BUT IF YOU'RE EDUCATED, MALE, JOB-HUNTING MAY GET EASIER

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, February 27, 1992                   TAG: 9202270091
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: B5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The Baltimore Sun
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium
BUT IF YOU'RE EDUCATED, MALE, JOB-HUNTING MAY GET EASIER
Male, educated and unemployed? Hang in there. The 1990s could yet be your decade.
It may seem surprising in these days of repeated rejection letters, widespread industrial downsizing and enduring economic gloom, but a shortage of educated males is expected to develop in this decade.
While the work force will grow 20.1 percent by 2005, demand for executives will expand by 27 percent, professional and specialist jobs will be up 32 percent, and technical positions will increase 37 percent, government statistics say.
Two other factors are at play to create a shortage of educated males:
The end of the baby boom, meaning fewer workers - male and female - will enter the labor pool this decade than in the previous three, with the number of new graduates ages 20 to 24 down from 15.7 million in 1985 to 13 million in 1997.
A dramatic slowdown in the numbers of females entering the job market.
The fastest-growing professional sectors in the 1990s, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects, will be computers, health care and education.
In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the labor force grew faster than the working-age population, largely because of the tremendous increase in the number of working women.
"Basically, what we had was a tremendous surge in labor force participation associated with the liberation of women from their traditional roles," said Robert D. Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Women's participation in the work force grew at an annual rate of 2.8 percent between 1975 and 1990, Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show; between 1990 and 2005, the percentage is expected to be only 1.6 percent.
Meanwhile, the male work force, which grew at an annual rate of 1.3 percent from 1975 to 1990, will expand at only 1.01 percent yearly until 2005.
"It reaches the point of diminishing returns, with a smaller and smaller pool of women left over making that choice [to join the work force]," said Mike Hillard, a University of Southern Maine economist.
Karla Scherer, founder of a foundation in Detroit that grants scholarships to women seeking business careers, said: "I have heard, and it alarms me, that some women are retreating into the home - women who are highly educated.
"They are an expensive commodity. They are an asset. We can't afford for that to happen."
Maggie Palmer, an organizational psychologist with the women's studies department at the University of Southern Maine, said women were leaving the corporate world - but not the workplace - in significant numbers.
Her studies convinced her that many women were starting their own businesses rather than returning home.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB