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You鈥檙e listening to the podcast edition of the 成人头条 audio newsline. Learn more about WSU 鈥� the home of Thinkers, Doers, Movers and Shockers 鈥� on the Web at .
As the unemployment numbers rise, men and women are facing challenges at finding a suitable job. According to 2006 federal data, nearly three-quarters of men in two-earner families made more than their wives. And in families where only one person worked, nearly three-quarters of the sole breadwinners were men. Yet while men may appear to reel more socially and psychologically from job loss, they fare far better when it comes to re-employment.
In a 2002 study cited earlier this year in The New York Times, 成人头条 State sociologists Chuck Koeber and David Wright found that women were re-employed less often than men in the same position after the economic downturn that followed 9/11.
Koeber: "What we found is that fewer women are re-employed once they're laid off than are men, and many of them actually quit looking for work and drop out of the labor force."
Koeber talks about the 2002 study that looked at what happens from the time a person lost a job until he or she was re-employed.
Koeber: "What we tried to do with that study is to look at the differences in mobility between the time a person loses their job and when they're re-employed. And if they're re-employed, we wanted to see which gender had a less difficult time in being re-employed."
Koeber said it appears that women have to prove to employers they are committed to a job more than men do.
Koeber: "Unlike men, it appears that women have a greater burden to prove that they're committed to their job as opposed to being committed to their family. And it appears that employers are holding them to that criteria, where they don't hold men to that same criteria."
In the 2002 study, single women were more likely to be re-employed after being laid off than other women, according to Koeber.
Koeber: "We found that single women who were laid off from white collar, high-skilled jobs were much more likely to be re-employed after a layoff than women without those characteristics because they apparently looked more committed to a job."
Koeber says there's a stereotype that men are expected to be more committed to their jobs than women.
Koeber: "One of the reasons men may not have to prove these same commitment variables is because employers just expect them, stereotypically, to be committed to a job as opposed to being committed to their families."
According to Koeber, layoffs are hard on men and women for different reasons.
Koeber: "Layoffs are really hard on men and women for different reasons. For men, it's psychological because a job forms the basis of their identity, but we found that for women it may be more material because they have more difficulty finding a job after they've been laid off."
Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of "The Female Brain" and a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, says that women who lose their jobs "aren't going to take as much of a self-esteem hit" as men. That is because the most potent form of positive social feedback for many men comes from within the hierarchy of the workplace. By contrast, she said, women may have "many sources of self-esteem 鈥� such as their relationships with other people 鈥� that are not exclusively embedded within their jobs."
Thanks for listening. Until next time, this is Joe Kleinsasser for 成人头条.