April 29, 2004 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.) Self-employed women: 1976-2003In 2003, over 38 percent of self-employed persons were women, and about 5.7 percent of employed women were self-employed. From 1976 to 2003, the percentage of self-employed persons who were women increased nearly 12 percentage points, from 26.8 percent to 38.6 percent. Over the same period, the percentage of women who were self-employed (self-employed women as a percentage of all employed women) increased by about 1.3 percentage points. The data in this report are annual averages from the Current Population Survey. For a wide variety of information on women and work, see BLS Report 973, Women in the Labor Force: A Databook. (Data for 2003 are from Employment & Earnings, January 2004. There is a link to these data on the Current Population Survey homepage: see Characteristics of the Employed, Table 15, Employed persons in agriculture and related and in nonagricultural industries by age, sex, and class of worker.) Note: The comparability of historical labor force data has been affected at various times by methodological and conceptual changes in the Current Population Survey.   Related TED article: Happy 10th Birthday, TED!The very first issue of The Editor's Desk (TED) was posted on September 28, 1998. TED was the first online-only publication of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For 10 years, BLS has been committed to posting a new TED article each business day, for a total of over 2,400 articles so far. |
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