Women lose retail jobs as men gain them

A surge of Americans got back to work this year, driving the jobless rate to a 17-year low - but the current economy appears to have disproportionately benefited men.

A new analysis of government data reveals a surprising disparity. The retail industry, which shed the most jobs last year - 54,300 - seemed to push women out while offering more opportunities to men.

Between October 2016 and October 2017, women who worked in the country's stores lost 160,300 jobs, while 106,000 men found new work in the field, the analysis from the Institute for Women's Policy Research found.

'We've seen many news reports of the decline in retail jobs, but few have noted that the picture in retail is much different for women and men,” researchers at the Washington think-tank wrote.

Over the past year, they added, 'women's share of all retail trade jobs fell from 50.4 to 49.6 percent.”

Economist Heidi Hartmann, president of the IWPR, said it's too soon to tell what sparked this shift.

Her theory is that, as hiring ramped up, so did spending on big-ticket items, including furniture and appliances - and men tend to dominate those sales roles, which have historically come with the highest commission payments. They also offer more job security.

'There's basically sex segregation within the retail industry,” she said. 'Women have tried very hard to get into jobs like that.”

Hartmann pointed to a 1979 sex-discrimination lawsuit against Sears, in which the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission argued that the retailer regularly overlooked women for similar high-commission jobs. Although 61 percent of applicants for such roles were women, just 35 percent of the jobs went to women, the government lawyers argued.

The EEOC ultimately lost the case. The judge ruled that employment data wasn't enough to prove discrimination.