Introduction

Summary

The US economy entered the twenty-first century exuberantly, with unemployment plunging to historic lows and families seeing the value of their assets grow to unimagined heights. A few years later, beginning in 2007, it all came crashing down. The US subprime mortgage crisis, which blossomed into a full-blown financial crisis a year later, made jobs evaporate and asset values disappear. On the employment front, men were hit hard, with unemployment rates reaching double digits. Women’s employment fell, but not as far as men’s. The press was quick to coin a new term to capture this economic assault on masculinity – the US was experiencing a “mancession”. Despite the initial alarm, the mancession was relatively short-lived. By the beginning of 2010, men’s employment already showed signs of recovery. Women weren’t so lucky. Women’s employment stagnated until almost a year and a half later, exhibiting signs of steady growth only in the second half of 2011.

These kinds of macroeconomic meltdowns have happened elsewhere. Between 1998 and 2002, Argentina experienced one of the worst economic disasters in its history, earning this crisis the moniker of the “Argentine Great Depression”. Unemployment reached record highs as Argentina’s economy shrank by over 18 per cent. Despite the decline in employment opportunities, women’s participation in the labour force actually rose modestly during the crisis (Montaño & Milosavljevic 2012). With formal jobs evaporating, employment in the informal sector became an important coping strategy (Whitson 2007). During crises, like Argentina’s, women’s work allows families to make ends meet as they try to weather the economic storm. Economic distress may trigger reactions that hurt women in other ways. Due to macroeconomic policy choices, Zimbabwe experienced extreme rates of inflation beginning in the late 1990s that squeezed households and threatened living standards. Incidents of domestic violence rose as the country’s economic crisis intensified (Masiyiwa 2017).

Economic crises are extreme events, yet they all illustrate an important lesson. Changes in the overall economic environment affect women and men differently. This holds true in non-crisis situations. Broad-based economic policies will have gender specific outcomes.