The Recession's Hit Women Hard, but the Myth of the "Mancession" Won't Die

As an analysis, the myth of the “mancession” may have started out as an overly-stylized reading of labor market statistics. Men lost a larger share of jobs than women at the outset of the Great Recession in 2007, according to widely-reported Bureau of Labor Statistics measures tracking trends through spring 2009. This led University of Michigan economist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark J. Perry to conclude that there was a “historic” and “unprecedented” gender gap in unemployment favoring women by as much as two percentage points — a gap that actually has been closing more recently as cutbacks shift from the male-dominated construction and manufacturing sectors to education, human services, and other areas where women predominate.

But as an idea, the myth of the mancession has assumed a staying power beyond what those initial numbers appeared to support: it taps into larger cultural and economic anxieties that predate the Great Recession and that have to do with changing relations between men and women. This is revealed nowhere more powerfully than in the late, great passing of the “traditional” two-parent family, in which men could expect to be the chief — if not the solo — breadwinners.

Of course, there is rarely just one way to read statistical measures, and on these grounds alone the “mancession” has been subject to much dispute. More fine-grained analyses of the data, for example, show considerable differences in the impact of male job loss across lines of class, race, age, and region; not all men have been affected equally by the downturn, nor women for that matter, suggesting at the very least that there is more to the so-called gender gap than meets the eye. Nor has the Great Recession shown any “favor” to women when it comes to wage losses and poverty rates, both of which are on the rise. And historical experience reminds us that men have also lost the large majority of jobs in past recessions, as they did in the Great Depression, due to the fact that they are disproportionately represented in traditionally hard-hit and better-paying sectors of the economy. Indeed, one could use this observation to conclude that the gender gap in job loss reveals just how stratified the labor market remains, with nearly 90 percent of construction jobs held by men, and nearly 70 percent in manufacturing. The “mancession,” however, comes to a simpler, if misleading conclusion: men suffered far more from the Great Recession than women, and by the time we actually recover, they may find themselves even further behind. As characterized by Perry when he first started writing about the unemployment “gender gap,” what women were experiencing as a “downturn” was a “catastrophe” for men.

It is in taking this line that the myth of the “mancession” most clearly links up to a larger narrative that, in its starkest expressions, presents a story of female ascendancy and male decline. Indeed, news reports of the mancession almost invariably come wrapped up in a bundle of statistics suggesting that women are outdoing men in all sorts of other “historic” and “unprecedented” ways, from higher numbers of college and post-graduate degrees to larger shares of consumer spending and growing importance, if not yet outright leadership, as breadwinners in the household economy. Men, in the zero-sum logic that underlies the larger narrative, are losing out, not just in terms of relative economic position, but in the sense of authority and, well, manliness that once anchored their sense of identity.