January 7, 2012 · 12:36 pm

Here’s an odd statistic

Report: men grabbed 97% of all new hiring since mid-2009. True? Heck if I know but if so,why? [UPDATE: a reader ponts out that these data were complied by The National Women’s Law Center, so they could well be entirely bogus]. Men comprised 70% of the fired in the height of the recession, a loss attributed to cutbacks in construction and manufacturing jobs but those industries aren’t exactly roaring back. Maybe government jobs are dominated by ladies and state and municipal governments aren’t hiring? Curious.

15 Comments

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15 responses to “Here’s an odd statistic”

  1. Anonymous
    January 7, 2012 at 1:28 pm

    You know better than to trust statistics from biased sources.

  2. Walt
    January 7, 2012 at 1:35 pm

    Dude –
    HMMMM. Let’s noodle this a bit. Shall we?
    Could it be because 95% of the new jobs created are at McDonalds, and men flip burgers better than women? A real possibility!!
    Or if a hottie couldn’t find a real job, she decided to join the nude ballet? Which is all cash so she is still considered unemployed? A career move I fully support, BTW.
    Or maybe, just maybe, this study, like 99.9% of the ones out there, is total bullshit? You ever think of that? You believe the real unemployment rate is 8.5%? Well do yah PUNK!! If so, I have a bridge you may want to look at.
    Your Pal,
    Walt

  3. Earth Ocean Sky Redux
    January 7, 2012 at 1:42 pm

    I’ve watched a gigantic shift change in the young women I know. All got great educations. All had fabulous post-college jobs, rising in their professions. But those who had children were challenged to pay a small fortune for daycare, seeing half their paycheck go out the window to someone else, yet needing to work to stay alive, or wanting to work for personal satisfaction. Some young moms I know opted to take part-time work, and look for jobs where they could work from home to balance the pressures of needing an income versus wanting to raise children. That might account for your statistics. Another segment of women I know left their jobs altogether. Of course, that meant being finally self-sufficient or having a spouse who made enough for that luxury to happen. Further, many young women I know have jobs in the not-for-profit sector, wanting to make a difference in the world. Those jobs might not be in the polling of who was hired where.
    I look at my two daughters – neither has a traditional job. Neither would want one. One is a landscape architect, working in the oil well industry, heading to Wyoming to live, fracking her specialty.
    http://dirt.asla.org/2012/01/05/a-fracked-landscape-in-wyoming/

    The younger is a chef at a great restaurant in the city, working her tail off crazy hours, yearning to own her own place. They don’t fit any statistical mold.

    Your two daughters are also perfect examples of my theory.

  4. Walt
    January 7, 2012 at 1:57 pm

    Dude –
    One more thing.
    You are “Mr. Greenwich”, the man about town. Right? Mr. Inside with all the connections? So score us some Giants tickets for tomorrow!! You are a pigskin fan, aren’t you? Or just a pig?
    Come on, get off your ass and make some calls. You load. It doesn’t have to be luxury box seats, although those would be nice!! Anywhere between the 40 and 50 yard line, no more than 3 rows back would be acceptable. On the sunny side of the field.
    What do you say? I am really fun to tailgate with!! I do it right. PLUS I will do all the cooking!! I am not eating a frigging pigeon that you ran over in the parking lot.

    And have you ever seen those Falcon’s cheerleaders Dude? SMOKING HOT!! Those little vixens. If I drink enough, I will run out on the field and moon them at half time for you.
    What do you say? Pick you up at 9:00?
    Your Pal,
    Walt

  5. bigfoot
    January 7, 2012 at 2:02 pm

    maybe ladies are doing the hiring..

  6. Inagua
    January 7, 2012 at 4:31 pm

    EOS – I am confused. What exactly was the title “Fracked Landscape in Wuoming” referring to? The well rig itself as a blight on the landscape or the trees around the rig as visual mitigation? The content of the article suggested the former, but the fact that it appeared in a professional landscape journal suggested the latter. Is this what a landscape architect does for oil and gas companies, landscape drilling rig sites? Can one actually specialize in fracking wells? At any rate it sure sounds like an interesting and unique job, certainly one I never knew existed.

    BYW, I understand that the flaw in the EPA study is that the test wells it drilled are considerably below the depth of the actual water wells used by local residents.

