Maybe it's all just a way to free up jobs for men

At one point a number of years ago, when Mr. Brilliant was between jobs, he would refer to himself as an "unemployed bum." I asked him the other day what an unemployed woman was, and he said "an unemployed bumette." That didn't ring quite right, and after a moment I realized that an unemployed woman was essentially a housewife, or if she has kids, a "stay-at-home-mom."

I'm beginning to have some hope that it just might be unnecessary to even file for unemployment, but if it does take longer to find a new job than I hope it does, my days after August 29 are hardly going to be filled with household chores, given the amount of time job-hunting takes up. But without HAVING to be someplace for X hours a day, I'm reasonably confident that the house will be far cleaner and tidier than it is when we're both working.

The layoffs in my department consist of three women and two men, which in our case means that MEN are disproportionately represented, given that the new configuration will consist of exactly ONE man at a lower-than-director level and another who works from home -- and the rest are women. But that's not the case in the national employment picture:

This week, Congress issued a report, titled “Equality in Job Loss: Women are Increasingly Vulnerable to Layoffs During Recessions,” that may — if read in its entirety — finally, officially and definitively sound a death knell for the story of the Opt-Out Revolution. The report, commissioned by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out.

Women — all women, mothers or not — were hit “especially hard” hard by the recession of 2001 and the recovery-that-never-really-was, the report states. “Unlike in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, during the 2001 recession, the percent of jobs lost by women often exceeded that of men in the industries hardest hit by the downturn. The lackluster recovery of the 2000s made it difficult for women to regain their jobs — women’s employment rates never returned to their pre-recession peak.”

While prior recessions tended to spare women’s jobs relative to men’s, that trend has been reversed in the current downturn, thanks in part to women’s progress in entering formerly male industries and occupations, and in part to the fact that job sectors like service and retail, which still employ disproportionate numbers of women, have suffered disproportionate losses. And this — not a calling to motherhood — accounts for the fall, starting in 2000, of women’s labor force participation rates.

“Women may be more susceptible to the impact of the business cycle than they were when they were more highly concentrated in a smaller number of non-cyclical occupations, like teaching and nursing,” the report states. “There is no evidence, however, that mothers are increasingly ‘opting out’ of employment, in favor of full-time motherhood. For this story to be true, the employment rate of non-mothers would have had to diverge sharply from that of mothers, which has not been the case.”

In fact, Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which released the report, proved in earlier research that there was no evidence at all for the belief that having children was causing women to drop out of work. On the contrary: the likelihood that a woman with children at home would leave the labor force decreased dramatically from 1984 to 2000, and continued to fall significantly right up to 2004. This downward trend held for women of all age groups and educational levels — except for women in their thirties with advanced degrees, for whom the numbers remained stable over time. “The data stand in opposition to the media frenzy on this topic,” Boushey wrote for the Center for Economic and Policy Research in 2005. “The main reasons for declining labor force participation rates among women over the last four years appears to be the weakness of the labor market.”

Men, of course, were hit hard by the recession and weak recovery, too; in fact, as Louis Uchitelle of the Times reported earlier this week, the workforce participation rates of men aged 25 through 54 have dropped from 96 percent in 1953 to 86.4 percent today.

But when men in their prime working years drop out of the workforce we don’t say they’ve gone home to be with their kids.

We say they’re unemployed.

It may very well be that when women were concentrated in service industries, those jobs were less susceptible to the vagaries of the business cycle. But with more women holding jobs traditionally held by men, it should not be a surprise to anyone that when the axe falls, it falls on women as well.

Where women have at least a psychological advantage, as compared to men, when we lose our jobs, is what was revealed during my discussion with Mr. Brilliant. A woman can claim to have "opted out" of the workforce (something I am not able financially to do even if I wanted to), but when a man does that, he faces a stigma among his peers and the world at large. Even though I have no children, I could stay home and clean, finish refacing the kitchen cabinets, set down a new kitchen floor, garden, blog, work on my novel, and no one would think of me as a bum. I could show my face at the Shop-Rite at eleven o'clock in the morning and no one would think anything of it. Men don't have that luxury -- unless they have a level of intrinsic self-confidence that few men have.

The aforementioned male co-worker who works from home is philosophical about the prospect of additional layoffs, even though he has now survived two of them. "If they lay me off, I'll just let the nanny go and I'll take care of the kids." The nanny is female. And if he has to let her go, that will be another woman, this time in a traditionally female job, who will be a casualty of the current recession.

The quoted article's purpose is to debunk the notion that some kind of social sea-change has led women to opt out of the workforce, such as this 2003 New York Times Magazine article about women who attended Ivy League schools and then chose to stay home with children. The whole notion was horsepuckey, of course, as any number of sources revealed later on, including a paper that is hardly a bastion of feminism, the Wall Street Journal.

In theory, at least, we will at some point scramble and climb out of this (though the massive debt this country has rung up in the past eight years makes me even skeptical of that). It will be interesting to see if women's jobs return, or if this is just the beginning of not an opting-out, but a push of women out of a workplace in which there will be fewer opportunities to go around -- with women and minorities the first casualties.