The Declining Demand For Men

The Great Recession has sometimes been dubbed the Mancession because it drove unemployment among men higher than unemployment among women. Because men tend to work in more cyclical industries than women, they have historically lost more jobs on the downturn and gained more on the upturn.

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Comments

[Billy Jack]

06:07 PM on 12/14/2010

I think that people are going to have to be creative about sources of income. The traditional idea of employment, i.e., working for a company just won't meet the demand for jobs. We're going to have to create our own jobs.

[angrymanspokane]

01:51 PM on 12/14/2010

The McDonald's drive through play-set I saw the other day in the toy store isn't so funny anymore. Seems like an eerie prediction of the future.

[mrcontinental]

04:08 AM on 12/14/2010

People thought I was insane all those years ago when I was pursuing two bachelor degrees to go along with my associates. They wondered why I didn't go for a doctorate and I told them over and over that I didn't want to be a one trick pony and they were still baffled. They aren't baffled anymore though. The more skills you have the more marketable you are and the more doors are open for you.

And it beats playing video games.

[Kai-HK]

02:36 AM on 12/14/2010

That is what happens when you make hiring more punitive, ceteris paribus, to the employer. As the costs associated with manufacturing here in America go up mainly do to tax and restrictive regulations mainly environmental and labor, companies will find it more difficult to compete globally while being domestically based. Labor pays the ultimate price. And since more companies have become global businesses, they are no longer defined by competition locally but competition globally. For us to get back to competing globally that means we have to make some hard choices about the taxes, regulations, and labor costs that make us uncompetitive at the global level.

Kai

[ron ray]

01:22 PM on 12/14/2010

Labor costs means wages and benefits. we gain nothing by racing to the bottom with child labor and slave labor in places like china.

[Kai-HK]

08:11 PM on 12/14/2010

You are quite right. That means that Americans have to take less for doing the same amount of work. In the meantime, labor costs in China should start increasing. While we move down, they should be moving up. Until we reach value-adjusted equilibrium. It is a an economic certainty and has been happening for decades as we have had to compete with global labor not just local or domestic labor. We do gain, though. As the cost of labor as a factor of production drops, so should the cost the goods and services produced by that factor of production. The lower cost goods and global competition should help offset some of the lost nominal value of wages and provide countervailing benefit to standard of living. In other words, if I had to buy a basket of goods in 2000, mobile phone, flat screen tv, car, etc. but because of greater competition and cheaper labor etc. the prices in 2010 of those items have dropped, along with the value of my labor, thus my standard of living should not drop as much as indicated by a drop in the value of my labor as an input.

[murphy80]

05:11 PM on 12/15/2010

you are so right, one hard choice would be to use the unitary tax,

the second choice would be to tax all those profits held overseas by corporations doing business

in the united states. you ain't seen nothin' yet.

[MetalCanuck]

02:16 AM on 12/14/2010

This is what happens when you get rid of factories and send them to China for the sake of Free trade nonsense that has destroying North America.

[wdokken]

12:59 AM on 12/14/2010

This recession is not worse than the great depression, but if our policy-makers do not learn the lessons of 75 years ago, it could be far worse than it needs to be.

Read my blog "great recession vs great depression"
http://www.wealthvest.com/blog/wade-dokken/4191/

Wade Dokken
President
WealthVest

[murphy80]

09:52 PM on 12/15/2010

just wait a few years, 2008 will seem like a picnic.

[Mildmannered]

11:57 PM on 12/13/2010

glass ceiling for men

[joroline]

10:57 PM on 12/13/2010

i am not thrilled with how this is all happening but i am ok with where i fit within it. genders arent suffering, industries are. the fact that they are male dominated has more to do with gals getting a break because they have children while men go to jail. its a broken system and we need to fix it.

[Duppy]

09:17 PM on 12/13/2010

Its not just men. Older workers are also not wanted

[MyFatCat]

06:00 PM on 12/13/2010

Trying to sex-up the recession as a man's problem distracts from the far more important elements: there are fewer jobs, PERIOD, and many of those are being automated.

I'm calling red herring, not because I don't think there aren't a lot of very unhappy, unemployed, or underemployed men out there, but because this trivializes the problems of women, youth, people of color, and native Americans.

