Work Multiple Jobs? You're Probably a Woman

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Sparks flew last week as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney plunged into general-election mode tangling over women voters.

Romney has said the president's failed economic policies have waged a real war on women, while Obama's campaign has slammed the former Massachusetts governor's camp for refusing to say whether he would have signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act for equal pay.

"RRaising questions about why he feels the need to parse his words on a law that is so fundamental to the economic security not only of women, but also their families," Obama's campaign wrote about Romney in a Tuesday statement.

Women's status in the United States' economy has shifted, in many instances, intensely since Ronald Reagan's first term in 1981.

Maybe most strikingly, if you're a woman in the United States, it's now more likely that you will hold more jobs than your male colleagues to earn an income.

Since 1994, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) first recorded the data, the number of women working multiple jobs has increased 9.1% to 3.6 million, up from 3.3 million. Men holding two jobs has fallen to 3.3 million, down 15.4% from 3.9 million. This means that nearly 52% of women account for all multi-job holders.

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Though the Romney campaign said last week in a press statement that unemployment had risen 1.1 percentage points since January 2009 -- or the month Obama took office -- the unemployment rate for March was unchanged for women when compared against the BLS's year-2009 average rate of 8.1%.

Since 1987 (the oldest recorded data), the number of women who earn more than their husbands has jumped to 9.3 million, up from 5.3 million, or 75.5%. And wives in the United States who earned the only household income rose to 13.9 million, from 7.6 million, up 83%.