00:01
So here, this is something that you just need to know.
00:02
I'm going to try to plot this for you, right? if you start at 1960 and you go all the way to 2015, let's think about what happened to men and to women, right? so historically in 1916, and it's labor force participation rate in percent at the top of the scale.
00:26
So it used to be that, you know, back in the day, you'd get a lot of men working, right? this number might have been like 85 % for men, but since then it's basically trickled down a little bit, something like this, maybe a little flatter, maybe a little steeper.
00:44
But the decline in the labor force participation rate for men has just been downward sloping and fairly constant to the point where in 2015, it reached maybe something like 70, i'm just eyeballing the graph for you, maybe something like 72%, right? something like that.
01:03
So there's been this sort of long, slow decline where the population has aged.
01:08
And as the population has aged, a lot more men are retired.
01:11
And so when they're retired, they're not participating in the labor force.
01:15
So for men, you've got, you know, a slow, steady decrease in labor force participation.
01:25
But for women, the story is, of course, somewhat different.
01:29
If you go back to 1960 for women, women's labor force participation there might have been something like 40%.
01:37
Because in 1960, women were not allowed a very active role in the labor force.
01:43
Now, women's labor force participation looks something like this.
01:47
If we cut, you know, it went up steadily as women, you know, entered the labor force, but it tends to flat line at around 2000.
01:56
And even, even then, it's maybe declined a little bit, but today women's labor force participation might be something like 55%.
02:03
Right.
02:04
The story of women entering the labor force has really, you know, died out by now, right? so it increased and then stagnated maybe a touch of decrease.
02:24
But after 2000, it certainly wasn't increasing anymore.
02:32
So that's simply what the data looks like.
02:34
Let's see if we can match that to the answer.
02:38
So a looks pretty good, decreased every in every year, decreased slightly after 2000.
02:43
I don't think a is right because it's missing the big increase in women's labor force participation starting in 1960, right? so b is not wrong because it says b, women's labor force participation decrease in most years.
02:59
That's wrong...