Job Losses Hit US Men Much Harder than Women - Building Gender Balanced Business

• With the economic crisis hitting such credit-dependent industries as construction and transportation extra-hard, job losses for US men are far outpacing those for women.

• Women, because they dominate sectors like government and health care, where the job losses have been milder and economic growth continues, have seen less of an increase in unemployment. (The same is not true of Britain.)

• Four-fifths of the 2.74 million people who became unemployed from November 2007 to November 2008 were men, according to Andrew Sum, director of Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies.

• Men make up 87% of the construction industry, the hardest-hit industry in the US as home prices tumble and credit dries up. Two other heavily affected industries are manufacturing and wholesale trade, which are at least two-thirds male.

• Health and education, whose employees are overwhelmingly female, added 536,000 jobs in 2008, Sum said.

• US data show men’s employment as a share of total population fell by 2.7% from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008, while the ratio for women eased 0.8%. As of December 2008, the unemployment rate for men was 7.9%, up 2.9 percentage points from a year earlier, while the rate for women was 6.4%, up 1.6 points.

• The gender gap in unemployment rates is the largest since 1983, explained Heather Boushey, senior economist at the Center for American Progress.

• Most of the jobs lost in the financial sector were held by women, at 102,000 out of a total of 134,000, Boushey said. But total job losses in the financial industry pale in comparison with such sectors as construction.

The Reuters report