It would be an insipid statement to say that exciting things are happening in the world of women entrepreneurs. Women may be the dominant force in small business ownership, and succeeding in industries that were once taboo for women, but the recession has taken a particular toll on men in the workplace, so for some it may be hard to celebrate in this economic climate.
Several different measurements of labor market strength suggest that men fared worse in the recession, suffering greater job loss than women. But the numbers also indicate that men are recovering those jobs faster.
The industries in which the majority of women are employed appear more “recession-proof” than those with higher concentrations of men; they didn’t shed as many jobs during the recession and therefore have much less ground to make up. In fact employment in the female-dominated fields of education and health services has increased by 12 percent since the recession began.
Men were hard hit in the recession, suffering more than 70 percent of the job loss. However, the recovery has been tougher on women – between June 2009 and July 2012, women gained just 20.7 percent of the jobs added. As a result, during the recovery, women have regained only 26.7 percent of the jobs they lost during the recession while men have regained 40.6 percent of the jobs they lost during the recession.
From the end of the recession in June 2009 through May 2011, men gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent. Women, by contrast, lost 218,000 jobs during the same period, and their unemployment rate increased by 0.2 percentage points to 8.5 percent.
These trends are a sharp turnabout from the gender patterns that prevailed during the recession itself, when men lost nearly twice as many jobs as women. So while men have taken an early lead in the recovery, they still have far more ground to cover than women to return to pre-recession employment levels.
Men have snagged about three of every four of the 2.4 million net new jobs created since the summer of 2009 according to John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a global outplacement firm based in Chicago.
The trend is so pronounced that Challenger and others have nicknamed the recovery the “he-covery” or “mancovery.”
Meanwhile, women entrepreneurs have become a strong driving force in today’s corporate world. Not only are they able to equalize their duties of both motherhood and entrepreneurship but they also comprise almost half of all businesses owned today.
Many women entrepreneurs have an average age of 40-60 years old because they have had previous careers in other areas. Their primary goal is not monetary reward but rather personal satisfaction and community involvement. Many of them are educated and assemble into groups in order to pool business ideas and resources together.
What does this all mean to the local economy? Obviously, while we look at the overall impact and success of women in the workplace, a more important subject is just plain jobs, for everyone. It’s apparent that many men in the construction business in Central Oregon have had to reinvent themselves, some even changing careers in the middle of their life and starting new ventures.
You can read about some of these success stories in our RESET articles and about several women entrepreneurs, all in this issue! pha
