Men Get Jobs, Women Lose Them

U.S. Labor Department data showed that, during the downturn, men lost jobs at a faster rate than women. There was never an entirely adequate explanation of the trend. Women do make only about 80% of what their male counterparts do. Companies may have kept their least expensive workers.

But this trend seems to have reversed. Men have begun to do better in the job market, and women have begun to do worse. Perhaps the cost of male workers is not as important as it was a year ago. That may be a signal the recession is really over.

Pew Research reports that “From the end of the recession in June 2009 through May 2011, men gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5%. Women, by contrast, lost 218,000 jobs during the same period, and their unemployment rate increased by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5%.” Women still have an overall edge, but the gap has closed. Pew opines that the overall growth of women in the national work force has ended. Maybe that is why the numbers are not influenced by a decades-old trend as more and more women left the home to find jobs.

The fact that there seems to be sea change in the addition or lay-offs of employees by gender may simply be an anomaly. The American labor force is 160 million people strong. Many of the jobs lost in the recession were in the construction industry, which has been dominated by men. At any rate, a loss of 218,000 jobs among women over a period of two years in a pool as large as the U.S. work population is statistically insignificant.

Pew does not spend any effort in an evaluation of the size of the country’s employment base. That would have ruined the attraction of the headline of the study: “In Two Years of Economic Recovery, Women Lost Jobs, Men Found Them.” Most of those job gains were probably among men who dig ditches and erect lumber supports to build roads and homes.

Douglas A. McIntyre