More Women Turn To Moonlighting
By day, Donna Holloway is a psychologist who counsels emotionally troubled students at a special Dallas high school.
At night, Holloway becomes radio station KKDA’s Lady D, the husky-voiced blues and jazz disc jockey who plays B.B. King and broadcasts tales of lost love for her middle-aged radio audience.
Holloway, 48, a divorcee, has worked three and four jobs at a time. She worked as a school counselor, did family counseling on weeknights and performed as a disc jockey at nightclubs. She has recently eased her schedule because she broke her ankle and has difficulty getting around.
Her day job - working with troubled kids - offers challenges, while her night job is a form of relaxation.
It’s also a way to pay for gas, lunch and unexpected expenses.
For a growing number of women, one job isn’t enough any more. Millions are taking two, even three jobs. In 1994, for the first time, women equaled men in working multiple jobs, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In the past two decades, women have gone from hardly working outside the home to working very hard. The percent of female workers with more than one job jumped to 5.9 percent last year from 2.2 percent in 1970. The rate for men declined, then stayed flat at about 6 percent.
The rate for all people with more than one job jumped to 5.9 percent last year from 4.9 percent in 1980, and nearly all of the increase was accounted for by women.
“Women have caught up and become just like men in the labor market,” says Daniel Hamermesh, economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
College-educated women are more likely than high school graduates to have more than one job, and they are right on the heels of college-educated men, economists said.
Women take on numerous jobs mainly for the money. The proportion of women who head households with children has tripled since 1960 to 25 percent; 45 percent of those families live in poverty.
And although womens’ earnings have improved over the years, they still earn about 24 percent less than men, the government says.
Although incomes for both men and women have risen in the past 20 years, their purchasing power has not kept pace, economists say. That’s made it difficult for many women, as well as men, to attain and maintain a middle-class standard of living.
For example, the number of people who think their family income is high enough to satisfy their “important” desires fell from 75 percent in 1976 to 64 percent for men and 65 percent for women in 1993, according to a survey of 4,000 heads of households by DDB Needham Worldwide.
At the same time, women also have become more comfortable performing what once were considered “non-traditional” jobs. What’s more, they’re becoming more willing to work longer hours at several jobs.
“I think women’s attitudes about the kind of work they can do have changed, and the restrictions on what they can do have changed as well,” says Alec Levenson, a researcher at the non-profit Milken Institute for Job & Capital Formation. “It’s now more socially acceptable for them to work long hours like men do.”
College-educated managerial and professional employees have one of the highest rates of moonlighting, according to the bureau. They generally act as consultants or have small businesses on the side to help meet large mortgage payments and private school bills, economists say.
One explanation for the trend is that college-educated people have higher expectations of being middle class than high school graduates. And although they may make a decent wage, college graduates may think they need to earn more income to stay middle class, economists say.
“People usually think if you’ve got lower wages, you’re more likely to work a second job,” Levenson says. “It’s the people who command higher wages who want to work more. If you have lower education, you might not want to work two unsatisfying jobs.”
According to Levenson, 3 percent of college-educated female workers had more than one job in the 1970s. That doubled to 6 percent in the early 1980s, and rose to almost 8 percent by 1991. For high schooleducated women, the proportion grew to about 4 percent by 1991 from 2 percent in the early 1970s.
About 5 percent of men with a high school education have more than one job; about 8.5 percent of college-educated men have two or more jobs.
Teachers and firefighters, who generally earn between $25,000 and $40,000, once were solidly middle class. Now many think they need extra jobs to buy necessities, plus middle-class extras such as nice cars and outings for children.
Fire inspector Diana S. Salinas says she started working this month for a moving company run by offduty firefighters. She took the second job to pay bills, private school expenses and day care.
So every day before dawn Salinas, or her 16-year-old son Ricky, drops off 2-year-old Regina at day care before she heads for work. There she inspects libraries, funeral homes, bars and other businesses for fire code violations.
Like many women with families, her second part-time job has to mesh with her family duties and her husband’s schedule.
“I have to get home to pick up my daughter from day care by 6, clean the house and do laundry,” she says.
Her second job with the moving company starts at 7 a.m. Saturday, when she helps pack and move an office. She spends 10 hours pushing boxes into an elevator, moving them down and out of the building. She says she gets support from her extended family. Her mother irons for her and her son babysits on Saturdays while she works. She pays him $2 an hour, still less than the $10 an hour she earns with the movers.
Statistics suggest a pattern in which much of the dual job-holding occurs when women are in their early 20s through their mid-40s. Single women are more likely to work two jobs. When they marry, fewer continue that workload.
Later, if they are divorced, separated or widowed, they begin to work more than one job again.
“They’re usually in pretty serious economic straits,” says John Stinson, labor economist for the Bureau of Labor Statistics. “They may not be getting child support. Sometimes they had to work two jobs to make ends meet.”
Men also work more than one job more often when they’re young and single, but at a lower rate than for single women. As they age beyond their middle 20s, their multiple job rate slips and remains steady through middle age. Men’s dual jobholding rate also declines when they marry, and picks up again when they are widowed, divorced or separated.
Women also are more likely to patch together several part-time jobs to earn a full-time income, economists say. According to Stinson, 33 percent of women workers have several part-time jobs and no full-time job, compared with 13 percent of men.
It’s unclear whether women will continue to work such dizzying schedules.
“For families,” Hamermesh says, “it’s a problem.”