THE economic crisis is sweeping away men’s jobs at a faster rate than those of women in America, heralding the onset of a so-called “mancession”.

New unemployment figures have revealed the biggest gap in jobless rates between men and women for more than half a century. The shifting pattern is redefining gender roles and challenging the status of men as family breadwinners.

Tony Hawkins, 48, was laid off by his lorry manufacturing plant in North Carolina after 22 years. “You could kind of feel it coming, but you think, well, you’ll be okay, when all of a sudden, boom!” His wife Johnnie works from home as a book-keeper. She is trying to increase her workload while he does the cooking and minds the house.

“I do the majority of the cooking – I enjoy it – and I’ve been working in the yard. I’m doing projects all around the house. That is what’s getting me through,” Hawkins said.

The jobless figures for May showed unemployment at 9.4%, a 25-year high. But while rates for men and women were roughly equal in 2007, 10.5% of men are now unemployed, compared with 8% of women. Four of every five jobs lost in the past two years had been held by men. The gender gap is the largest ever seen in US labour statistics, which go back to 1948.

“What’s happening in this recession is unprecedented,” said Mark Perry, an economist at the University of Michigan. “It’s structurally different because the job losses are so concentrated among men.”

Blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and construction are haemorrhaging while white-collar work in increasingly female-dominated, often publicly funded fields, such as education and health, are holding steady or growing.

The vulnerability of men in the workplace has been compounded by a revolution in education, with women gaining 60% of all college degrees. Hawkins’s wife went on to higher education, but he did not. “I was a teenage father so I went straight to work when I left school,” he said. “I’ve been hitting the road, trying to see what’s out there, but there’s nothing.” According to Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys, women are forging ahead in the knowledge-based economy, turning feminist theories of female victimisation on their head.

There is a “myth of the fragile girl”, she wrote in 2000, but “boys are more likely to cheat on tests, wind up in detention or drop out of school”. Nearly a decade later, those boys have grown up and are floundering in the job market.

Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist during her presidential election campaign, calls the new generation of men “guys left behind”. The ultra-wealthy multi-millionaires still tend to be men, but the pay gap is closing for people in their twenties. Men are also finding themselves in greater numbers at the bottom of the heap.

“There is a statistically significant and growing group of guys who are just not going to make it,” Penn wrote in The Wall Street Journal last week.

Men, he pointed out, are outstripping women in all the “downers” in life – there are more felons, more alcoholics, more drug addicts – and they generally die first. While Penn’s own patron, Clinton, failed to crack the White House glass ceiling, it was unthinkable for Barack Obama to appoint a male Supreme Court justice to replace David Souter – instead he went for Sonia Sotomayor, the first Hispanic nominee.

Hollywood has captured the trend in films such as Knocked Up, starring Katherine Heigl and Seth Rogen, which depicted women as high-achievers and men as losers.

It is also affecting the dating game, according to Sean Hamilton, 34, who lost his computing job in Dallas last January. “To speak plainly, chicks don’t dig a broke guy,” he said. “I don’t bring it up.”

In April, Maria Shriver, the wife of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California, launched A Woman’s Nation, which she described as the first national project to “paint the portrait of the modern American woman” since her uncle John F Kennedy gave former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt the same task in the 1960s.

“For the first time in our nation’s history, women now represent half of all workers and are becoming the primary breadwinners in more families than ever before,” Shriver said, calling it a “seismic shift” in the economic and cultural landscape of America.

Women still perform the majority of household tasks, often a source of marital tension. The pace of social change can be overstated, according to Sylvia Hewlett of the Center for Work-Life Policy in New York, and unemployed men are rarely eager to take on women’s traditional role in the home.

“A lot of guys out of work see themselves as having a new job - which is looking for a job. They are not necessarily cleaning the bathroom,” she said.

Nevertheless, men are adapting to the challenge. Rhett Rhame, a father of three young children, found himself in the role of “Mr Mom” when he lost his post as a salesman with a fire sprinkler company in Georgia. His wife works as the director of the local education authority.

“I have no problem with picking up my wife’s dry-cleaning,” he said. “I just do what needs to be done, and quite honestly I feel really lucky to have this time with the kids.”

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