Women lost fewer jobs than men during recession

Women fared better in the recession than men when it came to employment.

In fact, during the crash the employment gap decreased to its narrowest since the foundation of the State.

And at one point in 2008, looking specifically at PAYE employees, there were more women in the Irish workforce than men.

This is according to a presentation made at the Economic Social and Research Institute (ESRI) yesterday, at a conference marking 50 years of research.

“What you’ll find looking at male and female employment (is) a levelling down, quite a dramatic fall here in the early years of the recession in male employment and not such a dramatic fall in female employment,” said Frances McGinnity, associate research professor at the ESRI.

“We do find a convergence in male and female employment rates, the lowest since the foundation of the State in those early years (of the recession),” she added.

Ms McGinnity went on to say that women made up more of the PAYE workforce than men, during the recession: “If we look at employees, that’s if we exclude the self-employed in late 2008 there were actually more female employees than male. This is just overall employment, around one-third of women (were) working part-time compared to somewhere between 10 and 15% of men. The nature of the engagement is rather different.”

There was a multitude of reasons as to why women were not as badly-affected as men when it came to job losses. “Looking at the role of sector in (a) recession, this idea of working in protected sectors may have protected women.

“You look here at manufacturing and particularly construction.

“As you can see construction is one of the most segregated, there just wasn’t a very high proportion of women working in construction, 5% there so the massive job losses in construction were less salient for them (women),” explained Ms McGinnity.

Whereas women are employed in greater proportion in “protected” sectors such as health or education: “Women are more concentrated here in the largely public education and health sectors. They make up also three-quarters in 2007 of public sector workers, compared to 35% in the private sector,” said the research professor.

One other finding in the ESRI presentation showed that unlike in other boom and bust periods, where women entered the workforce temporarily and then retreated, this was not the case. “Standing back and looking a little bit more at the long term, we see no evidence of substantial withdrawal from the labour market in the recession,” Ms McGinnity said.

The presentation, “Gender equality in the labour market: A Work in Progress?” was co-authored by Helen Russell, associate research professor at the ESRI and Philip O’Connell, director of the UCD Geary Institute.