Friday, September 04, 2009

Unprecedented Gender Disparity in Labor Market

The two charts featured here further put the "mancession" into perspective, and demonstrate how men have been significantly and disproportionately adversely affected by the recession. The chart above shows that the August jobless rate for men of 10.9% is almost 5.5% above the post-WWII average of 5.43% for males, and is just 0.20% below the historical record high of 11.2% for men in 1982.

In contrast, women are doing much better compared to the historical average jobless rate for females and the post WW-II peak. The chart below shows that the 8.2% August unemployment rate for women is 2.2% above the 6% average since 1948, and a full 4.2 percentage points below the maximum jobless rate of 10.4% in 1982.

This analysis further demonstrates that the severity of the most recent recession fell disproportionately on men, who have experienced much greater job losses and significantly higher jobless rates than women. Futher, this gender disparity in favor of women is historically unprecedented.

2 Comments:

At 9/05/2009 3:38 AM, Blogger juandos said...

This makes me think back to the 'teen unemployment' numbers...

Does the same trend hold there also where females aren't as unemployable as males?

If so why?

Any idea if the BLS site has that sort of breakdown?

 
At 9/05/2009 9:57 AM, Anonymous Mario Balistreri said...

When we take a look at the industry's that have been hit the hardest in this recession it is no surprise that the unemployment rate for men is higher than for women. Is the recovery then going to be slower for men as well? How fast do economists see a rebound in these industries (construction, manufacturing) compared to other industries?

 

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