A Changing Job Market Leans Against Men

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A Changing Job Market Leans Against Men

Industries that heavily employ men are losing jobs, and the share of men working has flatlined

By Justin Lahart, WSJ

May 10, 2026

The American labor market is tilting away from men, with nearly all net job growth over the past year coming from the female-dominated healthcare and social-assistance category.

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The American labor market is tilting away from men.

Over the past year, nearly all net job growth has come from healthcare and social assistance, a sector with a dearth of men. Sectors with heavily male workforces have been losing jobs. The postpandemic period has seen an influx of women in their prime working years into employment. The share of men working has flatlined.

The divergent path might widen in the years ahead. As the needs of an aging population stack up, occupations that men have historically been loath to enter, such as jobs as home health aides and medical assistants, will likely play a bigger role in the labor market. A growing educational divide is also part of the equation: Women now earn bachelor’s degrees at a substantially higher rate than men, and employment rates among people who are college-educated are substantially higher than those who aren’t.

Friday, the Labor Department reported the overall unemployment rate stayed steady at 4.3%. Unemployment rates for men and for women weren’t all that different from each other—4.4% vs 4.2%, respectively—just as they weren’t before the pandemic. But the unemployment rate includes only people actively looking for work. A broader picture of employment trends comes from looking at the share of the population that is working.

Among men age 16 and over, the employment-to-population ratio was 64.1% in April. That compared with an average of 66.6% in 2019, and 70.9% in the 1990s. A lot of that decline can be explained by an aging population: There are a lot more male retirees than there used to be.

The share of women working has always been lower than men’s, but it has held up much better despite an aging population. Women’s employment-to-population ratio came to 54.5% in April, a bit below its 2019 and 1990s averages.

The narrowing of the employment gap between men and women has been a decadeslong process, said Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, the consequence of a long deterioration in men’s participation in the labor market. Women’s gains in participation had stalled out starting around 2000 but were reinvigorated after the pandemic, in part because hybrid work arrangements afforded more opportunities for women with children.

More recently healthcare and social assistance, where women outnumber men three to one, has been the main bright spot in a dimming job market. The sector added 656,500 jobs over the year ended in April, the Labor Department reported Friday. Absent that gain, the private sector would have shed 145,500 private-sector jobs.

Among the sectors where employment has fallen over the past year: manufacturing, which has resumed its long decline after a brief, postpandemic pop, and which employs more than two men for every woman. And transportation and warehousing, which has been among the sectors most affected by tariffs, and where men outnumber women three to one.

“Men are clearly being affected by the tariffs and poor performance of manufacturing,” said Katz.

By the Labor Department’s count of U.S. payrolls, the number of jobs held by women has increased by 421,00 since the end of 2024. The number of jobs held by men has slipped by 1,000. It is a figure that comes with caveats: More women hold multiple jobs, for example, while more men are self-employed—meaning they have work but they aren’t included in the payrolls jobs count.

Lauren Bauer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, characterizes the job market not so much as weaker for men so much as it is much better for women.

Focusing on women age 25 to 54, who are in their prime working years, the employment-to-population ratio was 75% in April, which compares with a 2019 average of 73.7%.

For men, it was 86.5%, around where it was in 2019—a time when employment for these men was rising toward levels last seen before the 2008-09 financial crisis. “To the extent that things are softening, they’re softening from a very strong place,” she said.

The larger question for men in the labor market is what comes next, and whether recent softness represents a temporary setback, or something that could be longer lasting.

One concern is the degree to which the education gap between men and women has grown. Starting in the 1980s, more women than men began earning bachelor’s degrees. The gulf has widened since then: As of 2024, 46% of women age 25 to 54 held a bachelor’s degree versus 38% for men. And it appears poised to get wider still, with the Education Department projecting that women earning bachelor’s degrees in the current academic year will outnumber men by nearly 40%.

That matters not just because college graduates have historically earned far more than people with less education, but because they have much higher levels of employment. Career transitions can also be harder for the less-educated. A coal miner, say, might be highly skilled at using specialized machinery to cut and load coal, but that skill can’t be readily applied to work outside the mine.

Career transitions can also be difficult because some types of work “don’t fit into the identity of many men,” said Katz.

Consider dental hygienists. Employment growth is projected to stay strong, and the job pays well: The median annual wage was $94,260 in 2024, compared with $49,500 for all jobs. But only 5% of hygienists are men.

Change can occur, however, if gradually. The share of nurses who are men has risen from about 2% in 1960 to about 14% today, said Elizabeth Munnich, a health economist at the University of Louisville. In research conducted with Minneapolis Fed economist Abigail Wozniak, she has found that men tend to gravitate toward higher-stakes nursing jobs, such as working in intensive-care units. She has also found that they tend to enter the field after working other jobs.

“It didn’t seem to just be high wages that were encouraging them to go into nursing, but the general stability of the healthcare sector, which kind of surprised me,” Munnich said.