It was mostly men who got the ax during the Great Recession, so a new term for the longest economic downturn in the postwar era began floating around in news reports: The Mancession.
But that was 2009.
The Mancession was declared over at the beginning of this year. In January, Slate wrote about the end of the Mancession, and declared women as the economy’s biggest losers. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they showed that job growth for men outpaced job growth for women during 10 of the 12 months of 2010. State budget crises led to job losses for women, who make up the lion’s share of local government workers.
Six months later, the economic outlook for women is still looking bleak. Since the end of the recession in June 2009 through May 2011, men have gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent, while women lost a total of 218,000 jobs and increased their unemployment rate by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5 percent, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center.
But, why the sudden She-cession? Why are women losing during a time period that’s being described as a recovery?
Unfortunately, the Pew Center has no clear answers. Sure, struggling local governments can account for part of the reason why women are losing jobs, but that’s just one data point. Women also lost jobs in manufacturing, retail trade, and finance during the recovery, but gained jobs business services, education and health services. And even then, in each of these sectors mentioned, men didn’t lose jobs, they gained them. So why are men faring better? Here’s a look at how men and women have been faring in each job sector:
Check out the rest of the Pew report here.
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