Working whines

The LA Times reports that the economic downturn is hitting the Y-chromosome-infested set harder than the XX crowd.

The stats: “In December 2007, when the economy started tanking, unemployment ran nearly even at 4.4% for men and 4.3% for women. In February, that tally had shot up to 8.8% for men and 7.3% for women, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan at Flint, explains this partly by noting the crash started in construction, which is an 88% male domain, & continued into the financial sector, also dominated by men.

Conversely, healthcare & education are relatively stable, & those two industries run to 77% female, according to Perry. He adds that women tend to be better educated than men, & that the degrees matter these days.

I wonder, though.

Men outnumber women in the labor force—according to this story, by 10 million. Seems logical to me that more of them are likely to get axed, because there are just more of them out there. They’re a bigger target, as it were.

Also, I’m reminded of a seminar on 20th Century US economic & political history in grad school. Each student researched the Great Depression in a different state, & when we came together we found that the Depression didn’t seem to hit as hard in states like Colorado or West Virginia, where people were already living at subsistence level, as it did in New York or California.

& since women in the work force have lived closer to the bone than men, they’ve developed coping mechanisms for dealing with cut-backs & economic upsets. If they get laid off, they spend less time berating the gods over their cruel fate, & more getting on with finding another job. Or two. Or three—whatever it takes to keep the kids in shoes & mac & cheese.

I have to say, the thought of all these men out of work isn’t pretty. Back in Virginia I occasionally attended job-hunt support groups, one primarily for men, the other for women. I just couldn’t handle the former. These guys—mostly telecoms professionals—were so outraged & hurt by the utter injustice of being laid off that they had no strength or will left for finding another job. They were there to prove to the group that they'd tried everything humanly possible, & nothing worked, & so there was just no hope.

The idea was that you come together to share your experiences since the last meeting, get advice on how to handle this or that situation, & find encouragement in your search.

But almost to a man, here’s what would happen: a guy would describe an interview, say, & wonder how he should handle a response, because it was just too weird or hopeless or insulting.

The group facilitator—an amazing woman who is extremely knowledgeable about business, networking & positive attitude—would make some suggestions, & the guy would spend the next ten minutes deflecting each one because of this reason or that.

Rinse & repeat.

I finally realized that these people—who might never have had to look for a job since their first one out of college, having been recruited hither, thither & yon thereafter—only wanted to wallow in their misery, because they shouldn’t have to go through all this, & it’s completely unfair. The layoff shouldn’t have happened to them, & someone should just show up with a six-figure job with their name on it. Anything short of that was a completely unreasonable expectation of society.

I’m betting that’s happening all over the country, to hedge fund managers, auto execs & construction moguls.

So, while I’m sure that the stats on who’s getting the pink slips are accurate, I think the “he-cession” mentioned in the Times story is more to do with perception & spreading the misery than with just the reality of registering for unemployment & networking the daylights out of your Facebook friends.

& let me just say this: whenever I attended one of those meetings, I left feeling way more depressed & hopeless than I had when I arrived. Trust me, that sullenness, truculence & sense of broken entitlement radiates throughout every encounter you have with a recruiter, receptionist or hiring manager.