Mancession Blues
Anastasia De Waal, 12 July 2010
The New York Times asked individuals worldwide if – in these hard times – men have more right to a job. Britain was second among nations to disagree.
A seductive concept, the ‘mancession’ highlights that men have been hit particularly hard by the recession, they have been subject to a redundancy rate almost double that of women. The poster boy of this recession is the unemployed and disenfranchised male youth. The male employment rate dropped from 79% to 76% over the year from May 2008, while for women it fell only 1%, to 69%. The 7% employment gap between men and women is notable, indicating how much society has changed since 1971, when it stood at 30%.
Not only have men been made unemployed double as quickly, they are also said to be superfluous in a society where so many women work and where single mothers can glean support from the state while they bring up a child and look for a job; they are no longer in thrall to a male breadwinner. This is linked, inevitably, to the decline of the institution of marriage, correlated to the quadrupling of the number of single parent families since 1961.
As the Times declaimed last year, ‘Women are the Victors’; they have certainly had much to celebrate over the past fifty years. Yet to suggest that women remain in employment at the expense of men is misguided. Men have suffered disproportionately in this recession because they work in the sectors which have contracted the most. A tenth as many women as men work in construction, where the redundancy rate was running at the highest of any industry, at 3.4%. The second highest redundancy rate – at around 2% – was in manufacturing, which employs a third as many women as men.
Women have not escaped the spectre of unemployment. Buffeted from market forces, the public sector was not initially purged but last month’s budget heralds unprecedented cuts to public services and backroom public sector jobs. This will be devastating for women as it is the sector which has proven most amenable to female employment, quick to realise new statutes on flexible working, part-time work and parental leave. It is a sector which accounts for 38% of female jobs and 14% of male ones. It is likely to become more difficult for women to secure jobs, let alone for mothers to progress their careers in tightened labour markets, as a former social worker set out the subtext to her job applications, ‘I am the candidate who might have to disappear because my daughter is ill, and the candidate who may not be able to do late-night emergency calls.’ Part-time work is not only the preserve of the mother with young children – it is predominantly (75.6%) female – but 44% of part-time workers do not have dependent children. Women are more likely to be in part-time work because so much of part-time work is low skilled and motherhood means many women necessarily have more transient patterns of work.