[TomFox]

09:30 PM on 12/13/2010

My Cat Likes Your Cat....

But to the topic at hand...it may be a red herring, but speaking as an unemployed 50 year old male professional, (only 4 months right now), I bet there are a lot of bitter blue collar men voting Republican and against their own interests.

I'm looking at moving into education as a way to mitigate the damage. I would love to teach math and science.

[TomFox]

09:31 PM on 12/13/2010

Oh...I don't intend to trivialize these problems, my point was supposed to be that because of this voting bloc, there may not be enough attention paid to the problems you right pointed out. Good post. F/F.

[LinkSync]

05:50 PM on 12/13/2010

Face it, business uses the FACT that Women accept less pay for the same work to further the RACE TO THE BOTTOM that business created in the first place.

They SAY they have to compete.
SO they go to China and hire or retain Women which would be just fine if the Chinese had pay scales and environmental laws that they could at least pretend they were a civilized Nation instead of Capitalist Neo-Barbs.

If we did not have Democrat anti-child labor laws and the minum wage they would "hire" (enslave) children to do their dirty work.

And trust me that is on the plate and coming, right after they tear down SSI and MEDICARE and Health Reform and you all will sit there and mumble and question like cows mooing for your silage as they will engineer another shooting war to keep you confused as they further entrench the power of the Corporations right under your noses, using Citizens United and the CORRUPT Congress and President to work their will on you, and me.

What amazes me, really amazes me, is none of you are pissed off yet. WTF?

[nofriendofrepublicans]

07:42 PM on 12/13/2010

F&F Been pi$$ed off for years.

[Wendy Davis]

08:35 PM on 12/13/2010

Everyone is "pissed off" that I talk to.  Hey, they went to the polls and voted in a junior black senator as president because he said he could change the direction of the wind.  What more do you want?  We are all struggling to keep the bills paid and many are absolutely petrified with fear of losing the jobs they have.  It may seem eerily quiet but the noise inside of heads is deafening. 

[Linda from Deerfield]

05:32 PM on 12/13/2010

When I say what the male unemployment problem suggests to me, I am not normally treated well, but I will say it again because I think it is something that ought to be considered. Here goes.

Women became roughly half of the workforce as they joined in great numbers over recent decades. Comparison efforts generally show that women still have achieved only about $.70 in pay for every $1.00 that a male would earn doing the same job. American wages have not been keeping pace with inflation for at least a decade, for 95% of workers.

Consequently, careful analysis might very well show that the degradation in wages, as well as the higher unemployment among males, could be due almost entirely to the underpayment of women. Given the lower average female wages, it would be in employers' best interests to replace males with females, through attrition or through net gender bias in hiring/firing activities.

If this analysis should show the effect that I suspect, then men who have not supported women's efforts to achieve workplace equality are in a sense guilty of having created negative wage pressures for male peers and their sons and grandsons. Women may share in the guilt by having tolerated the unequal treatment.

[nofriendofrepublicans]

07:47 PM on 12/13/2010

I'll agree with you to a point. I believe job losses most recently have occurred mostly in predominantly male industries.

[Paul Andrews]

08:39 PM on 12/13/2010

I think this article is very accurate. Healthcare is an area where there will always be a need for people and its not possible to outsource these jobs to other countries, nursing has always been dominated by females. That said business should not be as hard as we make it. Someone said find a need and fill it and you will get rich. There are markets out there that are going unserviced. There is always a need for products and services that service a market more efficiently and more economically. I have lots of ideas about how we can find and satisfy market needs that are currently not being met. If you are interested send me an email at [e-mail]

[JPalka]

08:09 PM on 12/13/2010

It would be true if those jobs still existed, but they do not. So you should go further in your analysis. Because women in America did not push for higher wages for males in China... they took them all. Going back, if women in America want better wages, they need to get those jobs back from China. This is a joke.

In truth, no woman wants the glass ceiling to be broken toward manufacturing jobs. They want it broken toward managerial jobs. With only services and no industry, you know, whatever...

[werbenjagermanjensen]

04:50 PM on 12/13/2010

Men earn more money so they're more likely to be laid off. A corollary to this is that they are more likely to have savings to fall back on and their unemployment benefits are better, which gives them less incentive to jump at jobs that offer low pay and benefits and bad working conditions.