Oregon Public Broadcasting

In Oregon and Washington, the recession is taking a much heavier job toll on men than women.

Based on the number of people filing unemployment claims for the first time in Washington, men are losing their jobs twice as fast as women.

KUOW’s John Ryan reports from Seattle on what some are calling the HE-cession.

Andrew Cater is a carpenter in Mountlake Terrace. Or at least he was, until his construction company laid him off eight weeks ago.

Andrew Cater: “I’ve been sending out resumes, but with very little response. If I personally stop by a biz and ask if they have any work or vacancies available, people tell me at this point, they’ve barely got enough work for themselves.”

Check out our map of recent layoffs around the Northwest

Cater’s girlfriend Cecilia has held on to her job as an office manager for a chiropractor. But Cater says he’s been eating into his savings to avoid relying too much on her income.

Andrew Cater: “Until all my avenues are tapped out, I should do everything I can to support the household my 50 percent, it’s just the right thing to do. But it can’t go on much longer.”

Cater, of course, is not alone. More than 300,000 Washingtonians are now out of work. The state’s unemployment rate hit 9.2 percent last month.

The heavily male-dominated construction industry has been the hardest hit.

60,000 male construction workers in Washington have filed for unemployment in the past year. That’s one out of every five people seeking unemployment assistance in the state.

The recession has caused big layoffs throughout the economy. But male-dominated industries like construction and manufacturing have let go the greatest numbers of workers.

And industries like health care and education, where women dominate the workforce, have had relatively few layoffs.

Seattle economist Dick Conway says the current recession hasn’t taken out as many jobs as some past recessions, like the Boeing bust in 1970, or the dot-com collapse in 2001. But he says this time around, it feels worse.

Map of state-by-state unemployment rates

Dick Conway: “In past recessions, the people who have been affected have primarily been the people who lost their jobs, and usually, that’s not  a high percentage of the population. This recession is different, we’re not only losing jobs, but anybody who owns a house or has stock has also lost a lot of wealth.”

Washington state is echoing a national, even international, trend.

Heather Boushey is an economist with the Center for American Progress. That’s a liberal think-tank in Washington, D.C. She says the recession is tough on women, too, since a woman working full-time in America earns 78 cents for every dollar a working man earns.

Heather Boushey: “Because so many men have lost their jobs, in millions of American families, it’s the woman who’s supporting the family, and the typical family, the man brings home a little under 2/3 of total family income, so the loss of his job is causing families to pare back their spending considerably.”

The pattern holds true north of the border, where Canadian men make up 80 percent of the nation’s layoff victims. Canadian newspapers have dubbed the nation’s recession, a “HE-cession.”