US: Record number of young Americans jobless, with 1/5th of 20-24-YO black males unemployed

Story here. Quick, fund more programs for girls! That'll fix the problem! Excerpt:

'CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. economic recession has taken a particularly heavy toll on young Americans, with a record one out five black men aged 20 to 24 neither working nor in school, according to research released on Tuesday.

Teenagers have found it significantly harder to get a job since the recession began in late 2007, with black youths and young people from low-income families faring the worst, wrote Andrew Sum of Northeastern University in Boston, a employment researcher commissioned by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network.

"Low-income and minority youth, who depended on part-time jobs as a significant stepping stone to future employment, have been forced out of the job market and economically marginalized," Herman Brewer of the Chicago Urban League said in a statement.

Overall, 26 percent of American teenagers aged 16 to 19 had jobs in late 2009, said the report, which was based on U.S. Census Bureau data. That figure is a record low since statistics began to be kept in 1948, the researchers said.

Employment counts the number of people with a job as a percentage of the entire work force. By contrast, the unemployment rate -- which stood at 10 percent in December in the United States -- does not include people who have grown discouraged and stopped looking for work.'

Do you think we need a "gendered approach" to solve this? Oh yeah, that only counts if the gender is female. Sorry, I was confused there for a minute.

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    Do you think we need a "gendered approach" to solve this? Oh yeah, that only counts if the gender is female. Sorry, I was confused there for a minute.

Strangely, tragically, the unemployment offices in poor black and latino areas (at least in NYC) do take a gendered approach: they offer free training and other inducements to women to enter the building trades...and the positions go begging. These are well-paying jobs the guys would kill for but are closed to them. Meanwhile, the man-cession gender gap resembles the academic one in these areas--women blithely passing idle men on their way to work. And, of course, yes, we need more scholastic programs for girls and employment ops for women.
/sarcasm /groaning

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Many government funded programs to get females into the trades, yet 85% of those who lost their job in this recession who would love some retraining and the province picking up a portion of their pay to entice employers to give them work are men.

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