After the crash, the downturn was dubbed a "mancession." As the meme continues to circulate, the Roosevelt Institute's New Deal 2.0 blog asked leading thinkers to help sort fact from fiction. Are men suffering more than women in a weak economy? Is Washington doing enough to address female unemployment? How do we ensure a jobs agenda that's fair and equitable? In the first part of an ongoing series, "The Myth of the Mancession? Women & the Jobs Crisis", historian Alice O'Connor takes on divisive arguments that skew the facts.
As an analysis, the myth of the "mancession" may have started out as an overly-stylized reading of labor market statistics. Men lost a larger share of jobs than women at the outset of the Great Recession in 2007, according to widely-reported Bureau of Labor Statistics measures tracking trends through spring 2009. This led University of Michigan economist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark J. Perry to conclude that there was a "historic" and "unprecedented" gender gap in unemployment favoring women by as much as two percentage points -- a gap that actually has been closing more recently as cutbacks shift from the male-dominated construction and manufacturing sectors to education, human services, and other areas where women predominate.
But as an idea, the myth of the mancession has assumed a staying power beyond what those initial numbers appeared to support: it taps into larger cultural and economic anxieties that predate the Great Recession and that have to do with changing relations between men and women. This is revealed nowhere more powerfully than in the late, great passing of the "traditional" two-parent family, in which men could expect to be the chief -- if not the solo -- breadwinners.
Of course, there is rarely just one way to read statistical measures, and on these grounds alone the "mancession" has been subject to much dispute. More fine-grained analyses of the data, for example, show considerable differences in the impact of male job loss across lines of class, race, age, and region; not all men have been affected equally by the downturn, nor women for that matter, suggesting at the very least that there is more to the so-called gender gap than meets the eye. Nor has the Great Recession shown any "favor" to women when it comes to wage losses and poverty rates, both of which are on the rise. And historical experience reminds us that men have also lost the large majority of jobs in past recessions, as they did in the Great Depression, due to the fact that they are disproportionately represented in traditionally hard-hit and better-paying sectors of the economy. Indeed, one could use this observation to conclude that the gender gap in job loss reveals just how stratified the labor market remains, with nearly 90 percent of construction jobs held by men, and nearly 70 percent in manufacturing. The "mancession," however, comes to a simpler, if misleading conclusion: men suffered far more from the Great Recession than women, and by the time we actually recover, they may find themselves even further behind. As characterized by Perry when he first started writing about the unemployment "gender gap," what women were experiencing as a "downturn" was a "catastrophe" for men.
It is in taking this line that the myth of the "mancession" most clearly links up to a larger narrative that, in its starkest expressions, presents a story of female ascendancy and male decline. Indeed, news reports of the mancession almost invariably come wrapped up in a bundle of statistics suggesting that women are outdoing men in all sorts of other "historic" and "unprecedented" ways, from higher numbers of college and post-graduate degrees to larger shares of consumer spending and growing importance, if not yet outright leadership, as breadwinners in the household economy. Men, in the zero-sum logic that underlies the larger narrative, are losing out, not just in terms of relative economic position, but in the sense of authority and, well, manliness that once anchored their sense of identity.
The fearful, not to mention highly exaggerated, narrative of women's looming economic and cultural dominance is hardly new. By invoking it, the myth of the mancession carries on a long tradition of more deeply rooted historical fictions that for decades were used to diminish or otherwise distort the significance of women's participation in the paid labor force -- and to defend the sanctity of the male breadwinner ideal. Until well into the twentieth century, these fictions mostly served as a form of willful ignorance, if not downright denial, treating women as at best temporary, non-essential workers without legitimate aspiration for better-paying, high-skilled jobs, let alone long-term careers. In formulations that still haunt us today, they treated African American and other minority female breadwinning as an expression of cultural pathology, a "matriarchy" that prevented men from taking their rightful roles as household heads. Such fictions persisted despite a similarly long tradition of social investigation documenting the realities -- and the necessity -- of female employment and household work. And they had real and lasting consequences: in well-documented government policies, union and private sector practices that denied women access to better job opportunities at equal pay; in decades of organized resistance to adequate child care provisions for parents in the paid labor force; in job training, employment, and social welfare programs that consistently favored male over female earnings capacity; and in a whole host of economic practices and cultural cues that sent women "back" to more traditionally subordinate positions in the wake of the unprecedented job opportunities that had been opened up by World War II.
