Female workers bore the brunt of job losses in the retail industry over the last year.
As the retail industry grappled with store closings and bankruptcies, it lost 54,300 jobs from October 2016 to October 2017. During that time, women lost 160,300 retail jobs, while men actually gained 106,000 jobs, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research analysis of the December employment report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).
The disparity seems to be coming from shifting trends in the retail industry, though just what trends are causing it are up for debate.
“This seems to be a situation where men are in the right places and women are in the wrong places,” said Heidi Hartmann, president and CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based IWPR.
Hartmann said she thinks the discrepancy stems from more women working in stores or departments that haven’t fared as well as those where she says men are more predominant. Categories like furniture and home furnishings, building materials and garden supplies, motor vehicles and parts have been selling better than clothing and accessories and department stores, according to U.S. Census data released last week.
Most of the industry’s job losses came from general merchandise stores, which shed 161,000 female employees while adding nearly 88,000 male workers from October 2016 to October 2017, the most recent BLS data available. Meanwhile car dealers, home improvement stores and furniture retailers all saw job gains in that period, with higher gains among men. Hartmann said you’re more likely to see men working in these stores than women, and same goes for those departments within larger general merchandise stores like Walmart.
She theorized that general merchandise stores may be laying off women in lower-performing departments and hiring men to work in more successful departments.
“I just think it’s kind of fascinating that the segregation in the labor market is so strong that we can even see it in a big field like retail and general merchandise stores, which we think of as integrated or even majority female,” Hartmann said.
But job market expert John Challenger doesn’t buy that explanation.
“It’s alarming,” said Challenger, CEO of Chicago-based outplacement and career transitioning firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Why the impact is hitting women disproportionately is a mystery to me, or certainly cause for concern.”
He noted that with the rise in store closures and popularity of online shopping, there’s a shift away from in-store positions and towards warehousing and distribution jobs, which he said might explain some of the gender differences. Warehouse and distribution jobs, however, are not listed as retail jobs in federal labor market data, a fact that industry representatives say skews the sector’s overall job performance.
Hartmann agreed that brick-and-mortar cuts are more likely to negatively impact women, who often serve in point-of-sale jobs like cashiers.
“What we have to work on is getting women into the jobs where they are growing,” she said.
