The employee in the cubicle next to yours is probably a woman. Recent job gains under President Donald Trump have gone mostly to women, who now outnumber men in the workforce. It is unclear, though, what women are gaining in terms of pay and status.
U.S. jobs reports of late “may feel especially lousy for men,” said CNBC. Women have outnumbered them in the workforce for eight straight months, the longest such stretch since 2010. That gap during the Great Recession happened “because men were losing jobs,” said economist Cory Stahle to the outlet. Now “women are gaining” jobs faster than men.
“The pink-collar economy is here,” said Justin Wolfers at Platypus Economics. Men once vastly outnumbered women in the workplace. Female employment “rose quickly” since 1970 while men’s work “grew more slowly and occasionally plateaued.” The gender gap “flipped” because of the growth of industries, especially healthcare, in which the job force was “already dominated by women.”
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The trends defy Trump’s vision of an economy in which men can earn a “good living but also a sense of accomplishment and status,” said Paul Waldman at MS NOW. The president could urge men to seek out jobs in female-dominated fields like healthcare instead of an ever-diminished manufacturing sector. “But it’s not the kind of profession Trump will encourage men to go into.”
The flip is “not an entirely good thing,” said Noam Scheiber at The New York Times. Women have become the majority of workers amid the “diminishing status of many American jobs,” a trend driven by factors such as reduced union membership, outsourced work and the rise of artificial intelligence. Female workers spent decades “reaching for the brass ring” only to find out that “it’s hopelessly tarnished once they finally grasp it.”
What next?
The next milestone is narrowing the wage gap. Women on the job “still earn far less starting the day they graduate,” said Fortune. They also make up “two-thirds of workers in low-wage jobs” such as teaching and nursing, but remain “underrepresented in more lucrative fields such as finance, construction and STEM.”
