U.S. Job Recovery – Faster for Men than Women

Even as women have moved up the economic ladder and outpaced men in earnings growth over the last decade, they are lagging behind in a crucial area — getting new jobs.

Since the recession ended in June 2009, men have landed 80% of the 2.6 million net jobs created, including 61% in the last year.

One reason: Male-dominated manufacturing, which experienced sharp layoffs during the recession, has rebounded in recent years, while government, where women hold the majority of jobs, has continued to be hit hard.

But there’s something else at work. Men are grabbing a bigger share of jobs in areas, such as retail sales, that typically have been the province of women, federal data show.

That’s not necessarily good news for women or men. So-called women’s work often pays less and offers skimpier benefits and less opportunity for advancement than the jobs men previously held…

via Women are lagging behind men in landing new jobs – latimes.com.

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Is the Recovery Sexist?

Is the Great Recession sexist? If you listen to the Obama and Romney campaigns, you’d swear it was. Republicans are pushing the point that the bad economy has been particularly tough on women. Democrats counter that the downturn began as a “mancession,” with job losses among women coming later, and largely due to government cutbacks. It’s the latest saga in the ongoing rhetorical one-upmanship in the “war on women.” And it’s mostly wrong.

About 552,000 nonfarm payroll jobs have been lost since President Obama took office, from January 2009 to the present, and 73 percent of those have been from women – a fact the Republicans and the Romney campaign have tried to take advantage of. But, the president’s supporters counter, 7.5 million jobs were lost during the recession, running from December 2007 until June 2009, with women constituting only 28 percent of the lost jobs. This suggests that men were hit first, and that movements in female unemployment lagged behind.

A harder look shows that the real story isn’t so simple.

As the nearby chart shows, at the start of the recession men and women had the same rate of unemployment, 4.4 percent. From the December 2007 start of the recession until its official end in June 2009, in nearly every month both the male and female unemployment rates increased. From the fifth month of the recession until the last, both men and women lost nonfarm payroll jobs every month. The recession didn’t start with men and then spread to women – for both men and women, unemployment was rising at the beginning of the recession, and continued to rise until the recovery…

via RealClearMarkets – Is the Great Recession Sexist?.

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