In this job market, women have the upper hand

Allison Schrager, Tribune News Service

America is fast becoming a country with two economies: a stagnant one for men and a growing one for women. So far this year, the US has created more than 165,000 private-sector jobs, and 72% of them went to women. To some extent this reflects a structural change in the economy, as growth is in industries more likely to employ women, such as healthcare. But it is also the result of a series of policy choices that aim to make the economy safer — and have made it less favorable to men.

The decline in male work is a long-running trend that coincided with the technology-driven decline in manufacturing and the rise of the service economy. America also has an aging population, which means there are a lot of jobs in healthcare, whose workforce is about 80% female. The nature of technology is such that the labor market is kinder to people with more education, and women are more likely than men to have a college degree.

The result is not just male unemployment but male non-employment. Men looking for a job and men no longer looking have increased over time, even among men in their prime working years.

It is worth noting that, overall, more men work than women. Still, lots of out-of-work guys can be a problem for both an economy and a society. It may be a reason that marriage rates are lower and there are more single mothers. Non-working men are also more likely to have mental health issues. When men in the prime of their lives aren’t working, it represents a loss of economic and personal potential.

It’s also true that economies evolve. As the tech-driven economy changes, it is shifting away from manufacturing, transport and other traditional male jobs and into services and caregiving. And as much as some economists and commentators would like men to change their preferences and become nurses, it is not a solution that will work for everyone.

That said, some of these trends are policy-driven and could be reversed by policy that allows for and rewards risk-taking.

The fact that most current job creation tends to be in healthcare or (until recently) government and education reflects a society that aims to reduce risk. Between its tax code and its workplace regulations, the US encourages an increasingly greater share of compensation to come in the form of insurance (mostly health insurance) instead of take-home pay. Health insurance has its benefits, of course — but it also encourages more spending on health-related services and disconnects them from prices, and that’s just the private sector. The US also spends more on healthcare in the form of government benefits, mainly Medicare and Medicaid.

The net effect of all this is to increase healthcare’s share of the economy. This is not necessarily bad — there is an argument that being safer and having more insurance coverage improves health — but the US does not have unlimited resources. Spending on healthcare is a choice, and it comes with trade-offs.

One of those trade-offs is less work for men. One recent paper speculates that the decline in work hours, mostly from men leaving the labor force, can be explained by the huge expansion of Medicaid over the last 50 years. Medicaid discourages work because recipients lose health benefits when they earn more money.

And then there are environmental regulations and building restrictions, which are forms of risk aversion — for the environment and for neighbourhoods. They also make it harder to build more homes, which both limits the number of jobs in the construction industry and makes housing more expensive. That, in turn, makes it harder to take a risk like moving to find a better job.

Some states are also trying to restrict gig work and force firms to hire more workers as employees instead of contractors. This is also a form of risk-aversion policy: It attempts to ensure that workers have more benefits and employment protections, but it also makes hiring people more expensive, especially in jobs that don’t require a college degree. The impulse toward risk aversion also favors white-collar jobs in areas such as human resources and compliance, which also tend to be dominated by women.

All these attempts to make the economy safer and more regulated come from a place of noble intentions. But they make the economy less dynamic — and since women tend to work in more stable and less physical jobs, they benefit more.