Charts of the week: Paid family leave, metro unemployment changes, using your college major

Brookings Now presents the first post in a new regular feature that highlights interesting charts, graphs, and data visualizations from recent research at Brookings. Click on the links or the charts to go to the full research.

PART-time and low-wage workers have much lower access to paid family leave

The AEI-Brookings Working Group on Paid Family Leave, a joint initiative co-directed by AEI’s Aparna Mathur and Brookings’s Isabel Sawhill, takes a closer look at the need for inclusive federal paid family leave.

SOME AREAS in the industrial midwest have unemployment rates lower today than in april 2007

Alan Berube and Cecile Murray of the Metropolitan Policy Program examined the change in unemployment rates in America’s 388 metropolitan areas over a ten-year period. The wrote that “these metropolitan unemployment patterns—of increasing regional convergence over the last two decades, and improved conditions in the industrial Midwest over the last decade—don’t square neatly with the political narratives of places being left behind, especially in the Rust Belt.”

over 45 percent of graduates with science and engineering majors enter those fields

Researchers from the Hamilton Project at Brookings examine the variation in earnings within college majors. “Not only do students from the same major transition into a surprising variety of occupations,” they write, “they also earn very different incomes.”