The past few years have seen a huge number of state and local government jobs cut, with continuing public sector job losses. That's bad for the economy, with those public sector job losses counteracting some of the private sector job creation happening each month and dragging down the economy. But it's worse for women, as the Economic Policy Institute's David Cooper explains. Women make up a much higher proportion of state and local workers than of the overall workforce, and:
[T]hey also have taken the brunt of the job losses in state and local governments. Of the net change in total state and local employment between 2007 and 2011—a decline of roughly 765,000 jobs—70 percent of the drop is from female employees. Today, there are about 540,000 fewer women in state and local jobs than in 2007, compared with about 225,000 fewer men.
African-Americans, too, have been hit hard by public sector job cuts. The disproportionate impact women and black people face from attacks on public sector workers are something to remember about those attacks—in the grand scheme of things, the Republican project is to damage government and dismantle the middle class entirely, but they find sexism and racism to be very handy tools for accomplishing that.