Men overtake women in retail jobs thanks to unbalanced recovery

The jobs recovery is not exactly booming for anyone, but as we've seen, women are getting the worst of it. Men have gotten 80 percent of the jobs gained in the recovery. The disproportionate effect of public sector job cuts on women is one big part of the problem, and a part very directly affected by government policy, but women face problems even in traditionally female-dominated occupations like retail sales:

Three years ago, women made up a majority of the payrolls in the retail trade, just as they have throughout most of the last three decades for which data are available. But since the sector hit bottom in December 2009, men have landed more than 440,000 retail jobs while women have lost 49,500 positions.

Men now account for 51% of the 14.75 million retail jobs in the country.

Similarly, the male share of payrolls has inched higher in financial services such as banking and real estate, healthcare and education, and leisure and hospitality businesses, although women still outnumber men in each sector.

There are a lot of factors, of course, but a big one, if we're being blunt, is that men tend to get better jobs than women. Sometimes that means actual good jobs. Other times it means bad jobs rather than no jobs. So when the economy crashed, several high-paying industries, like construction, were especially hard hit and men lost more jobs than women. But then, as the economy is coming back, men are just disproportionately getting the available jobs. They may not be as good as the jobs men lost in the recession, but it's better than nothing, which is currently what many women are getting.