Progressive polemics take on the 'he'-cession
hecession: recession where male incident unemployment overhsaddows female unemployment.
Progressive take and spin on the econonomic scene:
As women's job losses mount, some women--especially unmarried women--are facing an increasingly grim job market. Unmarried women have much higher unemployment than married women. In October, 10.3 percent of unmarried women age 20 and over (3.3 million) and 5.7 percent of married women (2.1 million) were unemployed (see figure below; all data by marital status is not seasonally adjusted). Although unmarried women represent less than half (46.5 percent) of all women workers, they account for 6 in 10 (60.8 percent) of women workers who are unemployed. The situation is worse for unmarried women who head families, most of whom are single mothers, who now have an unemployment rate of 12.6 percent, 2.4 percentage points above the national average.
Question not asked: are married women more likely to drift into and out of the laborforce, given job prospects or lack thereof ?
Not asked until much later:
The challenges finding a job are evident in the sharp increases in workers who report that they are unemployed and would like a job, but have given up searching because they have become "discouraged." Over the past year, the number of unmarried women workers who are discouraged has nearly doubled--up 85 percent to 179,000--while the number of married women workers who report being discouraged has risen by 174 percent, up to 118,000.
Center for American Progress / Liz Weiss
2009 November