Recessions Usually Are Worse for Men. Not This Time.
Transportation and warehousing, where they dominate, have held up. Retail and hospitality, with lots of women workers, haven’t been so lucky.
On the job.
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/BloombergWorking-age men have had it rough in postwar recessions when the economy typically sheds manufacturing and construction jobs. Then, in recoveries, men have been slow to find work as health care and other service-sector industries grow faster and manufacturing jobs shift overseas. That's not what happened in this downturn, nor in the nascent recovery. For the first time in decades, men may be the relative winners in this economic cycle.
The best way to visualize this might be a historical chart of manufacturing employment. More than 70% of manufacturing workers are men. Beginning in the two early ‘80s recessions, manufacturing employment began to stagnate and struggled to recover in the ensuing expansions. The 2001 and 2007-09 recessions were worse, in both cases resulting in the loss of several million manufacturing jobs. Although the U.S. had a modest recovery in manufacturing employment in the 2010s, the gains weren’t enough to get back to the employment levels of 2006.