Effects Of Recession On Men And Women
Saturday, July 25, 2009, 6:00 AM | Leave Comment
The current recession termed by some as the worst has affected both men and women. But certain professions have been traditionally occupied by an overwhelming majority of men.
For example, jobs in plumbing, carpentry, construction and such heavy work are filled by men. That’s what we see on a daily basis.
On the same token, there are fields that mostly the domain of women. Examples would be in nursing and at reception desks.
So recession in these areas will affect the respective fields occupied by either gender. That’s the impression on each gender’s occupation.
An economics professor coined the term mancession in the spring of 2009.
It describes the growing gap between male and female unemployment.
The male unemployment is higher than that of female by 2.5%. Economists think it’s the largest gap since World War II, and they blame it on the huge layoffs in manufacturing and construction, where men made up roughly 70 and 85 percent of the workforce, respectively.
Is that why they call it mancession?
These aren’t exactly boom times for women either. It is true, women have suffered fewer job losses than men, but overall they still earn only 78 cents for every dollar a man makes, according to Center for American Progress.
Much of their work is concentrated in lower-paid industries such as retail, hospitality, education, nonprofits and health care.
The jobs that women are holding on to typically lack benefits, retirement savings plans, or pensions.
The great hope of labor economists who study this trend – and they are mostly women – is that the mancession will prompt employers to raise wages for women and open up more lucrative fields such as high tech and finance to greater numbers of women.
Let’s hope so.
However, high tech and finance can only be concentrated by women in the job market when they start schooling for those and other similar fields that traditionally have been occupied by the male species of the human spectrum.
Research has shown time and again that college-educated women without children have made the largest advances in terms of closing the income gap, but women with less schooling and those with small children still earn substantially less than men.
Of course, men that have less schooling make a lot less in their lifetime than men who have more and better education.
Moral of the story
While the media may have latched onto the gender gap in unemployment, the mancession‘s rank and file aren’t buying in. When you don’t have a job, you just don’t have a job whether you are male or female.
The important thing is somebody’s gotta put food on the table.
Whether you are a man or a woman, the more schooling you have, the better your pay-scale would be.
You see less and less females in high tech and finance and the reason is obvious – no education in those disciplines.
No matter how anybody coins the term, this is a recession and we are all in this together.
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