There’s an old joke running around in conservative circles. The headline in the New York Times is “World Destroyed by Nuclear War.” The subhead reads, “Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.” If there were no double standard, the subhead on last week’s 25-year record high unemployment should have been “Men Hardest Hit.”
The unemployment rate among men is 10%, among women 7.6%. If you take a closer look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you find some interesting things. Women make up 47% of the work force and 47% of people 20 and over with jobs. That looks like an enormously high percentage to someone who grew up in the 1950s. In 1950 only 27% of “gainful workers” were women. In 1960 only 32% of the people in the work force were women.
That was then and this is now. Why are men more likely to be unemployed? Because they tend to be concentrated in jobs from which a lot of people are being laid off—in the parlance of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, production workers, movers and transportation workers, construction and extraction workers, for whome the unemployment rates are 14.7%, 12.5% and 19.7%. Unemployment among management, professional and related workers, in contrast, is only 4.0%. Those jobs are much more likely to be held by women.
Just as we have seen an increasing feminization of our colleges and universities, whose enrollment these days is something like 58% female, and our professional schools (I’m told that about half of law school and medical school students are women these days), so we’re seeing a feminization of the work force and, in this recession, the jobholding cadres. I’m sure this has all kinds of interesting implications, and I want to spend some time learning more and thinking about it. But in any case this is not a recession in which women are hit hardest.
