In America, when the economy is struggling, the men are often the first to go.
Major waves of layoffs in the last 30 years show men get terminated in droves when there is a recession.
But the latest data show something different: Women outnumbering men in the workforce is becoming the "new normal." And the social effects are devastating.
As pointed out by economist Stephen Moore, women are outnumbering men in the labor force by record numbers.
Working-age men have LOST jobs, while women have captured virtually 100% of the net new jobs.
— Stephen Moore (@StephenMoore) September 25, 2026
Men not working translates into men not marrying, which translates into population rapidly falling and American power declining.
Are we in a man-cession? pic.twitter.com/HsisfQY9Lg
"Working-age men have LOST jobs, while women have captured virtually 100% of the net new jobs," he notes. "Men not working translates into men not marrying, which translates into population rapidly falling and American power declining. Are we in a man-cession?"
That's a great question worth unpacking, because the question itself suggests something cyclical that might be reversed. But is that what the data are showing us?
Women are outnumbering men in the workforce in record numbers, but it is by a relatively scant margin that is close to a similar dip in gender employment gap after the 2008 housing bubble burst.
AllWork recently broke down the August numbers showing that women gained about 100 percent of all jobs in that month.
Women accounted for almost every job added to the U.S. economy in August, an extraordinary statistic within a jobs report full of surprises.
The economy added 162,000 jobs last month, nearly triple most economists’ projections of around 55,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of those gains, women accounted for 158,000 of them, roughly 98% of the net increase in payroll employment. Men, by comparison, gained only about 4,000 jobs.
As the publication points out, the trend is starting to look less cyclical and more structural.
Nevertheless, the lopsided month is another data point for a broad transformation in the American workforce: Earlier this year, women overtook men in total payroll employment for the third time in history. Unlike the other two times—the Great Recession and just before the pandemic—the latest shift looks less crisis-driven and more structural: Female-heavy industries such as health care and hospitality continue to add workers even as male-heavy sectors like manufacturing stagnate.
In the manufacturing and tech sectors where men have tended to dominate by numbers, there is also another issue: H1B visa holders. Foreign workers have replaced many workers in the United States in fields that attract men.
706,457 tech workers laid off since 2022.
— Expose H1B Fraud (@JobsNowPaper) September 22, 2026
670,693 H-1B visas issued to Indian nationals in the same period.
The pipeline never slowed down- even as Americans lost their jobs by the hundreds of thousands and were permanently displaced. pic.twitter.com/OoMvg44EAn
"706,457 tech workers laid off since 2022. 670,693 H-1B visas issued to Indian nationals in the same period.," the X account @JobsNowPaper posted. "The pipeline never slowed down- even as Americans lost their jobs by the hundreds of thousands and were permanently displaced."
Economist Mike Konczal recently delved into a great irony of the second Trump term: Men are being shut out of the economy in increasing numbers.
One of the great ironies of the second Trump administration has been that, despite their attempt to reassert a male breadwinner family model and make a gender vibe shift, men have gained no jobs under it. In December 2024, there were 79,332,000 men employed in the Current Employment Statistics survey. In August 2026, there were 79,326,000, a decline of 6,000. That’s as 759,000 overall jobs were created. [...]
Now job growth was essentially flat in 2025, with health care hiring canceling out the losses in federal employment after DOGE, in trade and transportation and manufacturing after the tariffs, and in professional and business services. Since Trump took office, private education and health services added 1,029,000 jobs against an economy-wide gain of 759,000, so one sector that is 77 percent female more than accounts for all net job growth since Trump took office. But even if you start the clock in November of last year or March of this year, after job growth picked back up, men got only 11 and 9 percent of the jobs, respectively. Even with last month’s surprise 162,000 jobs, 158,000 of them went to women.
Now, Konczal is very blasé about dismissing any type of anti-male effects baked into the economy, such as perverse incentives, gender discrimination, or the "girlboss effect."
In fact, he goes the other direction and claims, "First the Trump administration is trying to force women out of the workforce under the idea that their tariffs, deportations, and other economic policies are creating a workforce more accommodating to men."
Both assertions appear to be spurious, as there is no hard evidence provided in his analysis to either refute or support his claims. The trends suggest that the workforce is becoming more female-friendly due to shifts in education and mid-level management in various sectors of the economy.
Among people with jobs in 2025, nearly half of employed women — 49.6% — held a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 41.7% of employed men. That education gap first flipped in the mid-2000s and has widened since.
Women have earned most bachelor’s degrees for decades and now receive roughly 58% to 60% of them. Federal projections show men’s share still sliding toward about 40%. The gap is even larger among younger adults, ages 25 to 34. The result is that the typical employed woman is now more likely than the typical employed man to have a four-year degree.
Importantly, women are slowly making gains when it comes to management in large corporations. In 2025, women held about 42% of management jobs, according to BLS data. Pew put the figure at 46% in 2023.
Women are the majority of professional workers. About 80% of HR managers and 77% of medical and health services managers are women. However, women account for about 33% of people in the broader “chief executive” occupation, which includes smaller firms, and a record 11% of Fortune 500 CEOs — about 55 women.
Thus, we cannot attribute this all to a "girlboss effect," even though there is modest evidence to suggest that same-gender hiring preference exists, mainly among women.
A Science article found, interestingly, female recruiters more likely to favor female applicants; male recruiters did not show a symmetric preference for men.
Several trends are now converging at once: women make up a majority of the college pipeline; much of the recent job growth is concentrated in industries that already employ disproportionately large numbers of women; traditionally male-heavy sectors are stagnating or declining; and some female-led workplaces may exhibit same-gender hiring patterns.
At the same time, labor-force attachment among younger and less-educated men has been declining for years, suggesting a longer-term structural problem rather than simply another economic cycle.
The social consequences extend far beyond a paycheck. America is simultaneously experiencing historically low marriage rates, collapsing birth rates and delayed family formation. The U.S. marriage rate fell from 9.8 marriages per 1,000 people in 1990 to 6.1 in 2023, according to the CDC.
The fertility rate has fallen even more dramatically: the total fertility rate dropped to roughly 1.6 children per woman in 2024, far below the roughly 2.1 replacement rate, while the average age of first-time mothers has climbed from 21.4 in 1970 to about 27.5 today.
Economic stability has always been closely connected to men's marriage prospects, and the economic divergence between the sexes is increasingly difficult to ignore. The labor-force participation rate for prime-age men has fallen substantially over the long term, from roughly 97 percent in the mid-1950s to around 90 percent today.
Work also provides status, routine, purpose and connection to society. When large numbers of men become detached from it, the fallout can surface in isolation, substance abuse, homelessness, crime, family instability and declining civic participation.
The social effects are profound. Men account for roughly four out of every five suicide deaths in the United States, and about two-thirds of people experiencing homelessness on a single night are men.
The point isn't that women are succeeding at men's expense, but that there are deep structural issues beyond the gender employment gap that are turning the American Dream into an economic wasteland for young men. Artificial Intelligence and foreign-born workers are laying waste to sectors of the economy that have traditionally been dominated by men.
It is all working together to cause a surge of economically disconnected men and that is causing a profound social imbalance.
Maybe it is time for Americans to stop being so preoccupied with the "war on women," and to start taking a serious look at the "war on men."
