Courtesy of my favorite economist, Heather Boushey, at the Center for American Progress:

In answer to the question “what about women? aren’t they losing jobs too?”, here are some December 2008 stats for a reality check:

Construction has lost 22.5 of all the jobs; manufacturing has lost 28.8% (add that together and that’s 50% of the jobs lost.)  These are both male-dominated fields.

Within manufacturing, over 2/3 of the jobs have been lost by men. In manufacturing, at the start of the recession, women were 28.8% of all manufacturing workers.  They’ve since lost 32.9% of the jobs.

Within construction, over 90% of the jobs have been lost by men.

Within the finance and insurance industries, where women actually made up almost 2/3 of the workers, women have lost 1/2 of all the jobs.

But let’s keep this in perspective: The financial industry overall has only lost 8% of the total jobs that have been lost.

Finance jobs lost are nearly 230,000 jobs out of a total of 3 million jobs lost, as of December 2008.

In real estate – the other subcategory in the financial field – women have lost over 100% of jobs, even though they made up about 1/2 of the real estate workers at the beginning of the recession.

All this underscores how important it is to look at industry-specific contexts when talking about gender and jobs.  On net, the men are losing.  Jobs, that is.