Report: Moms hit hard by recession

May 8, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

NEW YORK

They’ve called it the “Mancession” — a recession that’s affected men disproportionately, because of its impact on male-dominated sectors such as construction and manufacturing.

But that term rings hollow to women such as Sara Wade, an Illinois schoolteacher who became the sole supporter of two school-age children — possibly for good, she fears — when her ex-husband, a carpenter and contractor, stopped paying child support 15 months ago.

Or to Martha Gonzalez, a divorced mother of three in Texas who had to take a second, part-time job when her work in real estate became scarcer. She lost her benefits, too, and for the first time in her adult working life, has no health insurance.

Or to Angela Grice, single mom of a 3-year-old son, who cobbles together two low-paying, part-time jobs while she tries to get an accounting degree that will lead to some stability for her and her son.

Concerned about women such as these, a congressional committee has issued a report, timed for Mother’s Day, outlining the adverse impact the recession has had on working women — especially on mothers, and particularly single moms. A copy was provided to The Associated Press ahead of its Monday release.

Strikingly, the report, by the Joint Economic Committee, finds that whereas during the bulk of the recession job losses were overwhelmingly male, as the economy edged toward recovery, the trend began reversing.

“As job losses slowed in the final months of 2009, women continued to lose jobs as men found employment,” says the report, based on the committee’s analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, including unpublished data. Specifically, from October 2009 to March 2010, women lost 22,000 jobs while men gained 260,000, it says. It adds: “April’s strong employment growth showed women gained 86,000 jobs last month, far fewer than the 204,000 jobs gained by men.”

Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., chairwoman of the committee, noted that the findings were especially dire for single mothers — their unemployment rate went from 8 percent to 13.6 percent between 2007 and 2009.

“Women are losing more jobs, yet families are more dependent on their earnings,” she said in a telephone interview.

In all, one-third of jobs lost during the Great Recession belonged to women, Maloney notes. That’s striking, she says, because in earlier recessions the percentage was much lower; women accounted for 15 percent of job losses in the 2001 recession, for example.

But even women who’ve been able to hold onto their jobs have found the economic sands shifting beneath them in ways they never anticipated.

Wade, the Illinois schoolteacher, counts herself among the luckier ones. An eighth-grade English teacher in Skokie for 16 years, she’s fortunate to have tenure and seniority.

Her husband, whom she divorced in 2004, is a carpenter and contractor, “just the kind of job they mean when the call it a ‘Mancession,’” she says. But the term seems meaningless because the impact of his job troubles has put her in a risky position she never imagined: the sole source of economic support for their 8-year-old boy and 10-year-old girl.

Wade has had no child support since January 2009, and she bought a new home with the help of her family.

In 2009, 3.3 million women worked part time for economic reasons, the report says, meaning that they didn’t choose it: Either they couldn’t find full-time work, or their hours had been cut from full time.