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Farewell to the Women

The T&C sector has always been a typical ‘female workplace’, and as such the decline has also affected more women than men. Overall, the share of women in the T&C industry has fallen from 70% to 54% through the decline, but there are large differences between sectors. Since occupations such as sewing traditionally have been held by women, women dominate employment in the clothing sector to a very high extent.

In contrast, the more capital intensive production of textiles, shows a higher frequency of men relative to clothing since weaver jobs typically are held by men. However, women dominate employment in both sectors. The decrease of employed women exceeds 77% in the clothing sector, and is about 64% in the textile sector. The corresponding figures for men ‘only’ amounts to 48% in clothing and 39% in textiles. The very large drop in employed women in both sectors has resulted in the fact that from 1997 and onwards, the share of men in textiles has been above that of women, and the share of men has doubled from 15% in 1980 to 30% in 2000 in clothing.

The developments in gender compositions across the textile and clothing sector depicted above seems to support that there is a higher probability for labor intensive job tasks to be outsourced, and thereafter for the job to be terminated, relative to the more capital intensive jobs. Hence, since women dominate the occupation of labor intensive jobs within the T&C industry (especially within the clothing sector) we observe particularly large drops in the employment of women.

The Doom of Youth

We now turn to the changes in age composition to see how the general decline in employment has affected the age distribution in the two sectors. In this respect, it is common to expect a large outflow of older employees, who often, in the case of a declining firm, more or less willingly leave their job for retirement, thereby leaving behind a larger share of younger workers.

Conditioning on age groups, the decline in both sectors is of a significant larger magnitude for the youngest workers than for any other age group. Despite this similarity, however, the decline in employment among the youngest age group is largest in the clothing sector. We note that the rate of decline falls as the age increases. We also note that the decline in clothing generally is more evenly distributed across all age groups than in textiles, which is mainly due to the fact that the overall decline in the production of clothing is of a relatively larger magnitude.