Some 11% of married couples with one partner between 25 and 54 years old had no earners in April. This is by far the highest rate of dual-unemployed couples on record. The share of couples with no earners never rose higher than 7% during the Great Recession.

The Rosie the Riveter myth itself—the notion that women entered the non-domestic workforce en masse during the war—ignores the fact that many African American women already worked outside of the before the war. Perhaps World War II was a watershed moment for white women’s work, but it's a more complicated story. Betty Soskin, a tour guide and consultant for the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park explains this point to visitors. “It’s not that it’s not true,” she says. “It’s just that it is incomplete. I don’t think it’s by design or by grand conspiracy,” Sodkin says. “It’s just about who tells the stories.”

Across socioeconomic classes, women are increasingly enrolling and completing postsecondary education, while, even as opportunities for people without a college education shrink, men’s rates of graduation remain relatively stagnant. In 2015, the most recent year for which data is available, 72.5 percent of females who had recently graduated high school were enrolled in a two-year or four-year college, compared to 65.8 percent of men. That’s a big difference from 1967, when 57 percent of recent male high-school grads were in college, compared to 47.2 percent of women.