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.
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.”