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
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.
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
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%.
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."
Outlook? Murky at best
"It's not a pretty picture for the workers that have been displaced, particularly in manufacturing, because we do not expect the vast majority of the jobs that have been lost to be recovered," Koropeckyj said.
Once consumers gain confidence and start spending again, demand for durable goods will improve. That signals a need for manufacturing workers. "But that increase will only absorb a small proportion of the workers who have lost their jobs during the recession," Koropeckyj said.
In 2006, there were 14.2 million manufacturing workers in the U.S. Now there are about 12.2 million. After a recovery, Koropeckyj doesn't expect more than 12.5 million manufacturing jobs. "We started at 14.2 million, and by 2013 we will have 12.5 million. There are a lot of jobs there that aren't being replaced," she said.
Others are more optimistic.
"The manufacturing jobs that have been lost in this recession will largely come back," Shierholz said. "We've seen manufacturing decline as a share of the work force for decades -- that won't stop." But the recessionary losses should return, she said.
"People are going to start buying durable goods again, including cars and appliances," she said, noting that some foreign-owned car companies have U.S.-based factories.
Also, some manufacturing workers may shift into construction, though that sector won't return to its former peak, economists said.
"With construction, it's a little bit more complicated because many of those workers were immigrants who then returned to their countries when the jobs dried up. It's not as easy to see what will happen there," Koropeckyj said.
She estimates construction will begin improving near year-end and gradually grow over the next three years. But "it will be a very slow recovery," she said. Current construction is at an annualized pace of 600,000 housing units.
"At the peak 2.2 million units were being constructed," she said. "By the end of 2010, it'll be about 1 million units constructed on an annualized basis -- that's still less than half of where it was in 2005."