More men are being laid off than women. Why?

December 16, 2008 9:59 AM

Well, today on the cover of my local paper it said that "1.1 million men have been laid off (in this state) since last year. But, there's now 15,000 more women working than there were this time last year!" WHUT!?!?

So why are the men being fired, and the women being hired? Could there be any quasi-scientific explanation? Speculation? Pop-psychology, chat-filtery?

More to the point; where on the Internets is this phenomenon being seriously discussed --- --- by employers and employees?

(Or, could that statistic I read in the newspaper just be wrong?)

posted by shipbreaker to work & money (19 answers total)

Link?

My guess is that more men than women work in construction and manufacturing. Everyone I know who works in construction has been laid off.
posted by desjardins at 10:02 AM on December 16, 2008 [1 favorite]

Speculation-filter incoming, but:

The number of women in the workplace has been on the rise continuously as equality between the sexes has drawn nearer. In addition, women now out-number men in college degrees earned, making them an even more qualified workforce than ever. That'd explain the increase, with the economy's downturn making it so paltry.

As for the men, the investment/banking sector, as well as the automotive/manufacturing sector have both been mostly boyzones, so when they got hardest hit by the recession, it was mostly men who stood to lose jobs.
posted by explosion at 10:04 AM on December 16, 2008

Echo desjardins and explosion. Also, a significant percentage of non-working women are stay-at-home spouses, whereas not many men are - so if your husband loses his job, you've got a strong incentive to look for work yourself, if he can't find new work; by contrast, if you're male, and your wife loses her job, you're already probably working or looking for work yourself.
posted by Tomorrowful at 10:06 AM on December 16, 2008 [1 favorite]

To add to what tomorrowful said I'd bet a lot of those women are working part time or lower paid jobs as they re-enter the workforce.
posted by fshgrl at 10:09 AM on December 16, 2008

More to the point; where on the Internets is this phenomenon being seriously discussed

Well, there's this related askmefi.
posted by Mike1024 at 10:10 AM on December 16, 2008

Yeah, it's pretty common in recessions for the first wave of pain to be in construction and industrial sectors, especially durable goods, with the service sector having a smaller dip later on and a longer, slower recovery. Services are generally more immune to cyclical effects.

There's probably a factor in there where one-income families are deciding to become two-income families, and where women are going to work because their husbands can't find any.

One can also speculate that women may be more willing to "trade down" to a lower-paying, lower-status job than men, who will pound the pavement until the last.

I will say that if your quote is accurate, it does not mean that 1.1 million fewer men are working. It just says they were laid off, not that they were unable to find other work.
posted by dhartung at 10:13 AM on December 16, 2008

OK, I found the paper shipbreaker is referring to (see lower right sidebar)
posted by desjardins at 10:16 AM on December 16, 2008

Well, speculation is easy enough to generate. For starts the headline you describe contrasts two separate things: on one hand lay-offs of men - the number of which tells you nothing about the net gain or loss of employment among men (i.e., some of those men have been re-employed in different jobs). On the other hand, you have a net increase in the number of women employed, which tells you nothing about how many women relatively are being laid off. You can't necessarily extract the conclusion you state (men are getting hired, women getting fired) from that data, you'd need more information.

Factors that could contribute to the situation the newspaper headline described: lay-offs being concentrated in industries dominated by male employees, new hires likewise concentrated in industries dominated by female employees. Demographic issues (momentary, local demographics create a situation where less women are retiring for example, could effect the net number of women employed). Women could be entering or reentering the workforce specifically because their husbands or partners are among the men being laid off, and in doing so may be accepting out of necessity lower-paying, more accessible jobs while their partners engage in longer searches to replace higher paying, career type jobs. Did you read the newspaper article to see what it had to say about it?
posted by nanojath at 10:16 AM on December 16, 2008 [3 favorites]

I'm gonna go with typo. 1.1 million jobs lost would be over 50% of the jobs lost in the entire country in the past year. No one state is going to account for that large a percentage of the total.
posted by valkyryn at 10:18 AM on December 16, 2008

FYI, the blurb says "in the US," not in your state, so 1.1. million people really isn't that much in a nation of 305 million.

