By: Dani Carlson, Director of Communications and Digital StrategyTaneisha Fair, Research Assistant/Contract Manager
What if there were only 100 women in Ohio? What would those women look like – where would they live? By looking at data from the U.S. Census Bureau, we were able to extrapolate the characteristics of Ohio’s 5,957,347 women and girls, as though they were all represented by only 100 people.
Looking at age, groups are close to evenly split. We know that about a quarter of the 100 would be girls 19 years old and younger. Another 25 would be in their 20s and 30s, 25 more would be between 40 and 60-years-old and another quarter would be age 60 and older.
If Ohio had only 100 women and girls, more than half would live in just 10 of Ohio’s 88 counties.
If Ohio had only 100 women and girls, more than half would live in just 10 of Ohio’s 88 counties; Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Summit, Montgomery, Lucas, Butler, Stark and Lorain. Eighty-one of those 100 Ohio women are white, 13 are Black, about four would be Latino and about two would be Asian-American. The remaining four women would be Native American, two races or another race.
If there were only 100 Ohio women, before the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic effects hit, two of them aged 16 and older would have been unemployed. Nearly 12 women would have worked in the health care and social assistance fields, about six would have worked in the educational services field and about five would have worked retail. The others are thinly spread among many other professions.
Unfortunately, those employment numbers are rapidly changing.
The number of women who are unemployed in Ohio has gone up significantly due to the coronavirus and its economic impacts. While the Great Recession was sometimes called a “mancession” as men faced higher unemployment rates, this economic downturn, so far, seems to disproportionately be affecting women. If those same 100 women now lived in Ohio they would have a much different employment outlook – about 9 more of them would have lost their jobs as of last month. – meaning 11 women would now be unemployed. .
Of course, it takes a lot more to truly know all the women in Ohio, but these indicators give a better idea of who our female friends and neighbors are.
