Women Trailing Men in Jobs Recovery, Gaining Only 27 Percent of New Positions

Men are faring better than women in the jobs recovery, a reversal of the gender roles that prevailed during the recent recession, according to recent analyses by BNA and nonprofit research groups.

Over the past year of steady job growth, men gained 1.3 million jobs in the nonfarm private sector, or about 73 percent of all new jobs, while women garnered about 500,000 jobs, or 27 percent, BNA’s analysis of Department of Labor figures found.

In the public sector, where states and local governments have been shedding jobs, women lost 332,000 jobs over the past 12 months, or 57 percent of the total, compared with 215,000 jobs lost by men, or 43 percent. The losses are proportional to women’s 61 percent share of government employment in contrast to the private sector, where women account for almost half the workforce.

Women “clearly are not getting their share of jobs,” Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told BNA Aug. 30. “It’s beginning to be a serious problem.” Little public attention has been paid to the disparity, Hartmann said.

Part of the disparity likely is due to the types of industries that have been expanding, such as durable goods manufacturing and certain high-tech industries, which traditionally employ more men than women. “We might not like that but there’s not much we can do about it,” she said.

“What we’d be very unhappy to see is if employers, faced with equally qualified men and women applicants for the same job, are discriminating. That’s a possibility,” Hartmann added.

“Men disproportionately lost jobs during recession so it is not totally surprising that they are regaining what little” there is, Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial, said Aug. 29.

“I can’t say that men have taken jobs that would have normally gone to women,” Swonk said. Their high unemployment could mean that more men are applying for job openings than women, “which are skewing the statistics in their favor,” she said.

Unemployment Rates Diverge.

The Washington, D.C.-based IWPR in an August study found that so far in the jobs recovery, men have regained almost 28 percent of all the jobs they lost, or 1.7 million jobs, while women had recouped only 11 percent, or 281,000 jobs.

In addition, women’s unemployment rate has risen to 7.9 percent from 7.7 percent in June 2009, when the recession officially ended, while men’s jobless rate has declined to 9.0 percent from 9.9 percent.

During the downturn and its aftermath, men lost more jobs than women (6.1 million versus 2.6 million), leading to a brief period of historic parity between men and women in the combined private sector and government workforce in late 2009. Since then, the gap between men and women has widened to 1.5 million jobs, still less than the 3.4 million gap in December 2007 when the recession started.

The greater decrease in men’s employment is attributable primarily to the types of industries that were hit hardest by the downturn, particularly male-dominated construction and manufacturing. As a share of employment, women lost a larger percentage of jobs than men in most industries, Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said in a May study. For example, in the financial industry, women’s employment fell by 12.5 percent between 2007 and 2010, while that of men declined 8.8 percent.

“The fact that women lost fewer jobs in this recession is entirely due to the fact that they were concentrated in less cyclical industries before the recession started,” Shierholz said.

Men `Trading Down’ for Lower-Paying Jobs.

Employment changes in many industries over the past 12 months show women disproportionately fared worse than men, BNA’s analysis found.

In manufacturing, where they constitute only 28 percent of the workforce, women lost 34,000 jobs, while men gained 199,000 jobs, and in retail trade, where about half of all employees are women, they also lost 34,000 jobs, while men gained 191,000 jobs.

“There is ample evidence of men trading down” for jobs that pay less than the ones they lost, Mesirow’s Swonk said.

Kathryn Kobe, an analyst at Economic Consulting Services, suspects that part of the job disparity between men and women in some sectors is the result of the mix of specific industries. “Men are more prevalent in some retail industries,” so they may be gaining jobs in businesses that traditionally have tended to hire more men and are recovering, such as motor vehicle dealers, whereas grocery stores, which employ more women, have seen little expansion in employment, Kobe said Aug. 29.

Thus, they may not necessarily be taking jobs that traditionally go to women, “but I do think more men are changing their professions” and moving into nursing and other well-paid fields in growing industries, Kobe said. In health care and social assistance, where 80 percent of workers are female, only 62 percent of new jobs, or 216,000 jobs, have gone to women, while 38 percent, or 131,000 jobs, have gone to men.