1. Resume blasts are infamously ineffective. Not only that, but gap since last job is a screening criteria so basic that even HR can filter from it; if you're bad on that metric you're unlikely even to hit a hiring manager. So it may be less true that 6 months of unemployment is intractable than that 6 months of unemployment forecloses on the tactic of just blasting resumes.
2. Women routinely incur 6-12 month gaps of unemployment because they have kids. When Erin went back to the workforce, the resume gap was by far the biggest obstacle she faced; it was raised specifically in (I think? She'll comment and correct me.) every job interview she had. Point being: if you're disadvantaged as a cohort that early in the process, the impact to your career long term is likely to be far-reaching even after you find employment.
Ironically, having a child is likely the best possible response to have for why you have a year gap in employment. For the all-male resumes used in this experiment, hr and hiring managers would be more likely to assume the gap was due to work-related reasons (lazy, unskilled, unintelligent, etc) as opposed to the socially accepted and positive reason of childbirth.
