The latest
unemployment figures released this week by the CSO confirm that men are much
more likely to be unemployed than women and hence the term some people have
coined for this recession, namely the ‘mancession’.

Figures
from the National Household Survey for the fourth quarter of last year show
that whereas the female unemployment rate is 10 percent, among men it is 17
percent, that is, fully 70 percent higher.

This gap is
higher than virtually anywhere else in the industrialised world. In the EU-27
the average unemployment rate for men and women is virtually the same at around
10 percent each.

Why are men
in Ireland much more likely to be unemployed? The obvious answer is that the
construction industry, which is overwhelmingly male, has been overwhelmingly
hit by the recession.

In the last
quarter of 2008 there were 201,200 men employed in the construction sector but
by the last quarter of last year this had shrunk to just 102,000, an almost 50
percent drop.

Women are
also being protected from unemployment, relatively speaking, by the fact that
so many more than work in public sector jobs like teaching and nursing.

In the
education and health sectors as a whole (including social work), 303,700 women
are employed, as against just 83,000 men.

So men are far
more exposed to cyclical unemployment than women.

There is
probably not a whole lot that can be done about this. Men in general are
obviously more attracted to building work than to service sectors like health
and education.

Of course,
what this illustrates once again is that the sexes are not homogenous. Men and
women are frequently drawn to different kinds of jobs. Women are much more
likely than men to do part-time jobs. More women than men are home-orientated
by preference.

These second
two preferences by women are the main explanation for the pay gap between men
and women persists even in Sweden at a rate that is at about the EU average.

The existence
of the pay-gap is often used as prima facie evidence of ‘sexism’. Perhaps some
part of it is explained by sexism, but most of it is explained by the choices
men and women freely make, just as the current high rate of unemployment among
men is explained by the type of jobs many men choose, and not some kind of
structural sexism.