Employment Status.  Table 7.4 reports, by Service, the rates of fathers and mothers who were employed.  In the CPS, the civilian labor force is defined as all employed and unemployed civilians 16 years and over.(25)  Unemployed, however, is limited to those civilians who made a specific effort to find a job within the past four weeks.  All other persons are "not in the labor force."  For this report, civilian comparison employment computations are based on all parents in the non-institutional population, including those not in the labor force.(26)  The three employment categories (employed, unemployed, not in the labor force) are included because recruits' parents represent the total population, not just the defined "labor force."

DoD recruit mothers were somewhat more likely to be employed than CPS mothers (78 percent for DoD mothers and 73 percent for CPS mothers).(27)  Fathers were more likely to be employed than mothers, but there were no differences in employment between CPS and DoD fathers (89 percent of CPS and DoD fathers were employed).  Employment rates were very similar across Services and components.

See Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1998 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1998), pp. 400–401, for a detailed explanation of labor force employment categories and the component parts of each category.(go back)
26. Approximately 7 percent of recruits' fathers, 16 percent of recruits' mothers, 9 percent of CPS fathers, and 24 percent of CPS mothers were reported as "not in the labor force."
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27. The recruit survey asks recruits whether the parent is currently working at a paid job, in a business, or on a farm, while the CPS asks whether the individual was employed in the last week.  Thus, comparisons of employment rates from the two data sets must be interpreted with caution.
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