Economic recovery: what's ahead for men and women workers.

• Author: Stock, Wendy A.

Predicting what is ahead for Montana's men and women workers as we move from the economic downturn and into what is expected to be a slow and subdued recovery requires us to look back on how the recession affected those workers. The recession's impact on men and women differed nationally and even generated the coining of a new term, "mancession," to describe the more negative impacts of the recession on males. Higher rates of job loss for males had the related impact of pushing the percentage of female workers in the national economy upward, to the point where data indicate that women now constitute a near majority of the nation's workforce. Recession-induced changes in family structures and educational attainment are likely to have long-lasting impacts. The recession's impacts on men and women in Montana have matched some, but not all, of the national trends.

Unemployment

As shown in Figure 1, in 2006 the national unemployment rate was at 4.7 percent for both men and women. It diverged only slightly in March 2008 (to 5.2 for men and 5.0 for women) and then rose dramatically afterward, but much more so for men than for women. By March 2009, the national unemployment rate for men was 9.5 percent compared to 7.5 percent for women. Thus, the nation saw the unemployment rate gap between males and females move from essentially zero at the start of the recession to more than 2 percentage points by 2009. Roughly 1.7 million more men than women entered the ranks of the unemployed between March 2008 and March 2009.

Although much has been made about this male/female unemployment rate gap during the past 18 months, larger increases in male unemployment than female unemployment are not uncommon during recessions. Indeed, during the most recent recessions of 1990-91 and 2001, the male/female unemployment gap was roughly 1 to 2 percentage points--similar to what we have seen during the present recession. These gaps tend to close during economic recovery periods.

The male and female unemployment rates for Montanans show a different pattern than the national data. The unemployment rate for males rose from a low of about 2 percent in 2007 to 4 percent in 2008 and roughly 8 percent in March 2009. The female unemployment rate was similar to that of males in 2007, at roughly 2 percent. It rose to near 4 percent in 2008, but then leveled off. These trends generated an unemployment rate gap between males and females in Montana of about 4.5 percentage...