Women in Recessions - Lies, Damn Lies, and Newspaper Journalists who can't read statistics

Oft-times, the Press Corps likes to believe that the difference between itself and bloggers is the better accuracy the journalists have in their reporting. So this piece by the TUC blog, Touchstone, complaining about misreporting of their report "Women and Recession", is illustrative of how the reality can differ

The misreporting seems in part to be the responsibility of the Press Association who have misquoted our press release in their headline - changing ‘harder than previous downturns’ to ‘hardest hit’.

The Mirror have interpreted our analysis as showing that two women are sacked for every man. And The Herald has reported that the redundancy rate for women is double that of men.

The Daily Record report that the recession will hit women hardest and that the retail trade are bearing the brunt of the job cuts.

As they note, the facts were different and required a bit of application of intelligennce in reading the statistics:

In fact our analysis shows that the rate of women’s redundancy is lower than men’s. But from January - September 2008 the speed at which women’s redundancy rate increased was twice as fast as the speed at which men’s redundancy rate increased. This shows that women will be affected - but not that the effects will be greater for women than for men.

[And]....as all sectors of the economy look likely to be affected (including manufacturing) retail and services may be hit more than in previous recessions (when these sectors remained relatively resilient), as well as noting that higher levels of public sector work and the likely longer term growth in the service sector would be protective factors for women’s jobs.

Core data in the report:

Just to be clear the logic is as follows:

- There are more women at work. The female employment rate is around 70 per cent, while in the last recession is was around 67 per cent. Therefore there are more women who will feel the effect of the downturn. Particularly, there are more women in low-paid jobs - and for low-paid workers the effects of recession are worse.

- Women’s incomes are increasingly integral to overall family incomes - while women’s wages have always mattered they matter more now, for more families, than ever before.

- There are more lone-parent families than ever before, 90 per cent of whom are women. While these households will not all be completely dependent upon women’s wages for income, lone parent families may be more likely to rely more on women’s wages.

- Sectors across the economy are being hit - manufacturing, construction but also retail and services.

- Unemployment is rising for men and for women. This fact is further borne out by yesterday’s data, which show that the unemployment rate for working age men is 6.9 per cent, compared to a rate of 5.7 per cent for working age women. Both rates have increased since the start of the year (by 1.3 percentage points for men, and by 0.7 percentage points for women), and have also increased on the quarter.

- In the first three quarters of 2008 male and female redundancy rates showed sharp rises. Yesterday’s data show a greater rise for men than women, but women’s rate is still increasing fast.

- More women are part time workers (around 40 per cent of all women at work) and they will feel the effects of recession even if their jobs aren’t cut - overtime is often essential to women in these posts and is likely to be reduced during the downturn.

Less about the poor quality of blogging accuracy methinks.....(hat tip Kelen Keegan)