The “Mancession” Has Ended
At the beginning of the Great Recession, there was a lot of talk about how men were being disproportionately affected by job losses, since construction and manufacturing jobs were disappearing left and right. The media pundits labeled it “the Mancession” and spent hours analyzing this phenomena.
According to MSNBC the “mancession” is over. Men are slowly getting back to work. It’s women, now, who are being left behind:
Although women lost nearly one in three of jobs cut between December 2007 and December 2009, they have gained back only about 1 in 10 of the jobs added during 2010, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The deep spending cuts that Kim McMurray wrote about yesterday are likely to disproportionately affect women.
Experts from the National Women’s Law Center, which first noted the disparity, say women are faring worse partly because of steep and continuing cuts in government jobs. Women make up more than half of all government workers, but they lost 86 percent of the 220,000 jobs cut in that sector during 2010.
I don’t think we’ll be hearing reports of The Womancession any time soon.
Women still earn less than their male counterparts, so at the height of hype about the Great Mancession, the argument was made that companies were happy to keep women on, because they could pay them less. That was true. But “Mancession?” The simple reality is that the Great Recession has been hard on everyone, but it’s so much more fun to pit the genders against one another, isn’t that right mainstream media?
Tags: unemployment
When Bush became President in 2000, executives predicted that there would be no aggressive enforcement against the discrimination against women in science and technology. Starting with the early 2000s there was a massive backlash against women in STEM fields. Women were removed from management roles and disproportionately affected by layoffs. The layoffs created a vicious cycle because employers can claim that an applicant had a gap on their resume and that a hiring decision was not based on gender. The Mercury News has reported over the years on the glass ceiling for women in Silicon Valley.
In the State of the Union address President Obama expressed concerns about our education system and competitiveness in science and technology. But no one is discussing why our country is failing to provide oppostunity for women, who go to school, study hard, get degrees (even up through the Ph.D.) in science and engineering and then cannot get work except for substitute teaching or free lance technical writing.
The trite reaction is to blame the situation on child care and the need for balance between work and family. All of this is true, and we need to accept that a woman can make productive contributions without having to work 70 hours a week. But childless women are not breaking through the glass ceiling of Silicon Valley or its East Coast counterparts any more easily.
It is very easy to throw blame on our K-12 systems, but the fact is that you can see women handing onto postdoctoral fellowships in fields like chemistry for years, never getting that permanent opportunity in private industry or as a university professor.
Lawmakers and policymakers are in denial about the existence of discrimination against women, but unless one puts the right name on a problem it will not be solved.
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When America embraced the repeal of welfare, it reconfirmed the “lesser” status of women who are not under the ownership of men. Our policies against the poor directly violate international human rights standards (per the UN’s UDHR), but we don’t “get it” because we truly don’t regard the poor/women as equal human beings. Workfare created a massive disposable workforce of disposable people, serving as a replacement workforce, used to break unions and suppress wages. Money is power, and the super-rich and powerful certainly aren’t going to step aside to allow even the slightest progress for women and/or the poor.
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OK, it was widely reported that the Great Recession initially affected men more negatively than women; you now point out ways in which women are being negatively affected more than men. What is your point? Are you crying about the concept of reporting that sometimes men have it harder than women? Are you crying about some imagined slight because someone at sometime thought that in some way men were being victimized by a phenomenon that was not victimizing women as much? Are you trying to regain some sick claim to women always being oppressed more than men?
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Methinks you do protest too much.
The point is in the last sentence:
“The simple reality is that the Great Recession has been hard on everyone, but it’s so much more fun to pit the genders against one another, isn’t that right mainstream media?”
No need to get defensive. This is a case of the old farmer’s saying: ” When the feed gets low, the horses start biting each other.”
Our main problem is not who is getting laid off or hired back. Our problem is that there are too few jobs for the people who need and want them. An ancillary effect is that some employers are exploiting the tight job market by ignoring laws against discrimination and unfair labor practices.
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Dear garycsan,
I’m just reporting the news. No sobbing, weeping, or wailing involved. No hidden agenda. Just news.
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This downturn has been particularly brutal on those industries, leading some observers to call it a ‘mancession.’ Only 80.3 percent of men age 25-54 had jobs in December — the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics started collecting that data in 1948 — at which point the figure was 94.4 percent. When the recession began in December 2007, less than 13 percent of men in this age bracket were out of work.
Co-Owner
Express Funding Group
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