By MARY PATRICK
Men are trailing behind women in regaining jobs lost in the Great Recession, partly because men dominate industries that have not added back the jobs cut during the economic downturn.
Women, on the other hand, have regained all the jobs lost during the Great Recession. They’ve actually surpassed those pre-Recession employment figures – in the August federal jobs report, 68 million said they were employed, more than the 67.9 million who reported having jobs in December 2007.
Men remain about 2 million jobs behind where they were – 78.3 million reported having jobs in December 2007, while 76.2 million had jobs in August of this year, according to CBS News.
The numbers show the importance of a college education and how choosing to train for a new vocation can help open up doors in a troubled job market. Women attend college in greater numbers than men. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 2010, 30.7 million women had a bachelor’s degree or higher, while the corresponding number for men was 29.2 million.
Almost 30% of women over the age of 25 have obtained a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which also reported that there are 11.3 million women attending college.
The gap in employment between men and women also could be seen in the August unemployment numbers. The unemployment rate for women stood at 6.8%, while the rate for men was 7.7%.
Part of the reason, according to CBS News, is that women dominate jobs in one of the fastest growing industries in the nation: healthcare. The healthcare sector had added almost 1.6 million jobs since June 2009, with about 1.1 million of those jobs going to women.
Women also make up more than 50% of the workforce in hotels and restaurants, another industry that has been growing rapidly since 2009. Women have also made gains in sectors that often require a college education: information technology, architecture, engineering (long a male-dominated industry) and professional and business services.
One contradictory number is the labor force participation percentage, which is the number of people who are either working or looking for work. For women, the number was 57.3%, down from 59.4% in December 2007. For men , the number was 69.5%, down from 73.1%.
The reasons for the drop include the number of people retiring, going back or enrolling for the first time in college, going on Social Security disability and simply stopping to look for work, according to CBS News.
