Are Women Being Unfairly Denied Jobs?
ARE women being unfairly denied jobs? No, I don’t mean the usual feminist whinge that women are discriminated against because none of them have been hired as FTSE chief executives immediately after 15 years of raising sproglets. No, rather, the general difference in unemployment rates that we’re seeing:
The latest figures also confirm an unusual feature of this recovery – fewer jobs for women and more jobs for men. In previous recoveries, the recovery in employment favoured women. In this recovery, job growth has been strongly male dominated. It remains to be seen whether the reversed gender bias in job growth will continue.
This is indeed unusual and it’s highly likely that it will continue too.
The basic pattern in employment over the past 70 years is for ever more women to be in the workforce. You can call this female economic emancipation if you like, you could even think of it as an effect of the pill. You could also think of it as a result of the way that work very rarely these days required muscular heft and grunt: something which men always have been better at.
It’s also true that the last 70 years have seen an expansion in government employment: and government employment has always been skewed towards women.
So we’ve had two processes: more women entering the workforce anyway and more entering government work as government work itself expands.
And what is it that’s happening at the moment? Yup, that’s right, government is actually shrinking (not as fast as I’d like and faster than many others would but….) and all of the new jobs are being created out there in the private sector. That private sector where women tend not to work and the jobs lost are in that government sector where women do tend to (ahem, sorry, used to tend to) work.
Other than pointing out what is going on there’s not really all that much more to say about it. There’s no grand message here: that’s just what is happening. If women tend to work in government, more than men do, and government work is shrinking, then we’ll see more women losing their jobs than men.
Shrug.
Posted: 18th, August 2011 | In: Money Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
