The Role of Industry and Occupation in Recent U.S. Unemployment Differentials by Gender...

This paper documented “historical unemployment trends by gender, race, and Hispanic ethnicity, and provided a decomposition of unemployment differentials in terms of industry and occupation…This overview highlighted the growing importance of female, nonwhite, and Hispanic workers in the U.S. labor force, as well as the shift of the U.S. workforce towards services and white collar jobs. Using the same data, [the report] presented historical comparisons in the unemployment rates by gender, race, ethnicity, industry, and occupation” (p.2). (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

Full Publication Title: The Role of Industry and Occupation in Recent U.S. Unemployment Differentials by Gender, Race and Ethnicity

The “analyses show that, as the female proportion of the labor force has increased in the past 50 years, the female unemployment rate has converged with the male unemployment rate. However, [the authors] find that there remained substantial gender differences in the employment distribution by industry and occupation, and that these differences had a large effect on the gender unemployment rate gap. When [they] adjust for such differences, the female unemployment rate is higher than the male unemployment rate. [The] analysis also indicates that women were appreciably less likely than men to receive UI benefits in the past two decades. However, this difference is explained by differences in the industry-occupation distribution; in fact, women in the same kinds of jobs as men had the same or greater likelihood of receiving UI benefits. But given that their unemployment rates after adjustment for type of job are above those of men, unemployed women are somewhat less likely to receive UI than unemployed men…Racial differences in unemployment are of longstanding importance. Even the most casual reference to unemployment and UI statistics reveals that nonwhite levels of unemployment remain substantially above those for whites” (p.28-29). (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2012
• Author(s): Michaelides, Marios; Mueser, Peter
• Organizational Author(s): IMPAQ International; University of Missouri
• Funding Source: Funding source not identified
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies