Who's getting hit most by layoffs

Your likelihood of job loss depends a lot on your gender, your race and your age.

The current recession is hitting workers in just about every industry, but men are taking a much bigger hit than women.
The 2.3-percentage-point gap between men's June unemployment rate of 10.6% and women's 8.3% rate was just below May's 2.5-point gap, the largest since records started being kept in 1948. The gap first hit 2 points in March.
The overall unemployment rate rose to 9.5% in June, from 9.4% in May. The economy lost a more-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June. (See full story.)
"The gap between female and male unemployment has never been as large as it is now," said Sophia Koropeckyj, an economist with Moody's Economy.com.
It's not hard to see why. Two male-dominated industries -- construction and manufacturing -- account for about half of the 6 million jobs lost since the recession started in December 2007, and both industries started shedding jobs before that.
"Every industry is contracting, but these industries have taken the brunt," Koropeckyj said. Given that men account for 87% of workers in manufacturing and 71% in construction, it's not surprising that men's unemployment is rocketing past women's.
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Health care, education jobs gaining The only two private-sector industries to show a net increase in jobs from the start of the recession are health care and education -- and female workers are highly concentrated in both.
Health care logged a net gain of about 542,000 jobs from December 2007 through May, and private education showed a net gain of about 102,000 jobs in that period.

Eighty-one percent of health care workers are women, and 61% of workers in private education are women, Koropeckyj said. Also, government has shown a net job gain of 259,000 in that period, and 57% of government workers are women.
That's not to say women are escaping unscathed. Unemployment has skyrocketed for both sexes. Women's unemployment rate was 4.7% in January 2008; men's was 5.1%.
And lower-income and less-educated workers, no matter their sex, usually face steeper job losses than others in recessions, and this one's no different.
"It's not as if women are not suffering," said Eileen Appelbaum, an economist and visiting scholar at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and director of Rutgers University's Center for Women and Work.
"Less-educated women are certainly feeling it, but to the extent that they have been employed in (health care and education), they have not felt the brunt of it, at least so far," Appelbaum said.
That may change.
Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said the net gain in health care jobs is slowing, partly because millions of Americans have lost not only their jobs but their employer-provided insurance and thus are ratcheting down their health care spending.
The education sector is also looking less solid, due mainly to state budget crises. "Education is losing jobs now," Shierholz said, though "not nearly as dramatically as other" industries.
Age- and race-based differences The differences in unemployment rates are even more dramatic when broken down by race and age. For example, white men's unemployment rate in June was 9.5%, while black men's was 17.8%. For white women it was 8%, and for black women, 13.1%, according to the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Teens have a harder time during recessions too. Here's a sampling of unemployment rates in June for various groups:
Black men 20 and older: 16.4%.
Black women 20 and older: 11.3%.
White men 20 and older: 9.2%.
White women 20 and older: 6.8%.
Black males age 16 to 19: 50%.
Black females age 16 to 19: 40.6%.
White males age 16 to 19: 26.5%.
White females age 16 to 19: 23.5%.

Jobless rate rises to 26-year high

U.S. economy shed a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June

Employers cut a larger-than-expected 467,000 jobs in June, driving the unemployment rate up to a 26-year high of 9.5 percent, suggesting that the economy's road to recovery will be bumpy.
The Labor Department report, released Thursday, showed that even as the recession flashes signs of easing, companies likely will want to keep a lid on costs and be wary of hiring until they feel certain the economy is on solid ground.
June's payroll reductions were deeper than the 363,000 that economists expected and average weekly earnings dropped to the lowest level in nearly a year.

However, the rise in the unemployment rate from 9.4 percent in May wasn't as sharp as the expected 9.6 percent. Still, many economists predict the jobless rate will hit 10 percent this year, and keep rising into next year, before falling back.
All told, 14.7 million people were unemployed in June.
If laid-off workers who have given up looking for new jobs or have settled for part-time work are included, the unemployment rate would have been 16.5 percent in June, the highest on records dating to 1994.
"We were on the road of things getting less bad in the jobs market, and that has been temporarily waylaid," said economist Ken Mayland, president of ClearView Economics. "But this doesn't change my view that the recession will end later this year. We're probably two months away."

On Wall Street, the employment news pulled stocks lower.
Since the recession began in December 2007, the economy has lost a net total of 6.5 million jobs.
As the downturn bites into sales and profits, companies have turned to layoffs and other cost-cutting measures to survive. Those include holding down workers' hours and freezing or cutting pay.
The average work week in June fell to 33 hours, the lowest on records dating to 1964.
Layoffs in May turned out to smaller, 322,000, versus the 345,000 first reported. But job cuts in April were a bit deeper — 519,000 versus 504,000, according to government data.
Even with higher pace of job cuts in June, the report indicates that the worst of the layoffs have passed. The deepest job cuts of the recession came in January, when 741,000 jobs vanished, the most in any month since 1949.