US Job Recovery and Men / The ‘1 million missing’

The recovery needs to man up already.

Women have regained all the jobs they lost during the financial crisis, but men are still lagging behind.

After losing more than 6 million jobs, men have gained only about 70% of them back, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So what’s the hold-up?

First, men lost more jobs than women to begin with, so they have more ground to gain back.

Meanwhile, most of the missing jobs come from just two male-dominated industries: construction and manufacturing.

They’re barely recovering, whereas sectors populated with a lot more women — like education, leisure, hospitality and health care –have all been growing more rapidly.

Where have all the good men gone?

Construction workers were the single hardest hit group in the recession, accounting for nearly a quarter of all job losses in the economy. In 2010, their unemployment rate surged to 25%.

Now, it’s much lower — around 9%, but it’s not because construction workers are getting jobs. Roughly 1 million of them appear to have either switched industries or dropped out of the labor force altogether, according to BLS.

“Unemployed construction workers have left the industry, either to go back to school, retire or maybe leave the country. They’re no longer sitting at home waiting for a contractor to call them,” said Ken Simonson, chief economist for Associated General Contractors.

He calls them the “1 million missing men.”

Manufacturing has a similar problem. After years of a hiring drought, factories are slowly starting to bring some jobs back, but they’re also complaining that they can\’t find enough skilled workers.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Men have yet to recover all the jobs lost during the financial crisis – Nov. 21, 2013.