Source: The Canadian Press

A new study has found the percentage of mothers who juggle a job and raising young children has more than doubled in a little over three decades.

Statistics Canada says the employment rate among women with children under the age of three was 64.4% last year, more than twice the proportion of 27.6% in 1976.

The agency says the employment rate for women with children has been steadily rising for three decades _ almost doubling in 33 years.

In 2009, 72.9% of women with children under the age of 16 living at home were employed, nearly twice the rate of 39.1% recorded in 1976.

“This analysis of paid work among women shows considerable change in their labour force activity,” says a summary of the study.

“In general, the employment rate for women has followed an upward trend since 1976, when it was 41.9%, although women are still less likely to be employed than men.”

StatsCan says that about 8.1 million women worked last year, or 58.3% of Canada’s working-age females _ markedly less than the 65.2% of men.

And, while nearly three-quarters of employed women worked full-time last year, they were still more likely than men to work part-time.

Nearly seven in 10 part-time workers were women. That proportion has changed little over the last three decades, StatsCan says.

“The majority of employed women continue to work in occupations in which they have been traditionally concentrated,” says the study.

“However, they have increased their representation in several professional fields such as business and finance.”

Last year, 67% of employed women worked in teaching, nursing and related health occupations, clerical or other administrative positions, or sales-and-service occupations. In contrast, 31% of employed men worked in these fields.

Yet women comprised 51.2% of business and financial professionals in 2009, up from 38.3% in 1987. The share of women employed has gone up in diagnostic and treating positions in medicine and related health professions.

Women made up 55.2% of doctors, dentists and other health occupations in 2009, as well as 72.5% of professionals employed in social sciences or religion.

The agency says the impact of the recent economic downturn was less severe on women than on men.

The employment rate for men fell 2.9 percentage points to 65.2% between 2008 and 2009. The same pattern was set in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, StatsCan said.

In contrast, the employment rate for women declined by only one percentage point in 2009, after reaching an historic high of 59.3% in 2008.

In 2009, the number of unemployed women rose to 608,000, compared with 487,000 in 2008 and 476,000 in 2007.

The unemployment rate for women increased to 7% in 2009, the highest since 2003. But among men, it reached 9.4%, the highest rate since 1996.

“Men were hit harder by the downturn because the industries hardest hit by employment losses in 2009 were male-dominated,” said StatsCan. “They included those in the goods-producing sector, mainly manufacturing, construction and natural resources.

“In contrast, more women worked in service industries, such as health care and social assistance, and educational services, where employment continued to grow.”

In October, TD Bank released a report that said motherhood leads to unexplained but significant wage losses for working women.

The authors of the report, entitled “Economic Impact of Motherhood,” suggested the wage gap was largely the result of wage penalties mothers suffer each time they exit and re-enter the workforce.

The report found women who exit the workforce to have children tend to experience an unexplained but persistent 3% wage penalty per year of absence.

The TD Bank report showed the penalty is as much as three times more severe for frequent exits (three or more) than it is for long absences.

It also said mothers returning to the workforce have greater responsibility on the home front, meaning mothers tend to “become less responsive to classic job incentives like wages and more attracted to work-life balance.”

The report found women incur far less financial penalty if they are able to build more experience before temporarily exiting, irrespective of the length of time they ultimately remain out of the workforce.

“Returning to the same employer also lends itself to a lower wage penalty, as social networks and other firm-specific skills remain better preserved.”