Here's a link to an article discussing the numbers. An excerpt:

Economists say the chasm is due to the fact that the current downturn is clobbering male-dominated industries centered on creating goods, such as construction, which is about 90 percent male. Women, on the other hand, work in more service-oriented jobs where there is still a demand, such as healthcare, in which nearly 80 percent of the workers are women and which added more than 400,000 jobs in the last year.

posted by desjardins at 10:20 AM on December 16, 2008

Incidentally, I see that the article desjardins linked to actually does contrast net employment figures and it is for the U.S., not the state (of Minnesota, as chance would have it - yo, homeboy). The specific citation is, "1.1 million fewer men are working in the U.S. than a year ago, while 12,000 more women are working." It looks like no further information or depth is provided, and no reference citation for that matter, sort of a crappy little infobite.

In any event, it doesn't tell you anything about how many men are being laid off (there are many other ways men could be lost from the workforce). Adjust other speculations appropriately.
posted by nanojath at 10:25 AM on December 16, 2008

The Boston Globe covered this in a front-page article last week. The nut:
"Men are losing jobs at far greater rates than women as the industries they dominate, such as manufacturing, construction, and investment services, are hardest hit by the downturn. . . . This gender gap is the product of both the nature of the current recession and the long-term shift in the US economy from making goods, traditionally the province of men, to providing services, in which women play much larger roles, economists said. For example, men account for 70 percent of workers in manufacturing, which shed more than 500,000 jobs over the past year. Healthcare, in which nearly 80 percent of the workers are women, added more than 400,000 jobs."
posted by otio at 10:51 AM on December 16, 2008

Here is a summary of some discussion on the topic of gender and the economic downturn in Jezebel.com. There are links at the bottom to other articles
IMO, it is due to the hit on manufacturing (men-heavy) and the move toward service industry (women-heavy) in North America
posted by Gor-ella at 10:56 AM on December 16, 2008

I don't know about that specific report -- as others have said, it's so extreme it sounds like a mistake. But here's some more general info you might be interested in: unemployment is hitting men a lot harder than women overall.

Sidenote: could we please ban the word "boyzone" on Mefi unless it's genuinely referring to a zone where women's presence is forbidden or at least frowned on?
posted by Jaltcoh at 1:00 PM on December 16, 2008

Jaitcoh, I'd posit that Wall Street, automotive factories, and especially construction sites are all examples of "a zone where women's presence is forbidden or at least frowned on." It's perhaps less so in the automotive factories since most of the heavy work is automated, but on a construction site, a woman's gonna have to work twice as hard to get half the respect that any guy would. I know I'm stereotyping a bit, but only just a bit, really.
posted by explosion at 1:28 PM on December 16, 2008

shipbreaker: Well, today on the cover of my local paper it said that "1.1 million men have been laid off (in this state) since last year. But, there's now 15,000 more women working than there were this time last year!" WHUT!?!?

I just wanted to point out that that's not really that astounding. In fact, it could very well be that 2 million women got laid off last year - so long as 2,015,000 jobs were created for women. But the statistic about how many men were laid off says nothing about how many jobs were created or about how many jobs men have lost or gained this year. Maybe 2 million jobs were created - in which case men have increased their employment more than women, at least in raw numbers - or maybe zero jobs were created - in which case, yes, it's astounding. But, looking at the statistic as you've given it, we have absolutely no way of knowing for sure.

There are even more possibilities. Are many men leaving the state? Are there a lot of women immigrating? For example, say many men came years ago to support their families in other countries and finally managed to move them here this year. Then, those women who started working aren't women who were sitting at home or raising children until now - they're new citizens who weren't there before. In short, you need to look at the population growth or decrease, too.

You're assuming that all the factors involved - the number of jobs, the number of workers, the population, etc - are constants. They might not be. It's not even just about "job creation." To put it simply: how many of those 1.1 million men who were laid off went out and got new jobs?

In short, there are a lot more factors involved in understanding job loss and creation than just these two statistics. It sounds nice in a newspaper headline, and it clearly has a nice semantic impact, but "1.1 million men laid off but 15,000 more women working" doesn't actually indicate anything substantial in lieu of more data.

I hope there are more facts in the actual article.
posted by koeselitz at 2:31 PM on December 16, 2008

desjardins has it. according to the research, the hardest-hit industries also happen to be very male-dominant.
posted by thinkingwoman at 2:36 PM on December 16, 2008

I would also suggest that due to the wage gap, employers might be less liable to fire the people who do the same work for less pay.
posted by dunkadunc at 2:55 PM on December 16, 2008 [1 favorite]

Late to the discussion here, but another possibility is that there are likely a higher proportion of women working in part-time/casual positions (which jibes with most women being employed in the service sector, as well as work/life balance issues). They would be less likely to receive benefits, and therefore cheaper to employ and less likely to be laid off.
posted by thisjax at 12:41 AM on December 23, 2008