Have women done better or worse than men during the recent recession? As we begin to show signs of coming out of our long slump, how are women being affected? According to a recent study, women did better than men during the recession, avoiding many of the steep job cuts that affected men. However, their economic recovery rate is currently much worse than men’s—women just aren’t getting hired back on at the same rate that men are.
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Women may have fared better than men during the recession but they’re not doing as well in the recovery.
The recent recession was labeled by some a “man-cession,” because of sharp employment cuts in male-dominated fields. During the downturn, which ran from late-2007 to mid-2009, sectors such as manufacturing and construction shed millions of jobs, sending the unemployment rate for men into the double digits. But as the economy has recovered, men have been making up lost ground in the labor market faster than women.
“2010 is a year where men had a recovery and women didn’t,” said Betsey Stevenson, the Labor Department’s chief economist.
The unemployment rate for men, on average, was 10.5% last year. By April it had declined 1.1 points to 9.4%, the Labor Department said Friday. Joblessness among women was less common: Their unemployment rate was 8.6% on average last year. But women are struggling to nudge their joblessness down. By April, the unemployment rate for women had fallen just 0.2 points to 8.4%.
A large part of the problem is that women are disproportionately represented in state and local governments—and that is where many jobs are being cut now.
“It was a very broad and deep recession for everybody,” said Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, but “where the cuts have affected women more than men is in state and local government.”
What do you think—what’s the economic forecast for women? What lies ahead for women’s changing roles in the post-recession workplace?
