Unemployment and Gender

A quick post to follow up a discussion from Google+.

A big factor in labor dynamics over the last four decades has been a shift in demographics.

One of the problems with gender equality is that in many cases it means a woman can do a job just as well as a man. In fact, statistically speaking, roughly 50% of the time, she can do it better.

What this means is that often when a woman joins the workforce, as thankfully they have done in droves over the last half century, they are often replacing a man.

Labor force participation is a zero-sum game, in so far as it has held steady between 56 and 64% since 1976. An unfortunate side effect of this is that men have seen steadily increasing unemployment since for as long as we have reliable data.

As shown in the graph, unemployment among women declined from 1976 to 1997, and plateaued, not rising until the recession of 2009 (Black Arrow), while men had faced rising unemployment at about a quarter point per year, until 2009.

Same chart, Googlified

That being said, from a strictly economic standpoint, any time a woman replaces a less qualified man, society benefits from increased productivity, so we shouldn't exactly be mourning the progressive improvement of American society.

Especially, as the data indicates, we still have a long way to go.

Data used in this analysis were from the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, specifically Series:
LNS10000000 - Civilian noninstitutional population
LNS11000000 - Civilian labor force
LNS10000001 - Civilian noninstitutional population, male
LNS11000001 - Civilian labor force, male
LNS10000002 - Civilian noninstitutional population, female
LNS11000002 - Civilian labor force, female

Raw data available here.