The current recession is hitting workers in just about every industry, but men are taking a much bigger hit than women.
The 2.3-percentage-point gap between men's June unemployment rate of 10.6% and women's 8.3% rate was just below May's 2.5-point gap, the largest since records started being kept in 1948. The gap first hit 2 points in March.
The overall unemployment rate rose to 9.5% in June, from 9.4% in May. The economy lost a more-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June. (See full story.)
"The gap between female and male unemployment has never been as large as it is now," said Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist with Moody's Economy.com.
It's not hard to see why. Two male-dominated industries -- construction and manufacturing -- account for about half of the 6 million jobs lost since the recession started in December 2007, and both industries started shedding jobs before that.
"Every industry is contracting, but these industries have taken the brunt," Koropeckyj said. Given that men account for 87% of workers in manufacturing and 71% in construction, it's not surprising that men's unemployment is rocketing past women's.
Health care, education jobs gaining
The only two private-sector industries to show a net increase in jobs from the start of the recession are health care and education -- and female workers are highly concentrated in both.Health care logged a net gain of about 542,000 jobs from December 2007 through May, and private education showed a net gain of about 102,000 jobs in that period.
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Eighty-one percent of health care workers are women, and 61% of workers in private education are women, Koropeckyj said. Also, government has shown a net job gain of 259,000 in that period, and 57% of government workers are women.
That's not to say women are escaping unscathed. Unemployment has skyrocketed for both sexes. Women's unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2008; men's was 5.1%.
And lower-income and less-educated workers, no matter their sex, usually face steeper job losses than others in recessions, and this one's no different.
"It's not as if women are not suffering," said Eileen Appelbaum, an economist and visiting scholar at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and director of Rutgers University's Center for Women and Work.
"Less-educated women are certainly feeling it, but to the extent that they have been employed in (health care and education), they have not felt the brunt of it, at least so far," Appelbaum said.
That may change.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the net gain in health care jobs is slowing, partly because millions of Americans have lost not only their jobs but their employer-provided insurance and thus are ratcheting down their health care spending.
The education sector is also looking less solid, due mainly to state budget crises. "Education is losing jobs now," Shierholz said, though "not nearly as dramatically as other" industries.
Age- and race-based differences
The differences in unemployment rates are even more dramatic when broken down by race and age. For example, white men's unemployment rate in June was 9.5%, while black men's was 17.8%. For white women it was 8%, and for black women, 13.1%, according to the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics.Teens have a harder time during recessions too. Here's a sampling of unemployment rates in June for various groups:
- Black men 20 and older: 16.4%.
- Black women 20 and older: 11.3%.
- White men 20 and older: 9.2%.
- White women 20 and older: 6.8%.
- Black males age 16 to 19: 50%.
- Black females age 16 to 19: 40.6%.
- White males age 16 to 19: 26.5%.
- White females age 16 to 19: 23.5%.
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But these wide variations are not unique to this economic downturn. "So far, the especially high unemployment rates for teens, and the increase in the size of the unemployment rate gap between whites and blacks for both males and females is consistent with previous recessions and periods of high unemployment," said Ron Laschever, assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Teens get hit because they're less educated and are competing for jobs with older, more experienced people. But "educational differences do not completely explain the black-white unemployment rate gap," Laschever said. "Some studies show that part of the gap is correlated with residential segregation: Blacks, on average, are more likely to live in neighborhoods where there are fewer jobs available."
Continued: Outlook is murky at best
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