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?


cross-posted at MainSt/workingamerica.org