continue gender-specific reports

Keywords: Gender, Employment

In a letter to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), Business and Professional Women/USA (BPW/USA) President Nancy Hurlbert urged the BLS to continue collecting data on women workers in the Current Employment Statistics(CES) survey. The BLS announced in late December its intention to stop collecting this important information after July 2005.

The Bureau’s CES report gathers information on employee hours, earnings and types of jobs held. “The report represents a critical, ongoing source of employment information for policymakers and researchers. With a gender breakdown, the payroll survey is capable of painting a reliable picture of where women are working across industries and business cycles. Without a gender breakdown, that picture becomes far more difficult to obtain,” Hurlbert wrote in BPW/USA’s comments to Amy A. Hobby, BLS Clearance Officer.

The BLS has stated that it does not need data from the Current Employment Statistics (CES) survey because it collects other labor market information on women through a household survey, the Current Population Survey (CPS). Hurlbert raised concerns about substituting that information for the CES writing, “I do not believe the CPS is an adequate substitute for the CES in this area. While the CPS is valuable for other types of information, its smaller sampling size produces a greater margin for error than the CES survey, as the Bureau itself has noted. Moreover, the CPS’s reliance on household interviews introduces the possibility of subjective reporting bias that does not exist with the payroll survey.”

For more information about BPW/USA, see www.bpwusa.org