Thursday, March 16, 2017

Women and Men in the New Economy

Data from a 2014 study by the Federal Reserve:
While women were hit much harder than men by the disappearance of middle-skill jobs, the majority of women managed to upgrade their skills and find better-paying jobs. By comparison, more than half of men who lost middle-skill jobs had to settle for lower-paying occupations.

From 1979 to 2007, seven percent of men and 16 percent of women with middle-skill jobs lost their positions, according to the Dallas Fed study. Four percent of these men moved to low-skill work, and 3 percent moved to high-skill jobs. Almost all the women, 15 percent, moved into high-skill jobs, with only 1 percent moving to low-skill work.
I bet if we had more detailed data we would find that health care jobs are a big part of this, with working class women much more willing than men to get training for jobs like x-ray techs or go back to school to become nurses.

But there's more to the story:
High-paying, difficult-to-automate jobs increasingly require social skills. Nearly all job growth since 1980 has been in occupations that are relatively social skill-intensive. Jobs that require high levels of analytical and mathematical reasoning but low levels of social interaction have fared especially poorly. . . .

The economy-wide shift toward social skill-intensive occupations has occurred disproportionately among women rather than men. This is consistent with a large literature showing sex differences in social perceptiveness and the ability to work with others.
For the "brutes", as Tyler Cowen dubbed them, things look increasingly grim.

1 comment:

G. Verloren said...

For the "brutes", as Tyler Cowen dubbed them, things look increasingly grim.

You don't see predatory wild dogs doing very well these days either, but sociable domesticated ones sure are thriving.

Humanity is slowly domesticating itself, to the enormous benefit of the species. There are simply some portions of it which refuse to adapt, and would rather drag everyone else down with them as they die out.