The myth of the mancession may not take us back to the dark days of cultural denial, but its exaggerated claims echo the old stereotype-laden, zero-sum ways of thinking that pit the fortunes of female earners against those of men. In recent months, it has stirred a minor skirmish in the ongoing culture wars between feminists and the right. Echoing the idea that men were the chief victims of the Great Recession, AEI resident scholar and author of "The War Against Boys" Christina Hoff Sommers accused feminists of "skewing" President Obama's initial stimulus plan by insisting on equal treatment for women, who in "mancession" logic did not need the jobs as much as men. Writing more recently on the AEI blog, Mark Perry similarly criticized the Obama National Economic Council for issuing its report on "Jobs and Economic Security for America's Women" in the midst of what he now refers to as the "Great Mancession", calling it "one-sided and misguided" to focus on women, when they are doing "so much better than men."
If history is any guide, perpetuating the myth of the mancession could very well exact a price: not only in thwarting long overdue discussions of a jobs agenda that is fair and equitable across the board, but in preventing a more frank coming to terms with the cultural anxieties -- and politics -- that prevent us from articulating, and embracing, a more realistic, equitable, and genuinely shared breadwinner ideal. Given the challenges ahead, that's a reckoning we can't afford to put off.
Cross-posted from New Deal 2.0.
That's what should be getting the attention--not gender!
You must accept, then, that math is misogynistic in nature.
You mean, like many forms of feminism?
This is indeed one rare instance where being a low paid schlub is an advantage. It just so happens that more women are poorly paid compared to men. It's the details that matter, David Byron, don't get distracted by the axe you're looking to grind.
Business isn't fair unless it's forced to be, and it can't be forced to be fair by anything less than law, because of the profit motive.
The numbers she does point to state that men have been disproportionately hit by the recession. Further more, she asserts that this has always been the case. Is it being implied that past suffering makes present misery easier to bear?
In every class, race, age and religion, women have endured the recession better than the men in their neighborhood. Attempts to blunt the severity of the issue by claiming that only select groups of men are hurting is intellectually dishonest.
This article does a very poor job of addressing the issue, I look forward to being convinced otherwise.
58.9% of the US population have jobs now, more than at any time before 1983.
But women are now 50% of the work force, compared to 40% in 1978, 31% in 1953.
I believe women should of course have careers if they want to. But most mothers (including mine) work because they have to, in my case so we could own a home.
Median wages declined, mothers went to work to make ends meet, the extra supply of labor drove wages down further. The rich profited from more and cheaper workers, consuming more corporate products. Corporate profits soared, wages declined.
We DON'T need more jobs, we need higher wages so more mothers or fathers can afford to be parents. And/or lower expenses, like national health care. A less regressive system.
http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/herman/reports/futurework/report/chapter3/chart3-1_text.htm
Percent of Women in US Workforce
1953=31%
1973=39%
1978=40%
1998=46%
NOW=50+"
At the moment the world financial system is in disintegration. I do not know the purpose of Ms. O'Connor's post. I know women struggle to survive, however the post is definitely not communicating the nation's crisis.
The unsustainable, usurious, speculative, monetary financial, derivative trading system is a killing machine. Hunger, homelessness, foreclosures, bankruptcies, loss of health-care, unemployment, contraction of production threaten the population's survival as all out war. However, Banker-Speculators irrationally demand that governments keep bailing out the derivative market, and force austerity upon the population. This is the crisis.
The United States must act quickly: terminate the monetary financier system, Reinstate Glass-Steagall in US banking, Then fund its' economic platforms to activate actual economic recovery, restore the national security.
We live in a world/universe of abundance, institutions of Globalization have screwed with our reason and perception. The population must empower itself, everyone pulling in the same direction, in order to transform this situation and our environment through development.
Which is exactly what the corporate oligarchs guiding and managing the teaparty 'patriots' want.
They have no problem at all with this.
The retail employees union was one of the weakest unions in the country. The Teamsters gave up trying to organize the truck drivers and decided to organize the companies (through threats and intimidation).
So I don't think union organizing is a gender issue, but more of one of ignorance and economic insecurity. I mean how many people can clean a toilet, or make a bed?
Though this should be in reply to the author, but I juswt conclude this by saying that a good portion of the stimulus money went to states to retain government workers - most of which are women - school teachers - 80% women - and human services staff at NGOs - majority again women.
The fact is everyone needs an income to survive. It's a human issue, not a gender issue. Frankly I'm tired of feminists rolling out Rosy the Riveter and how she lost her job when the soldiers came home. Those jobs went to men based on at least perceived if not actual productivity - though I'm not discounting the expected roles that were part of our culture then.
Automation has leveled the field in most industries, but we still push boys into math and science, and girls into social services.
I am willing to endure an onslaught of unfavorable replies from any that can explain how your article does anything productive. For the record, I am a Democrat and not a good ol' boy.
The two are not mutually exclusive, for the record.