This past Friday the Department of Labor Published the Employment Situation Report, or Jobs Report, at 8:30 AM. It was spot analyzed until approximately 9 AM. Reporters reported on the report, not the data that was published with the report.  This column has produced a number of articles regarding the data in the Jobs Report:

• "Deceptive December Jobs Report" detailed how we lost non-seasonally adjusted jobs, saw non-seasonally adjusted unemployment rise, and how the skewed seasonal factor used to convert the non-seasonally adjusted (NSA) current employment statistics (CES) private sector worker number to the SA Private Sector number could have revealed that only 34,000 SA CES private sector jobs were added, not 144,000 as was reported.
  
• "Four Presidents at 95 Months - Stealth Full-time Job Loss" detailed how while President Obama has added jobs during his tenure in office, he is in third place for Job creation behind Presidents Clinton and Reagan. He is in fourth place for adding participants to the economy (Employed and Unemployed Workers.) He also has overseen a drop in workforce participation that is masking the true unemployment rate. The Effective Unemployment rate, when comparing December participation and Unemployment between the four Presidents should have been reported between  9.75% and 12.12%. We lost full-time jobs, seasonal jobs, that may not be included in the official unemployment number. We also saw people with multiple jobs lose one job - these people are lesser employed, not unemployed.
  
• "Dec Decline in Multiple Jobholders"  detailed the aforementioned decline in multiple jobholders. We saw a drop in people working multiple jobs. We saw a decline in the number of people working two part-time jobs. We saw a decline in the number of people working a part-time job and a full-time job. We did see an increase in the number of people working two full-time jobs. We still have over 2 million people working two part-time jobs. We saw a slight increase from December 2015  and just fell short of the December dual part-time record recorded during December 2014.
  
• "Five Sectors Fewer Jobs than December 2008" examined the Jobs Report data from a different perspective. It examined the sectors where we had seen growth and contraction  in jobs. It examined  the job changes on a month to month, year to year, and a December 2008 to December 2016 basis. This column showed the persistent condition that five sectors have not returned to Pre-Recession Job Levels and how we saw job losses across eight sectors from November to December.
  

This column has published a number of articles on how this economy has impacted men and women. The first such article was published during November of 2014 with the article "War on Women: Men Lost 744,000 Full-time Jobs during November."  This past September this column updated that information with "Obamanomics - The Battle of the Sexes - Who Has Had a Better Recovery?" This column was the article that re-introduced the "War on (Wo)men" topic to this column on a regular basis. October saw the release of the article "Fewer Men Working Full-time than July 2007." November's article "Female Workers Winning   the Jobs Battle" detailed how while women have added part-time and full-time jobs since the peak of the jobs market during July 2007, Men had lost full-time jobs and added part-time jobs. A similar picture was pained with the review of the November data in the December column "1.1 Million Fewer Men working Full-time Jobs than July 2007."

It should come as no surprise that during a month while we saw full-time jobs losses, part-time job losses, and the decrease in the number of multiple jobholders, plus a spike in unemployment, that we saw men and women impacted by these changes. What happened during the month of December?

Men Have Fewer Full-time Jobs Now than they Had during July 2007, July 2016. If this recovery is as good as it is being promoted in the press a reasonable person would anticipate that there would be a growing number of men working in the workforce, and that because full-time jobs are the majority of the jobs in the United States that they would be working more full-time jobs. This is not the case. Men have 1.4 million fewer full-time jobs and 2.8 million more part-time jobs than they had during July 2007. This is an incomplete recovery.They lost over ten million full-time jobs at the depth of the recession. They broke even this past Summer. We have seen men lose over 1.3 million full-time jobs since this Summer.

Women Experienced Less Job Loss, More Job Creation Since July 2007.  This topic has not been breached often, or at all, in the mainstream media. Women saw a net loss of 3.849 million jobs from July 2007 through February of 2010.  You may notice that the "Jobs Iceberg" for women is slightly different from the Men's "Job Iceberg" There were some times where women gain full-time jobs  and lost part-time jobs during the Summer of 2008. The Jobs Recession began during 2008 for men and included Full-time job losses and part-time job gains.  Men never saw a 1:1 exchange of part-time jobs for full-time jobs. Women have gained full-time jobs and part-time jobs since July 2007, in stark contrast to their male counterparts

More Men are Officially Unemployed now than July 2007, Fewer Women. You will notice in the unemployment graph that the unemployment level for men peaked prior to when the women say their peak unemployment level, You will also note that there have "never" been fewer unemployed male workers, since the recession, than were unemployed during July 2007. There are officially 640,000 unemployed women than were present during July 2007 while there are 439,000 more men officially unemployed than were unemployed during July 2007. The official unemployment number is being skewed by the current participation rate. If someone is not employed or unemployed they are not participating in the economy. If they are not participating could they be unemployed without benefits or recognition?

Participation is Lower Now for Men than December 2014, Higher than December 2015. The general trend has been downward. Men saw the highest. This should not be a surprise. The male workforce population is growing faster than the number of jobs. What is surprising is that women are seeing a lower participation rate than 2015 and higher participation rate than 2014. Net-Net participation is down for men and women even though women are adding more jobs than men.

Are we really at full-employment for Men and for Women? Men and women were participating at higher rates prior to the recession. If we looked at changes in participation and unemployment for men and women the data for men would indicate that we have a 5.33% unemployment rate, NSA, right now. This is comparable to the office NSA unemployment rate during December 2007. The participation rate was 72.81% then compared to 68.76% right now. The "Four Presidents Column" has detailed how this difference in participation has a dramatic impact on the unemployment rate. The effective unemployment rate based on the participation rate of December 2008, is closer to 10% than it is to 5%.If we used the participation rate from December 2007 that effective unemployment rate would rise to 10.33%.

The Official Unemployment Rate for women is 4.30%. A similar argument could be made for the official unemployment rate fr women.The difference between the participation rate during December 2007 and December 2008 do not make as much of a difference as it did for men. The effective unemployment rate for women exceeds 8%.

Men and Women are suffering from a lack of participation. Full-time jobs have been created at a much slower pace than workers. Women have recovered from this recession - Men, notsomuch.

It's the economy.