If anyone needs me, I'll be in the bathroom

A few days ago, Anita sent me a link to a story in Gongwer, a state government newsletter, trumpeting the fact that Michigan’s unemployment rate “plunged” by 0.8 percentage points to 9.8 percent. It’s the first time in three years that the state’s unemployment rate dropped below 10 percent. (The national November unemployment rate is 8.6 percent.)

I wasn’t aware that a drop of eight-tenths of one percentage point was a “plunge,” but maybe I’m obsessing over word usage.

This was on the same day that I ran across an internet meme in Facebook stating, “There are more than 4 people unemployed for every open job; maybe ‘just get a job’ isn’t that simple.”

This is a reference, I assume, to comments made by that pompous, repulsive, insensitive slug known as Newt Gingrich, the GOP presidential candidate who admonished Occupy Wall Street protestors on Thanksgiving to just “get a job after you take a bath.”

Or maybe it relates to former Gingrich competitor Herman Cain’s insistence that if people who aren’t rich don’t have jobs, they have no one to blame but themselves.

In any event, Anita might have sent the link as just an FYI...or maybe it was because she’s tired of being the moneymaker in the family. My freelance writing career has thus far proven less than lucrative, to put it mildly, and she’s been shouldering the financial burden of our six-person family for some time now. It’s little comfort that in recent years there’s been a sharp rise in the number of married couples where a woman is left to bring home the bacon because hubby is unemployed.

According to the Center for American Progress, “The reason that more married couples now boast women as the primary breadwinners is because men have experienced greater job losses than women over the course of this recession, losing three out of every four jobs lost.”

So is it still a man’s world? Yes and no.

Wage inequality remains a problem. In 2007, the median weekly earnings of women working full-time were $614, or 80 percent of men's $766. And when comparing the median weekly earnings of people aged 16 to 24, young women earned 92 percent of what young men earned ($409 and $443, respectively).

But women did account for 51 percent of all workers in the high-paying management and professional occupations in 2007. They outnumbered men as financial managers, human resource managers, education administrators, medical and health services managers, accountants and auditors, budget analysts and physical therapists as well as in occupations like registered nurse and preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle and secondary school teacher. Women also outnumbered men in the fields of property, real estate, and social and community association management.

I wonder how many employers replace men with women because they can get away with paying women less.

Another information source, the Pew Research Center, contradicts the Center for American Progress. According to its analysis of more recent data, men gained 768,000 jobs and lowered their unemployment rate by 1.1 percentage points to 9.5 percent from “the end of the recession in June 2009 through May of this year.”

Guess I’d better take a bath now.



Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Think Progress, Center for American Progress, Pew Research Center.