Are women fairing better during the Economic Downturn?

[rotorgun]

Here is an interesting article I read from Time Magazine. It is a thought provoking piece of journalism that would make for a good discussion. As a result of the economic woes in the United States, it appears that more men are out of work than women. Mr. Caldwell believes that it is because most of the jobs lost have been in the construction and manufacturing sectors, not to mention the world of high finance and banking. It is an interesting phenomena that could see the men of the United States losing some ground in what has been a traditionally patriarchal economic system.

The Pink Recovery: Why Women Are Doing Better
By Christopher Caldwell Monday, Aug. 24, 2009

One thing that seems bound to change is the relationship between the sexes. Since the recession began in December 2007, the vast majority of the lost jobs have belonged to men. About half are in the heavily male domains of construction and manufacturing. At one point last winter, there were four men being laid off for every woman. The male unemployment rate is 9.8%, the female rate 7.5%. What constitutes "women's work" today? Well, health care, for one; 81% of the workers are female. According to the report Obama cited, 20,000 health-care jobs were gained in July, while 76,000 construction jobs and 52,000 manufacturing positions were lost.

A job is a claim on a certain amount of society's resources and esteem. As men lose that claim, they lose the instruments by which they have traditionally controlled society. A lot of people see that as fitting punishment. There weren't any women among the high-profile malefactors in last fall's financial meltdown. Maleness has become a synonym for insufficient attentiveness to risk. Journalists have lately been having a field day with a study by two Cambridge University professors, J.M. Coates and J. Herbert, who sampled the testosterone levels of London traders and found they positively correlated with high-profit trading days. Of course, nobody harped on this research back when housing prices were doubling and people were using their home-equity credit lines to buy third cars. But to paraphrase Richard Nixon's comment about Keynesians, we are all feminists now.

In Foreign Policy this summer, journalist Reihan Salam predicted that the "macho men's club called finance capitalism" would not survive the present economic ordeal. Provocatively--but correctly--he claimed that this male order rests on foundations considerably older than Ronald Reagan's supply-side revolution. The economic system that FDR shored up was a male one. The New Deal focused on infrastructure at a time when there were not a lot of lady dam builders around. (Salam might also have mentioned the GI Bill, the most effective instrument ever devised for giving a leg up to males in universities and workplaces.) Salam sees Obama's $787 billion stimulus package as a break with the New Deal. It spends relatively little on infrastructure and relatively much on female-friendly sectors like health care and education. Not to mention aid to state and local governments, where 3 in 5 employees are women.

Although cliches about the "vulnerability" of women in the economy have been disproved by hard BLS data, we want to believe them. When women lose jobs, the victims are women. When men lose jobs, the victims are, um, women, because they have to make up for that lost male income. The scale of male job losses was evident even when the stimulus bill was passed. That did not stop incoming Congressman Jared Polis, a Colorado Democrat, from warning Obama that "gender imbalance in occupations related to physical infrastructure development means that the direct job creation will benefit mostly men."

Men still make up 53% of the workforce, and the percentage of society's work they do is considerably higher, owing to women's shorter hours and more frequent sabbaticals for child-rearing. In prosperous times, women may yearn for more time at home. But economic realities have a way of washing away these yearnings. One such reality is the recession. Another is that women receive 58% of the bachelor's degrees in this country, along with half the professional degrees.

Should we expect men to cede some control over an economy they have so thoroughly messed up? No. We have no examples of that ever having happened. What we have plenty of examples of--you can see variants of it all over the developing world--is economies in which women do all the arduous work while men sit around smoking and pontificating in coffeehouses and barbershops. For decades, policymakers have been attentive to the flaws of a patriarchal, middle-class, single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented model of family economics--and their attention remains fixed on it. Whether or not that model dominated American society as much as its critics claimed, we are now leaving it behind. Maybe there is a humane model that can replace it. We have not found one yet.

Caldwell is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...916299,00.html

What do you guys think? Are the men of the United States about to be further emasculated? Did we bring this on ourselves? Are the proposals by the Obama Administration going to favor the Ladies more? Maybe I'll be able to spend more time at Starbucks.

[Marshal Murat]

(Salam might also have mentioned the GI Bill, the most effective instrument ever devised for giving a leg up to males in universities and workplaces.)

This was what really turned me off on an attempt at unbiased writing. It's like there's a male conspiracy, that before this point women and men competed equally in colleges. The GI Bill was for returning servicemen and it helped educate thousands of servicemen who then sent their kids to college and created one of the most highly educated nations in the world (as of 1960 anyway).

The author seems to have a vein of feminism which turned me off of an interesting if odd hypothesis. He enjoys saying that women will be earning more and doing more, but he doesn't evaluate or predict how this will change any roles of females and males. If anything, the female-working societies aren't all that nice to women.

For decades, policymakers have been attentive to the flaws of a patriarchal, middle-class, single-earner, nuclear-family-oriented model of family economics--and their attention remains fixed on it.

What flaws are there with this kinda life, sheesh.

[Banquo's Ghost]

I think the author is using rather blunt figures to make a hypothesis.

I would assume that the same pattern of employment exists in the USA as many parts of Europe: which is that women disproportionately take low-paid and part-time jobs. These are exactly the sort of jobs that open up in, and following, a recession.

Salaries that pay the mortgage and the bills are still largely the preserve of men.

[Hosakawa Tito]

It's not as bad as it used to be, but many women who perform the same job duties as men still get paid less. So when the economy goes bad and companies need to trim the work force they cut the more costly employees first.

[Hooahguy]

isnt prostitution the only industry that hasent really been hit too hard?

[Vladimir]

isnt prostitution the only industry that hasent really been hit too hard?

So, are you saying that this is why women are fairing better during this downturn?

[rotorgun]

I think the author is using rather blunt figures to make a hypothesis.

I would assume that the same pattern of employment exists in the USA as many parts of Europe: which is that women disproportionately take low-paid and part-time jobs. These are exactly the sort of jobs that open up in, and following, a recession.

Salaries that pay the mortgage and the bills are still largely the preserve of men.

I would say that is a fair assumption. I was thinking along much the same lines when I read the article. What is surprising, is his view that President Obama's initiatives are not aimed at aiding in the recovery of those types of jobs, but rather that stimulus package (sounds obscene), and health care reform bill will provide more of the types of jobs that traditionally favor women.