Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst

Though millions of people are still looking for work, some sectors added jobs in 2011. How did women and men fare in different industries?

For women, most of their job growth was in the service industry. Women gained jobs in private education and health services, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality. Women also added jobs in both retail and wholesale trade, as well as in "other" services (which includes repair shops and laundry services). The one non-service sector which saw some growth for women in 2011 was mining and logging.

Losses in the public sector were a huge story for women in 2011 — this sector saw the most losses by far. Women also lost jobs in goods-producing fields like manufacturing and construction, as well as in some service sectors like financial activities (which includes banking and real estate), information (which includes media and publishing), transportation and warehousing, and utilities.

For men the story is quite different — for every sector other than information and public jobs, they made gains in 2011.

Sometimes bad ideas just won’t go away. This is the case for the proposal to change the way the cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) for Social Security benefits is calculated by switching to a new measure of inflation (the chained CPI). This proposal has been billed as a mere technical adjustment to benefits but we debunked that myth this summer in our report Cutting the Social Security COLA by Changing the Way Inflation is Calculated Would Especially Hurt Women which showed that switching the COLA is nothing more than a sneak attack on Social Security benefits. The report explains how the current COLA already underestimates the effects of inflation on the elderly and fails to account for a crucial fact — that older people spend a much larger share of their budget on health care, where costs are rising much more quickly than with other expenses. And switching to the chained CPI would only put these beneficiaries farther behind.

The report also showed that changing the way the COLA is calculated would be particularly painful for women:

• Since women live longer than men, they would face deeper cuts in their Social Security benefits under the proposed new measure of inflation, because the cuts from this reduced COLA get deeper each year.
• Since women have less income than men, these cuts would represent a larger share of their total retirement income.
• Finally, since older women are already more economically vulnerable than older men, these cuts would leave many of them unable to meet basic needs.