USA Today: Women gain as men lose jobs

Submitted by anthony on Fri, 2009-09-04 17:22

Story here. Excerpt:

'Women are on the verge of outnumbering men in the workforce for the first time, a historic reversal caused by long-term changes in women's roles and massive job losses for men during this recession.

Women held 49.83% of the nation's 132 million jobs in June and they're gaining the vast majority of jobs in the few sectors of the economy that are growing, according to the most recent numbers available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
...
Through June, men have lost 74% of the 6.4 million jobs erased since the recession began in December 2007. Men have lost more than 3 million jobs in construction and manufacturing alone.
...
The gender transformation is especially remarkable in local government's 14.6 million-person workforce. Cities, schools, water authorities and other local jurisdictions have cut 86,000 men from payrolls during the recession — while adding 167,000 women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.'

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Interesting - 86,000 men cut from local government roles, and 167,000 women added. Some possibilities spring to mind:

- The men cost more per capita than did the women, so local governments can double the number of people and still save money by hiring women. (If this is true, why don't all business follow this route? This seems unlikely.)

- Local governments don't have actual shovel-ready work, but do have money to spend on administration, so they can expand admin staff (mostly female) at the expense of working staff (much of which is male).

- Local governments experience substantial pressure from women's groups and political action groups focussed on women, and preferentially hire women in order to avoid accustations of "discrimination", while firing men to conserve available funds as much as possible in order to pay for the women hired.

- The men are being fired in areas where local governments are losing tax resources and have not been "stimulated" by the Federal government, while the women are being hired in areas where the Federal government is providing "stimulus" funds, with the proviso that certain Federal requirements be met. The discrimination aspects can most easily be met by hiring women.

Any other thoughts? That 2/1 ratio is just too interesting to disregard. If the entire nation were experiencing hiring like that, it would surely not be called a recession!

But it certainly appears to be gender-based discrimination.

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Submitted by TomP on Fri, 2009-09-04 20:51

that mostly women are getting hired, if anybody.

simple reason. to get hired for gov work you must
have points (minority/woman) to meet quotas.
nobody talks about it out loud, but the guys whisper about it
behind closed doors.

affirmative action.

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Submitted by daveinga on Fri, 2009-09-04 23:45