It’s no secret that women have suffered more than men from the recession and this is particularly true in California.  A report released this month by the California Budget Project  and a blog by the California Work & Family Coalition, certainly chronicles this.  California has the seventh largest gap between the rich and poor among the 50 states, ranking between Alabama and Texas and the gap widened to a greater extent in California than in the US as a whole.  The incomes of the wealthy increased significantly over the past two decades, while those of all other Californians declined.  The cuts that have been made to deal with California’s budget crisis have fallen mainly on the backs of the middle class and poor where women are a majority.  A loss of jobs has been a major result of cuts.  The majority of women’s job losses were in the public sector — public schools and city and county jobs.

Women are recovering from the recession more slowly than men.   During the modest job recovery of the last year, mens’ job gains kept pace with the growth in the male working-age population while the share of working-age women with jobs declined by 1.5 percentage points.

Unmarried mothers have been particularly hard hit by the recession.The employment rate for California’s unmarried mothers dropped by 10.4 percentage points, from a recent peak of 69.2 percent in 2007 to 58.8 percent in 2010.  The share of these families with incomes below the federal poverty line increased by 3.7 percentage points, from 31.7 percent to 35.4 percent.  That’s more than a third of all single-mother families in California are living below the poverty level.

Exacerbating the problem for women, and particularly unmarried mothers, has been the cuts in health and human services programs most needed by women.  These include cuts in MediCal, In Home Services, SSI/SSP, CalWORKS, and child care.  And unfortunately the Governor’s Proposed 2012-2013 Budget includes more cuts in these areas.