Women Took 98% of August Job Gains—What Happened to Men?

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its August employment report last Friday, and buried inside a headline number that beat Wall Street expectations was a statistic that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received from the legacy financial press. Of the 162,000 net jobs added to the American economy in August, women accounted for 158,000 of them, or roughly 98 percent. Men picked up a mere 4,000 positions nationwide, a rounding error compared to the scale of the female gains.

On the surface, many commentators framed this as a triumph for American women, and there is nothing wrong with women succeeding in the labor market. But a closer look at the numbers tells a more complicated story, one that has less to do with women breaking barriers and more to do with which sectors of the economy are actually growing under current conditions and which are not.

Healthcare has been the single largest engine of job creation in America for well over a year now, and it remains overwhelmingly female. Roughly four out of every five workers in the healthcare industry are women, according to BLS data, meaning that any expansion of that sector mechanically produces lopsided results in favor of female employment. That is not evidence of some new feminist economic revolution. It is evidence that America continues to build an economy dependent on healthcare administration, home health aides, and government-adjacent service work rather than on the kind of broad-based industrial and manufacturing growth that historically lifted men and women together.

Local government and education also roared back in August, adding 42,000 jobs, or about a quarter of the entire net gain for the month. Women hold close to three-quarters of positions in education, training, and library work. Combine that with the healthcare surge, and you begin to see exactly why the gender split looked the way it did. This was not really a story about women outperforming men so much as it was a story about which industries the Biden-era regulatory and spending apparatus, still working its way through the pipeline, continues to favor.

Consider the twelve-month trend that BLS economists highlighted alongside the August numbers. Over the past year, the level of employed women in America has grown by more than 870,000 on a seasonally adjusted basis. Over that same period, the number of employed men has fallen by nearly 1.5 million. That is not a minor fluctuation. That is a structural divergence in the American labor market that ought to alarm policymakers regardless of party, because an economy that cannot generate stable work for men is an economy quietly eroding the household formation, family stability, and long-term productive capacity the country will need for the next generation.

The unemployment rate data makes the divergence even starker. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for women fell to 3.9 percent in August, down four-tenths of a point from a year earlier. The male unemployment rate, meanwhile, climbed to 4.4 percent, exactly where it sat in August of last year. In other words, women’s labor market position improved meaningfully over the past twelve months, while men’s simply treaded water at a materially worse level.

Some analysts have urged caution about reading too much into a single month’s gender breakdown, and that caution is fair as far as it goes. Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, noted that much of the swing reflected a seasonal rebound in education hiring, sometimes called the “teacher effect,” combined with a bounce back in hospitality after a weaker July. She is right that any one month is noisy. But noisy data points still add up to trends, and this trend, women overtaking men in total payroll employment for the third time in American history, has been building for months, not days.

What makes this moment different from the two prior instances when women’s total employment surpassed men’s is instructive. The first came during the Great Recession, when male-dominated construction and manufacturing collapsed almost overnight. The second came just before the pandemic. Both were crisis-driven anomalies that corrected once the broader economy recovered. This time appears to be structural rather than cyclical. Female-heavy industries such as healthcare and hospitality keep adding workers month after month, while male-heavy sectors like manufacturing and heavy industry continue to stagnate under the weight of high interest rates, energy policy uncertainty, and years of offshoring that no single jobs report can reverse.

Even in leisure and hospitality, a sector many assume to be gender-balanced, the same pattern held. Women gained around 68,000 jobs in that sector in August, even though the sector as a whole added only 62,000 positions, meaning men actually lost roughly 6,000 jobs within hospitality even as the industry grew overall. Several other service industries displayed the identical dynamic, with women accounting for more than the entire net job growth because male employment inside those same industries was shrinking.

Perhaps most notable, and least reported, is that women even out-hired men in manufacturing last month, a sector long considered a bastion of male employment. Women accounted for more than half of the roughly 16,000 manufacturing jobs added in August. That is a remarkable shift, and it raises hard questions about whether American manufacturing, to the extent it is growing at all, is growing in the light-assembly and administrative roles that have always employed more women, rather than in the heavy industrial and skilled trades work that built the American middle class and has historically been dominated by men.

None of this is to diminish women’s achievements in the workplace. Women have earned more college degrees than men for years now, a fact that leaves them well positioned to capture growth in professional and credentialed fields. That is a legitimate long-term structural advantage, and conservatives should have no quarrel with women succeeding on merit. The concern here is not that women are working. The concern is what the male side of this ledger tells us about the health of the broader economy.

An economy that cannot put men back to work is an economy with a marriage problem, a fatherhood problem, and ultimately a birth rate problem. Sociologists across the political spectrum have long noted that stable, well-paying work for men correlates strongly with marriage rates and family formation. When men experience prolonged periods of unstable or declining employment, as the past year’s data suggests they are, the ripple effects extend far beyond any single BLS report.

The overall headline of the August report was undeniably strong. The economy added 162,000 jobs against expectations of roughly 55,000, a result more than triple what most economists had forecast. Markets cheered the number, and administration allies were quick to tout the beat. But wage growth told a more sober story. Average hourly earnings rose just 0.3 percent for the month and only 3.1 percent over the past year, the slowest annual pace of wage growth in years. A jobs report can beat expectations on headline count while still reflecting an economy where ordinary workers are not getting ahead.

This is precisely the kind of nuance that a media environment eager to celebrate any positive economic data point for women tends to gloss over. The Economic Security Project, a progressive nonprofit, was among the first to flag the 98 percent statistic, framing it explicitly as evidence of “growing power” for women in the labor market. That framing is not wrong on its face, but it conveniently ignores the flip side of the coin: growing weakness for men in the same labor market, during the same month, under the same economic conditions.

Indeed director of economic research Laura Ullrich called the gap between female and male payroll levels the widest ever recorded, telling reporters that “we are in the midst of a shift” and that “it is changing right before our eyes.” She is correct that something is shifting. The question conservatives should be asking is whether that shift reflects a healthy, dynamic economy rewarding merit wherever it is found, or whether it reflects a hollowing out of the traditionally male-dominated industrial base that has not been adequately addressed by either the prior administration’s regulatory agenda or the current recovery.