Gender Equality in U.S. Labor Markets in the “Great Recession” of 2007–10

Both in the academic literature and the popular press, the 2007–2010 recession1 has come to be known as the “Great Man-cession” (Thompson 2009, Wall 2009, Perry 2010). Analysts have used two pieces of evidence to support this claim: first, that job loss hit males harder than females in 2007–09 in all racial and demographic groups; and second, that the female-male “unemployment gap” is larger in this recession than in previous recessions. For instance, as shown in Figure 9.1, men’s and women’s unemployment rates were roughly the same when the recession started, at 5.1 percent for males versus 4.9 percent for females. By the third quarter of 2009, they had risen to 11 percent for men and 8.3 percent for women (Sahin, Son and Hobijn 2010). This 2.7 percentage-point difference exceeded the maximum gap in the previous three recessions (Perry 2010). Looking over the long term, this finding is even more striking because, before the 1980s, the unemployment rate for women tended to be higher than that for men, both during normal times and during recessions.