Joyce Dotson has only ever wanted to be an administrative assistant, or “admin,” even since she was a kid. “When I was little, I used to play being an executive assistant,” she said. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

But in October, at the age of 65, she was laid off after spending 40 years in the field. As companies slimmed down, her workload and the workloads of her fellow admins crept up. “Back in the day when you worked for a VP… you were totally exclusive to them,” she recounted. “Today you need to work for about four, the VP and about four directors.” She watched directors who worked under her executive get fired, then she was told one day that her job was being eliminated.

Dotson isn’t ready for retirement and wanted to keep working. “I love what I do and I loved my job and I thought my boss loved me and I loved him,” she said. “I told my boss many times, ‘You’re going to have to take me out of here with a walker and a cane. I’m never leaving.’” Yet she now faces an incredibly tough job market. “You look out there and you see a job search and put in for that position and see hundreds that have already put in for that position,” she said. “It’s very hard out here for any woman that’s over 50, it really is.”

The recession marked a precipitous drop in men’s unemployment, but it was the recovery that was toughest on women. In 2011, women’s job losses that originally started mostly in the public sector started to spread to all areas of the economy. A large part of that widespread loss was the shedding of one particular occupation that can be found in virtually any industry: Secretaries, or as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, “office and administrative support occupations.” Women make up about three-quarters of this workforce. And while the economy had added 524,000 jobs between the end of the recession in June 2009 and June 2011, women had lost 925,000 positions in the administrative support profession.

The tide of job losses catalyzed by the crash hasn’t ebbed, however. The economy has now added more than 10 million jobs since the recovery. But between the beginning of the recession in 2007 and 2013, women have lost a total of 1.6 million administrative support jobs, according to data from the BLS. That’s nearly double the 865,000 they lost in this category in the previous six years. More than 14.6 million women worked as admins in 2007; only 4.8 million men did. But men, for their part, have lost just 95,000 of these jobs since the recession.