US Jobs Recovery / Middle-aged women doing particularly poorly

SINCE the job market in the United States hit bottom more than three years ago, men have benefited from the recovery far more than woman have, with middle-aged women doing particularly poorly.

From December 2009 through last month, the economy added 5.3 million jobs, according to the Labor Department’s monthly survey of households. Only 30 percent of them went to women. To some extent, that is simply a reflection of the fact that the recession hit men much harder than women, but the result has been at least a temporary reversal of the long trend of women holding an ever-increasing share of jobs.

The proportion of jobs held by women, which was around 28 percent when the household survey began in 1948, rose to a peak of 47.5 percent in January 2010, just after the economy hit bottom. During that period, there was only one substantial setback to the trend, in 1952 and 1953, when the end of the Korean War brought soldiers back to the civilian economy.

But in the first months of this recovery, that number fell as low as 46.6 percent, and it was at just 46.8 percent in January.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor from 

via Recovery Has Brought More Jobs for Men Than Women – NYTimes.com.