Gendered Job Loss: Will a he-cession reveal a she-conomy?

As a recession unfolds around the world, men are losing jobs faster than women.

In the US, 80 percent of those who’ve lost jobs since December 2007 are men. In France, male workers have lost their jobs seven times faster than female workers. And in Germany, the gap is even bigger: The unemployment rate for men increased 12.4 percent in April, but decreased 2.8 percent for women.  Among developed nations globally, the male unemployment rate for 2008 was 1.1 percent; the female unemployment rate was 0.8 percent.  (The trend reverses in Britain, where women are taking buyouts in droves.)  

But those were, arguably, the good old days.

Months ago, as the trend began to emerge, bloggers nicknamed this the “he-cession.”  Why?  Some have pointed to sector-based job loss which also breaks along gender lines: More construction workers are getting laid off than teachers or nurses.  Others have looked at occupational psychology:  Women are more risk-averse than men, some argue, which leads them away from the kinds of jobs we’ve seen disappear, while others note that women are less competitive than men.  Nancy Folbres, an economist at the University of Amherst who summarized those points of view in the New York Times, complicates the question: “Could economic theory, historically dominated by men, possibly overstate the benefits of risk-taking and competition?”

Last week, Matt Yglesias suggested we look at the numbers differently:  The employment-population ratio began to rise in the 1990s.   Why?  Feminism, Yglesias says (though some of his commenters disagree).  The bigger question, he says, is not what happens to male or female employment after the recession, but whether we actually need as many jobs as we had in the ’90s. Whatever the labor force optimum, Yglesias says, it will probably have more stay-at-home dads.