Recovery Is Bypassing Women

The Wall Street Journal
July 6, 2011

http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2011/07/06/recovery-is-bypassing-women/tab/print/

 Women have been worse-off than men through the past two years
 of sluggish economic recovery, according to this report by
 the Pew Research Center. The trend is a reversal from the
 recession itself, which due to of big declines in
 construction and manufacturing employment was much rougher
 on men than women. The discrepancy is partly due to the
 nature of the recovery, which has been led by the male-
 dominated manufacturing sector, but that doesn’t explain all
 of it.

Bloomberg News - Women haven’t fared as well as men in the
recovery.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%, according
to the Pew Report. Women - who still have a better jobs
situation - lost 218,000 jobs and their unemployment rate
increased by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5%, according to
Pew’s analysis of Labor Dept. statistics.

"The recovery from the Great Recession is the first since
1970 in which women have lost jobs even as men have gained
them," Pew writes in the report. "It is not entirely clear
why men are doing better than women in the current recovery."

One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that women
have stopped entering the work force after a decades-long
transition from housework. But the report suggests that’s
unlikely: While the labor force participation rate for women
peaked in 2000 and has since fallen, men’s labor
participation fell by a greater amount over the decade. Part
of the explanation lies in the nature of the recovery, which
has been led by the male-centric factory sector and seen big
job losses in the state and local government sector, which
employs a disproportionate share of women. Still, Pew says
that explains only part of the phenomenon, as men have
outpaced women in a number of sectors.

From the report: "The more notable developments are that men
have found jobs in sectors where women have not, and that men
made stronger advances than women in other sectors. In
particular, women lost a total of 433,000 jobs in
manufacturing, retail trade and finance during the recovery,
while men gained 253,000 jobs in those sectors. Two other
sectors - professional and business services and education
and health services - gave women a strong boost; 691,000 new
jobs in those sectors went to women. But men did even better,
gaining 804,000 jobs in those two sectors. There is no ready
explanation for why employment growth in these sectors has
favored men."

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