Employment And Population In The Long-Run

In the short-run, it's easy enough to see what's happening with the employment-population ratio in the United States. We're in a giant recession, so it's heading down. The longer-term picture is, I think, more ambiguous:

For a long time, women's employment has been rising while the trend has been for men's employment to fall. Up until 2000, the rate of women's increase was faster than the rate of men's decrease, so the overall trend was up. But since the demise of Pets.com, we've been on a downward trend. What's not clear is to what extent that trend is purely an artifact of the current downturn versus to what extent it may reflect an actual reversion to a pre-1990s equilibrium. From a progressive feminist point of view, we're presumably looking for men's and women's labor force participation to converge over the long run. But I'm not sure there are any obvious ideological grounds on which to favor convergence at one particular level over another.