Unemployment Women

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday that the government has been substantially underestimating joblessness, particularly among women. The underreporting was uncovered in tests of a new monthly survey technique that the department will begin using in January to measure unemployment. In a report released Tuesday, the bureau said that in the year ending last August, the new survey produced an overall jobless rate of 7.6%, compared to the 7.1% rate that has been officially reported.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Tuesday that the government has been substantially underestimating joblessness, particularly among women. The underreporting was uncovered in tests of a new monthly survey technique that the department will begin using in January to measure unemployment. In a report released Tuesday, the bureau said that in the year ending last August, the new survey produced an overall jobless rate of 7.6%, compared to the 7.1% rate that has been officially reported.

SOLO SPINOUT by Ann Nietzke (Soho Press: $22, 189 pp.) Edgy characters. Characters on edge. Characters on the edge--of middle age, menopause, unemployment. Women who live in "Mexikorea," on the frayed eastern edge of Los Angeles' Westside, who have ex-husbands or boyfriends but are edging their way into lesbianism. These are the people Ann Nietzke writes about in this novella and three shorter stories.

Could an advanced degree help you sleep soundly through the night? The answer depends on your gender. A better education helps women sleep well, but worsens sleep in men, a new study suggests. "For women, higher education may mean more resources, such as better support for child care and elderly care," says Ying-Yeh Chen, a social epidemiologist at the Taipei City Psychiatric Centre in Taiwan, who led the research.

With Saturday's deadline approaching, state officials say fewer than 35,000 of the estimated 115,000 eligible women have applied for their share of a $26-million class-action settlement for workers who were improperly denied unemployment benefits. Women who can show that they were not aware of the program until after the deadline have until Oct. 15 to make late applications, according to Ralph Hilton, assistant chief counsel for the Employment Development Department.

The bitter days of the putsch have passed, days that filled the hearts of all Russian mothers with fear and pain--fear and pain because on one side of the barricades stood their unarmed children defending democracy, while on the other side also were their children, manning tanks. The women were pained that their feelings, as in the past when Soviet troops were sent to Prague or Afghanistan, had not been considered.

A "radical reorganization" of the way in which Western Europe manages its air space is "urgent and essential" if the region's air transport system is not to be brought to a near standstill in the late 1990s because of congestion, according to a report released this month. The study, commissioned by the International Air Transport Assn., said the number of airline passengers carried each year in Europe will almost double, from 267 million in 1988 to 500 million by the year 2000.

The nation's unemployment rate hit a decade-low 6.3% last month as nearly half a million jobs opened up in construction, retail trade and business and health services, the government said today. The 0.3-percentage-point improvement over March's rate cut the number of jobless Americans to 7.5 million, the lowest since April, 1980, when Jimmy Carter was President. April's unemployment matches a 6.3% rate for the first three months of 1980, the lowest rate of this decade.

More women than ever before now are holding jobs around the world, latest U.N. labor statistics show, and ironically more are also unemployed. In fact, in many countries unemployment grows faster among women than among men and decreases in women's unemployment are smaller than in men's. The proportion of women in the work force has increased in 21 industrialized and 13 developing nations, according to the new Yearbook of Labor Statistics issued by the International Labor Organization.

The nation's unemployment rate increased slightly to 7.3% in January, the highest since August, even while total employment continued to climb to record levels, the Labor Department reported Friday. The increase in joblessness was caused by an unexpected surge in the labor force--the second in two months--rather than any slump in the economy, Janet L. Norwood, commissioner of the department's Bureau of Labor Statistics, assured Congress' Joint Economic Committee.

Job losses in the troubled oil industry and among auto companies helped push the overall unemployment rate up 0.2 of a percentage point to 7.2% in May, but services and housing construction stayed relatively strong, the Labor Department reported Friday.