Experts have been hard-pressed to explain the slower pace of the rebound for women, said Heidi Hartmann, a labor economist and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on domestic women’s issues such as employment, welfare and family. Based on the group’s calculation measuring job loss from the start of the recession to the time when employment hit bottom for each gender group, men have since regained 19 percent of lost jobs while women have regained 6 percent.

‘ In pure numbers, since men lost more jobs, we’d expect them to get more of the new jobs,’ Hartmann said. ‘But they do seem to be getting more than their fair share in the sense they are getting jobs back more quickly than women are and have regained a larger share of the jobs they lost.'”