Sangyoub Park, who teaches sociology at Washburn University, sent us an interesting article posted by NPR on various aspects of unemployment. The overall official unemployment rate of 8.8 percent (as of March 2011) hides a lot of variation. For instance, the unemployment rate during this recession has been consistently worse for men than for women:
Nearly half of people have been out of work for at least 6 months:
The unemployment rate for those with a college education is under 5%, while for those who didn’t graduate high school, it’s nearly 10 percentage points higher:
Check out the NPR story for more discussion and a few more graphs.
The NPR article doesn’t include data on race, but Sangyoub found some racial data at the BLS website. As of March 2011, the unemployment rate for Whites was 7.9%, while for Blacks it was 15.5%.
Comments 7
ellipsisknits — April 19, 2011
The most interesting bit for me was the yellow line on the duration graph. While in general the short-term unemployed have decreased and the long-term have increased, this semi-long-term 15 weeks to 6 months set has stayed low.
I wonder if that is just an artifact of the data sample (percentage of unemployed, rather than absolute counts, and divided among some arbitrary durations really is a strange way to display things) or if it implies something about those >6 month-ers that they are not part of a continuous progression.
Yrro — April 19, 2011
I'm curious how this breaks down by industry and geography. A difference in recovery rates for different types of jobs seems like a plausible explanation for the break.
gasstationwithoutpumps — April 19, 2011
Since race and education level are correlated in the US, it would be interesting to see a proper analysis that tried to determine how much the racial differences in unemployment were explainable in terms of education level (or vice versa).
Erin — April 19, 2011
A lot of married women are probably like me - I don't have a job (and would love to!), but I'm not "unemployed" for data purposes.
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