Women at Slightly Higher Risk of Layoff, Study Says

American women for the first time on record have become slightly more likely than men to be laid off from long-term jobs, according to a federal study released Wednesday.

The study, which tracked workers from 1995 through 1997, found that 4.8% of women employees lost long-term jobs in downsizings during that three-year period, versus 4.4% for men. That marked the first time since the federal government began conducting its so-called displaced worker studies in the early 1980s that women were more likely than men to be victims of such cutbacks.

Analysts said the development appears to reflect the rising influx of women into the labor force over the last two decades and their concentration in the service industries, where layoffs have climbed markedly in recent years. In addition, experts said, women in the service industries often hold white-collar clerical and sales jobs that are particularly prone to layoffs.

Still, the report provided a measure of encouraging news for men and women alike who have been plagued by worries about job security.

Amid the booming economy of the last three years, fewer workers overall lost long-term jobs through layoffs than they did in 1993 to 1995, the previous three-year period tracked by federal analysts. The displaced worker total declined from 4.2 million to 3.6 million, while the overall displacement rate for men and women employees fell from 5.4% to 4.6%.

What’s more, the displaced workers in the most recent period found jobs more quickly and suffered smaller permanent wage losses than before.

Those improvements “reflect the strength of the labor market right now,” said Steven F. Hipple, an economist with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics who wrote the displaced worker study.

But the short-run improvements, analysts said, aren’t enough to offset longer-term, structural changes in the U.S. economy during the 1980s and 1990s that have increased the risk of layoffs for all American workers.

Compared with historic patterns, “the displacement rates are higher than what we’d expect given the performance of the economy,” said David E. Marcotte, a labor economist at Northern Illinois University who has studied worker displacement trends. “It’s still quite high.”

The study also showed that older workers, 55 and older, became more likely to be displaced than most younger workers. The displacement rate among workers 55 and older was 4.9% during the 1995-1997 period, down just slightly from the 5.1% posted in 1993-1995.

The federal study defined displaced workers as employees age 20 and older who had held jobs for at least three years.