Who Suffers During Recessions?

T he Great Recession generated large reductions in employment, earnings, and income for workers and families in the United States. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate increased from 5 percent in December 2007 to 9.5 percent in June 2009, the start and end of the recession according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER, at 〈http://www.nber.org/cycles.html〉). From 2007 to 2010, median real family income fell by 6 percent and the poverty rate increased from 12.5 percent to 15.1 percent (DeNavas-Walt, Proctor, and Smith 2011). The recovery since June 2009 has been slow relative to historical averages. In the more than two and a half years since the offi cial start of the recovery, the unemployment rate has fallen by just over a percentage point, reaching 8.3 percent in February 2012. The effects of the Great Recession, however, are not experienced equally by all workers. National statistics can obscure dramatic differences in the severity of the cyclical impacts for different groups. For example, men experienced signifi cantly larger job loss in the Great Recession compared to women, but during the recovery, male employment is picking up more rapidly (Kochhar 2011). Who Suffers During Recessions?