Men / Women Employment Results Diverge

The employment release showed a MASSIVE divergence between the male and female workforce. The number of unemployed males dropped significantly (ALL caused by a dropping out of the workforce), while female unemployment rates spiked (they reentered the workforce).

My guess?

Males make up the bulk of the manufacturing sector, which continues to struggle, while females came back to the workforce for the holiday season, yet were unable to find jobs.

Update:

Looks like I was close.... Barry points out:

Job gains are nurses and teachers -- losses are construction and factory. Probably skews that way in each sectors demographics

Source: BLS

Gendercide

The NY Times has an article titled Woman's Crusade, which makes the case that:

In a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it's not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There's a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. Military's Joint Chief of Staffs to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight poverty and extremism.

And you may think of woman being marginalized as being paid less than their male counter-parts, but in other parts of the world it is much more extreme.

Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today.

And...

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

Source: Scaruffi

More U.S. Women 40 to 44 Remaining Childless

I'm traveling, but I found some recent research released by the Census that I found interesting, but I'll admit is pretty irrelevant to most readers (some disclaimer!); apparently women are having substantially less children. Per the USA Today:

The number of women ages 40 to 44 who remain childless has doubled in a generation, the U.S. Census reported Monday.

In June 2006, 20% of women in that age group remained childless. Thirty years ago it was 10%.

Source: Census