Women Filled 98 Percent of Jobs Created in August. What Happened to the Men?

American men have been withdrawing from the labor force for years now due to a combination of longstanding forces, but a jobs report released last week raised alarms that the trend may be accelerating.

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Women accounted for 158,000, or 98 percent, of the 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs created in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ establishment data. Compared to this time last year, there are 870,000 more women employed in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and 1.5 million fewer employed men.

Accounting for the new data, the gap between male and female employment reached its highest level since 1990, when men were overrepresented in the workforce.

Dramatic month-to-month swings in employment gains between the sexes are relatively common, and labor economists warn that sharp shifts don’t necessarily indicate lasting changes in the market. However, the August jobs report is in keeping with existing trends that have obtained for decades, namely a substantial increase in employment among women and a linear decline in employment among men.

There has been a “multi-decade decline in male labor force participation” and a “multi-decade increase in female labor force participation,” Kirk Doran, a professor specializing in labor economics at Notre Dame University, told National Review.

Part of this shift can be explained by the evolution of American industries. The sectors that grew at the highest rate in August — health care and public education — are female-dominated. Meanwhile, the industries that shrank — computing, data processing, and finance — are male-heavy.

These trends are not new. Since the 1990s, employment in the health care industry has nearly doubled, and its female share of workers has remained at a near constant 76 percent for more than four decades.

Men’s declining participation in the workforce is also not simply explained by recent trends in tech and construction, “because they’re multi-decade trends,” Doran said.

Gender shifts in the workforce “have a lot to do with cultural changes around marriage, family, the number of children people have, child-rearing practices, and cultural changes about who ought to get an education,” he explained.

Christian vom Lehn, a professor specializing in labor economics at Brigham Young University, agreed. It’s relatively easy to identify the factors boosting women’s entry into the workforce: major cultural shifts, falling discrimination, and technological changes.

“I think it’s much less clear what’s driving men’s exit from the labor force,” vom Lehn told NR.

Women’s entry into the labor force is not directly responsible for male employment falling. Vom Lehn referenced research he conducted in 2018, which found little historical association between men leaving the workforce when their wives entered it.

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“I think a change in the overall structure of the economy — what jobs are demanded — has a big part to play in this,” von Lehn continued. “But there are many people who have theorized that men working less could represent a lot of things.”

Both Doran and von Lehn referenced the difficulty of mid-career job shifts, public health and disability issues, the popularity of video games, and the country’s rising affluence as possible causes.

Within the field of labor economics, researchers have not come to one conclusion. “It’s one of those things where we have 25 stories that explain 30 percent each, and that doesn’t really leave us in a synthesis place,” von Lehn explained.

Ben Smith, the head of research at the American Institute for Boys and Men, referenced similar hypotheses for men’s declining engagement in the U.S. labor market.

Since the early 2000s, labor data have found young men less likely to “launch” than earlier generations. “We typically attribute the 20s and early 30s as a period where you move out of the house, maybe get married, have children, get a job, and do all those things to start your career,” Smith said. “And those have become a little less likely for a lot of men over the last 25 years.”

Smith referenced falling marriage rates and increased housing prices as deterring factors to young men launching.

If young men view themselves as not likely to get married, they may think, “I don’t need to try as hard,” Smith said. He then referenced research from Gabrielle Penrose, a graduate student fellow at AIBM, correlating a rise in housing costs to men’s declining labor force participation.

Outside of the labor market growing in woman-heavy industries, “there’s not a ton of resolution,” Smith said, referencing the myriads of factors at play.

And while there is little consensus on why male employment is on the decline, Brad Wilcox, the director of the Institute of Family Studies’ Get Married Initiative, described the increasingly female-friendly economy as “bad news for marriage and family in America.”

“Men are far more likely to marry and stay married when they’re working full-time, and women are far more likely to want to marry a man who is,” he said in a statement. “Everyone should care about this, because it’s married men and women, not single ones, who are actually finding the ‘pursuit of happiness.’”

Wilcox added, “An economy that’s bad for men and bad for marriage isn’t actually good for men or women.”

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