Mancession, Hecovery (Shock and Awe)

Thanks to a tip from Bill Bielby, I found myself listening to Diane Sawyer on ABC say, "There is a new chapter tonight in this very serious battle of the sexes..."
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Thanks to a tip from Bill Bielby, I found myself listening to Diane Sawyer on ABC say, "There is a new chapter tonight in this very serious battle of the sexes..." This is what she looked like as she said it:


It turns out the situation is very bad for women, as indicated by what we used to a call "graph":


Not to be too technical, but according to voice-over, there have been a total of 1.3 million jobs "gained in the U.S. during the recovery" (which must be why the numbers on the graph add up to 1.213 million). Of those, "almost 90%," by which she means 84.6% (1.1 out of 1.3), have gone to men. Or, according to the numbers on the graph, men actually got 90.7% of the jobs. But anyways, there are 100 icon-workers in the graph. If you go by the numbers on the graph, that's 12,130 jobs per icon. So those 15 pink icons represent 181,950 jobs, as indicated by the label, "113,000." Anyways, it's bad news for the pink team.

In fact, men are gaining jobs faster than women. From February 2010 to February 2011 (seasonally adjusted), men have gained 1,238,000 jobs, and women have actually lost 362,000:


But let's (maybe?) keep this in perspective. Men are still down about 4.1 million jobs since 2007's annual average, and women are down a paltry 2.3 million. I have attempted to label the trends according to the scale of shock and awe that might be more appropriate:


Oops, wrong picture. Try this:


Given the size of the mancession, I think a little hecovery shouldn't be too surprising, although to the woman in the ABC story who sent out 200 resumes and got two phone interviews that "went nowhere" I suppose that isn't the point.

Cross posted from the Family Inequality blog.

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