  7. Libertarian Advocate
    January 7, 2012 at 5:17 pm

    Off Topic:

    This comment left by a reader of a recent Knee Jerk Times hit piece on Ron Paul sure smells like it came our very own Mr. Bill:

    Sandy Reiburn
    Brooklyn, NY

    Ron Paul is attractive to followers of all degrees of mean-spiritedness. Not unlike his philosopher-in-chief Ayn Rand , (to quote Budowsky 5/10/11 The Hill) his “Darwinian view of the world,…a supremely selfish notion of citizenship in which we are not our brother’s keeper, in which the greatest good involves the most selfish ends.”

    In his philosophical purity, so far removed from the reality of the “agora”, his ability to be consistent is the one aspect of which he may indeed be proud. But the rigidity of maintaining his libertarian ideals with no room for real world consequences, allows every selfish crank group and aspiring militia to embrace Paul’s language to justify their own agenda.

    For Paul, who is so practiced in indignation,I find it hard to believe that he cannot summon disgust and disavow these political ne’er-do-well groups. In his case “the good is the enemy of the perfect”.

    Is that you DB?

  8. pulled up in OG
    January 7, 2012 at 6:17 pm

    A flaw, Inagua? Nice try. That was exactly the point of drilling deep near the fracking depth, to compare those chemical fingerprints to contamination found up at actual water well depths.

  9. Earth Ocean Sky Redux
    January 7, 2012 at 7:20 pm

    Inagua: To be honest, I didn’t read the whole article I linked. It was just as a guide to the fact that landscape architects do play a role in the new-day issue of fracking. Our daughter works for a well drilling company, helping them with the visual mitigation of the rigs but is more often the liaison between the company and town planners/residents. In a few years, she should be able to hang her own consultant shingle but for now, fresh off her masters degree, she needs to get some street cred (not to mention earn a buck!!) 🙂 Several of her MLA peers from RISD work for oil and gas companies and with fracking a huge topic these days, it made for a logical niche market.

  10. Inagua
    January 7, 2012 at 9:27 pm

    OG – It is my understanding that fracking depth is thousands of feet down and that water well depth is a few hundred of feet down. The question of contamination is real, and should be tested by “red dye” type experiments. I understand your point about full depth drilling to discover what is being used, but this should be unnecessary because Frackers should be required to disclose the materials used to regulators. It is also my understanding that fracking regulation is currently a state level matter. Does the EPA have an actual leglislative mandate in this area?

  12. Inagua
    January 8, 2012 at 5:40 pm

    OG – I don’t know about Dick Cheney, but here is what EPA Administraror Lisa Jackson said, “I’m not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water, although there are investigations ongoing.”

    http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/intersection/2011/06/25/epa-study-probably-wont-prove-that-fracking-is-unsafe-though-it-may-be/

  13. pulled up in OG
    January 9, 2012 at 1:53 am

    Her full reply, six months before the preliminary results of this study were released: “There is evidence that it can certainly affect them [aquifers and water supplies]. I am not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water although there are investigations ongoing.”

    And she was wrong, even back then. Here’s a cute one:

    “The industry appears to have wanted to exclude this case [Parsons] from the E.P.A.’s 1987 report because the water contamination involved production problems, not waste products. The industry specifically says that the damage in this case resulted from the hydraulic fracturing process and that the contamination appears to have traveled by way of a fracture that extended beyond the intended rock formation.”

    http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/us/drilling-down-documents-7.html

    “ . . . one of the difficulties in collecting cases of oil and natural gas pollution: lawsuits involving allegations of pollution are often settled out of court and the records are sealed. E.P.A. investigators have said that this practice prevented them from including other examples of suspected pollution from hydraulic fracturing in the report.

    “This is typical practice, for instance, in Texas. In some cases, even the records of well-publicized incidents are almost entirely unavailable for review. In adddition to concealing the nature and size of any settlement entered into between the parties, impoundment curtails access to scientific and administrative documentation of the incident.”

  14. Inagua
    January 9, 2012 at 10:34 am

    OG – If the EPA Administrator is wrong and there is proof that fracking contaminates drinking water, then what shoud be done?

  15. pulled up in OG
    January 9, 2012 at 3:56 pm

    I’d tell her to remind Inhofe et al to stop spouting the same nonsense, just on the off chance he’d pop a vein.