Total Jobs for Women Overtake Those of Full-Time Male Australians - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Australian women have more jobs than are held by full-time male Australians, a significant change for an industrialized or post-industrial economy.

• Women, both full-time and part-time, worked 5000 more jobs than those held by men working full-time in Australia in March 2009. Just a year earlier, men working full-time had 123,000 more jobs than those held by all working women.

• That may sound like a good development, and it resembles a similar shift in the US, but actually it is the result of the global economic crisis, which is destroying traditional blue-collar jobs in Australia while not reducing the number of employed women as much.

• 2.7 million women work full-time in Australia, for 25.1% of all workers, and 2.2 million, or 20.6%, work part-time. Men working part-time is at a record high of 937,000, or 8.7%, while the number of men in full-time jobs is at 4.9 million, or 45.6% of the work force.

• Thus men still make up a significant majority of the overall work force, but that gap too is shrinking, and if past recessions are repeated, men will emerge from the current crisis with far greater permanent and temporary job losses than women.

The Australian report