Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Worker Status: Full-Time and Part-Time Workers in Families

Two parent working families are something we often read about, but rarely see data on. The PUMS data for our region provides some insight into full-time as well as part-time workers in families.

The graph below shows the prominence of full-time workers, part-time workers, and no workers for families with two parents present, as well as single parent families.  Almost three out of four two parent families (72.4%) have at least one full time worker present. However, only 40% of two parent or married couple families are lucky enough to have BOTH parents working full time jobs. In addition, as many as a quarter of two parent families (26%) only have a single full time worker, where the spouse has no employment.

When looking at working fathers, as many as 62% have a full time job, compared to only 45.5% of working mothers. While slightly more than a quarter of single fathers and mothers work only part-time positions (27.3% and 28.4% respectively), single mothers are fair more likely to be unemployed (26.0%) compared to single fathers (10.7%).

Please note: Any household with someone age 65 or older present was excluded in order to not inflate the number/percentage of families where the householder is a retiree and not working. Hopefully the targeted families examined here are thereby headed largely by working age householders between the ages of 16 and 64.

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