Over the longer haul, some interesting undercurrents reveal themselves when you break things down by age and gender. Men 45 and older experienced sharp declines in median job tenure in the 1980s and 1990s, for example, although the situation has stabilized for them since.
The decline in the 1980s and 1990s persisted through two business cycles, so I think it truly did represent reduced job security. Older men were hit hard by layoffs in the early 1980s and early 1990s, and those who were able to return to the workforce drove median tenure down. That stuff about the disappearance of the “steady job with good benefits” (it’s a line from a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign speech) isn’t all wrong.
Here the increases up to 2000 mainly reflect women’s entry into the full-time, permanent paid U.S. workforce. The share of women ages 25 through 54 with jobs doubled from 37% in 1951 to 74% in 2000. Many women were joining the workforce and thus driving tenure down throughout that period, but women staying in jobs and building careers more than made up for that.
Since then, the movements have coincided with the fluctuations of the job market, with median tenure rising amid the weak labor demand of the 2000s and early 2010s and mostly falling over the past decade as women’s employment rates rebounded.
One thing that stands out in both charts is the stability of median job tenure for those ages 25 through 34. For women, it has barely changed since the early 1980s; for men, it hasn’t really budged since the early 1950s (which implies that it has probably risen a bit). In other words, all that talk about millennials being inveterate job hoppers was mostly bunk. Yes, young adults change jobs more often than their elders, but as economist Gray Kimbrough has shown repeatedly using a different measure—the percentage of workers with at least two sequential employers in the same year—current young adults are less likely to do so than earlier generations did at the same age.
Another thing that’s maybe a little less obvious but seems important is the onset of what you might call normalization after about 2000. The decades before then experienced big shifts in men’s and women’s attachments to their jobs. Since then, men’s job tenure has held more or less constant while women’s has been cyclical. This shift from an age of disruption to a steadier era has also apparent in measures of corporate volatility and startup activity. In that sense, these really are more stable times, even if they don’t always feel like it.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. A former editorial director of Harvard Business Review, he has written for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is author of The Myth of the Rational Market.
The tenure for women of all ages, meanwhile, has mostly risen through the decades, although not during the past decade.