Bidiversity

In the face of mass layoffs and rampant pay cuts that transcend industries, women may actually be weathering the economic storm better than their male counterparts.

 
“In the past, a lot of women were not exactly recession-proof because most of them operated at a lower-pay, disposable end of the workforce, so they tended to be the first to get laid off,” said Sasha Galbraith, partner at J. Galbraith Management Consultants.

 
“Now you’re seeing women in some high-necessity occupations such as primary education, health care administration, clerical – jobs that you have to have whether you’re in a recession or not,” she explained.

 
For this reason, they appear to be faring better during this recession in comparison with previous economic slumps, when they held less-critical roles.

 
Galbraith outlined a few industries in which women tend to thrive during recessionary times: nursing, psychiatry and therapy, accounting, financial planning and social services.

 
“Despite the fact that women still aren’t at parity with men in the corporate workforce, you see a lot of managerial-level women who [are] experts in a particular domain, so they’ve made themselves more recession-proof in the sense that you can’t necessarily fire somebody who really knows the accounting system or somebody who’s absolutely crucial to the sales and marketing group,” Galbraith said.

 
Further, Galbraith explained, to their credit, women in general tend to have different work motivations than men.

 
“A lot of women [are different] in how they perceive career success. It goes to the motivations, the way they see rewards, why they work, what they get out of work,” she said. “For women, it tends to be much more internally driven criteria such as the group they’re working with, the affiliations they have within an organization and the kind of work they do.”

 
Men, on the other hand, tend to view career success in terms of externally driven criteria. It’s what often is referred to as extrinsic rewards vs. intrinsic rewards, Galbraith explained.

 
“For example, men tend to be more focused on the amount of pay they get, the level of the hierarchy they stand, their title, how often they get promoted, when their next promotion might be, as well as various perks such as a corner office, company car and so forth,” she said.

 
Moreover, women tend to have a slight advantage over their male counterparts during a recession because they’re willing to work more often than men work for lower pay, she explained.

 
Furthermore, past recessions have helped spur entrepreneurial initiatives by women.

 
“For entrepreneurship, recessions have been a huge benefit for women who want to start their own business,” Galbraith said. “[Even though] most of the women’s businesses are quite small, when you look at the data, the rate [of budding entrepreneurs] is quite a bit smaller for men.”

Source: Diversity Executive