April 26, 2010 
By Jacey Eckhart
There used to be three kinds of chicks when it came to military spouse employment. The employed chick and the unemployed chick and the wannabe employed chick. Those were all the chicks the government could count.
Not anymore. This spring the RAND Corporation brought out a little study called "Measuring Underemployment Among Military Spouses." Instead of dividing us into a chickfest, researchers Nelson Lim and David Schulker decided to dump the traditional measures and use a new framework to get to a more accurate picture of military spouse employment.
First these guys came up with eight different kinds of employment situations - 3 kinds of full-time employment, two kinds of part-time employment, and three kinds of unemployment. Most interesting to me was a new way to describe unemployed spouses: NILFs. NILF actually stands for Not In Labor Force. In this study, the researchers used the term to describe spouses who are not looking for a job because they do not WANT a job.
And the numbers were significant. Lim and Schulker found that military spouses were far more likely to NILF than civilian counterparts matched by age, race, parental status, citizenship, education, experience, and geographic location. Which I thought was brilliant.
But then the researchers made recommendations that were, well, lame-o. They suggested that if the government wanted to raise the number of NILFs in the workforce, they should build more child care centers. Wha..?? These researcher guys missed the point entirely, the military equivalent of picking one's teeth with the bone of an Australopithecus.
These NILF spouses aren't a bunch of lazy, dependent slacker gals who need a job. If you ask me, NILFs are more likely not to want a job because they are already fully occupied, thanks. They are stay home moms with babies and toddlers. Behind-the-wheel moms of middle schoolers and high schoolers. Homeschooling moms. Parents with special needs kids. Constant Volunteers. Full-time students.
So look at the numbers again. Compared to our matched civilian counterparts, we military spouses are much more likely to choose to be NILF. We are more likely to be NILF if we have kids. We are more likely to NILF as our husbands rise in rank (read: income). Those researchers need to ask themselves why we military spouses would choose to do this more often than civilians do. Hint: it isn't due to a lack of day care centers.
Instead, Lim and Schulker have actually discovered in numbers proof of one of the coping strategies some military families employ. Could it be that the demands of military life are so high that NILFing makes sense, that opting out is a powerful response worth more to the workings of these particular families than the extra paycheck would be?
By seeing the NILF as an individual who can not get a job underestimates NILFing as a response to the demands of military life. It also underestimates the kind of adaptations employed spouses make. These numbers are a call to leave surveys behind and start qualitative research, the kind where you send researchers into the field to closely observe the ways that families cope. Because that is the next necessary research required to understand the reality of military spouse employment.