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Women, particularly those with lower-paid jobs in the service sector, bore the brunt of initial earnings and employment losses as the retail sector shut down in March, giving rise to the notion of a she-cession.

But the latest monthly Labour Force Survey from Statistics Canada is showing a much different divide in the job market, even as broad national unemployment rockets up at an unprecedented rate. The Canadian jobs market has split into two; on one side, hourly paid workers of both genders that are feeling most of the economic pain; on the other, salaried workers that are largely insulated from the employment downturn

Hourly workers have experienced a precipitous drop in hours worked, as the chart below indicates. Women are most affected, with a 39.5-per-cent drop in hours worked between mid-February and mid-April (a figure that includes both job losses and reductions in shifts). But men paid by the hour are nearly as badly off. That group experienced a 35.1-per-cent drop in hours worked between February and April, reflecting in part the gearing down of construction and manufacturing in late March and early April.

But Canadians with salaried jobs live in a much different world. For salaried women, hours worked have dropped by just 12.5 per cent, with much of that decline coming from seasonal patterns that recur each year. The same is true for salaried men, who saw hours worked fall a mere 10 per cent; again, much of that drop can be attributed to seasonal factors.

The split between hourly and salaried workers has important implications for the direction of Canada’s economic recovery, starting with how quickly consumer spending rebounds later this year.