The Pink-Collar Economy Is Here | Diving In

Here's an interesting fact.
Since Donald Trump returned to office, nearly all of the
net new payroll.
Jobs have gone to women.
And by nearly all, i'll be precise, I mean eighty
six percent. Now pair that with a second fact, women
now hold slightly more non farm payroll jobs than men.
It's currently fifty point zero two percent. So here's the puzzle.
Why is job growth tilting so hard toward women? And
once we've figured that out, a second question immediately shows up.
Are our economic policies and our politics keeping up with
the labor market that we actually have, or are we
talking about leave it to beaver while we're living in
a Jetson's world. Here's our roadmap. First, I want to
walk you through the facts about how men and women
are faring in the job market. You'll see that women
are doing.
A lot better.
Second, we'll explore now what's driving the shift towards women
and why that matters more than you might think. Third,
I want to step back and connect this to a
bigger economic and political point. What goes wrong when our
policy debates spend more energy saluting the past than understanding
the present. And Finally, we'll zoom out and figure out
what this tells us about the kind of work a rich,
modern economy like ours actually creates, and how you me
our kids, and indeed the whole country may need to respond.
Hey, let's start with the facts.
Over the course of the second Trump administration, the US
economy has added four hundred and sixty eight thousand payroll jobs.
And women got four hundred and three.
Thousand of those jobs, leaving only about sixty five thousand
per men. That's why I said women got nearly all jobs.
The precise version is eighty six percent of the net
gains went to women. And over that same stretch the
crossover happened, and today women hold slightly more non farm
payroll jobs than men. Okay, that's the short runs story.
Here's the long run one. Back in nineteen seventy, men
outnumbered women on these measures by a ratio of nearly
two men for every one woman. And then over the
next half century, women just kept getting more payroll jobs.
It kept climbing, while men's rose more slowly and sometimes
hit hiring plateaus.
The gap narrowed, then it closed, and now it's flipped.
This is the latest chapter in a very long story,
fifty years in the making. And the last fifteen months, well,
they've just pushed it out of the line, which brings
us straight to the question that I bet is on
the tip of your tongue right now. What the heck
is going on? What explains all of this? There are
basically two ways this could have happened. One possibility, across
a lot of industries, employers started hiring relatively more women
than men. The other possibility is the industries that were
adding jobs also happened to be the industries that tend
to employ a lot of women. The first idea says
that perhaps women are getting ahead because they're making strides
within many different kinds of workplaces. By this story, the
gender composition of workplaces changed. The second one says that
the workplaces that grew were the ones that tended to
employ more women anyway. By this story, it's the composition
of the economy that changed. The first story says that
existing workplaces better start installing more women's bathrooms. The second
story says that the businesses that were growing are those
that already have a bunch of women's bathrooms. So how
do we tell the difference? We start simple.
I'm going to take all.
Of the industries in the economy, and I'm going to
sort them into three buckets based on what they looked
like at the beginning of our sample in early twenty
twenty five. There's industries that are mainly male, industries that
are roughly even, and industries that are mainly female. Look,
I'm simplifying a lot, but it's helpful. When we do this,
the picture becomes clear. The mainly female bucket that added
eight hundred and twenty eight thousand jobs, the mainly male
bucket lost two hundred and eight eight thousand, and those
in the middle, the industries that were neither strongly male
nor strongly female, well, their results are in the middle.
They lost jobs, but not as many, a total of
one hundred and forty two thousand jobs. So right away
you get a sense of the basic pattern. The growing
part of the labor market was the female heavy part.
Now we can go a step further. I mean, why
not That simple analysis was useful and I could do
it in the back of my envelope. But to really
pin this down, what I'm going to do is I'm
going to get data where I break the economy down
into the most specific, narrow industry groups that the published
payroll data allowed me to look at with a gender lens.
And then I'm going to ask a very specific question.
If each industry had kept exactly the same male to
female mix that it had back in January twenty twenty five,
and if the only thing that changed was which industries
grew and which industry shrank, how much of the women
versus men jobs gap would this explain? To say it
in simpler terms, if all that was going on was
compositional change, would this explain the story? So this question
separates changes and where the jobs were from changes, and
who got hired inside of given industry, and when you
crank up your spreadsheet, and if you want to sound fancy,
you call it no Harker Blinder decomposition or maybe even
a shift share analysis, the pattern of growth across industries
in fact explains all of the shift toward women. It
actually explains more than the whole game, which is to
say that the change in industry mix alone might have
led you to expect an even sharper shift to women
within industry shifts, the changes and who got hired within
or in CIE particular sectors will Mathematically, these two effects
have to add up to the total.
So if the first.
Over explained, it must mean that the second factor says
there's been that within industries there's been a shift towards men,
back to the earlier analogy. What we're saying is that
the workplaces that have grown were the ones that already
had a lot.
Of female bathrooms.
Now you might ask, what is the biggest single engine
of that composition story, now that we understand it is
a composition story. To figure this out, I looked at
every industry and compared how female it was at the
start of the sample in early twenty five to how
fast it's grown since then. When I did that, one
industry in particular stood out healthcare the official category it's
called private education and health services, and it started out
more than three quarters female, and that sector added over
eight hundred thousand jobs over this period. What that tells
you is, in practice, nearly all the action in terms
of female job growth is about that sector.
So that's our answer.
The growth happened in the parts of the economy where
women were already heavily represented. Now let's connect this to
some bigger issues in economic policy. A lot of our
politics still situates the old industrial picture of work. It
talks about factories and furnaces and hard hats and trucks
and skilled trades. There's the heroic breadwinner who ex tangible
things with his hands. It's a fine picture for a
nineteen seventies campaign app but it's wildly disconnected from our
twenty twenty six reality. And when politics keep saluting one
kind of work while the labor market is creating another,
policymakers start to make mistakes. They try to revive jobs
that belong in the past. They launch trade wars and
the hopes of restoring a labor market that no longer exists.
They subsidize the work that fits an outdated idea of dignity,
and they undervalue the work that's actually growing and putting
fern on the table, Which means that this isn't just
a story about gender. It's also a story about economic understanding.
Too often we still talk as if real jobs are
the ones with steel toed boots, But a lot of
the jobs that are actually growing come with scrubs, patientless
diagnostic machines, clipboards, and long shifts on your feet caring
for other people.
This is necessary work.
It's often the hard work in many cases, it's very
physical work. When the labor market is moving one way
and the culture keeps glorifying another, people end up confused,
not because the economy is mysterious, but because they've been
handed the wrong map.
Bad maps lead to bad journeys.
If you tell people the future of work lies in
a factory revival, you'll steer training, dollars, industrial policy, and
political energy toward a ramoticized image of the past instead
of the labor market that's actually in front of your face.
It's a failure of political imagination and a refusal to
update the national picture of what productive work looks like
in a rich, productive, and aging economy.
I think you might understand the.
Full picture a little better if I fill in with
a little bit more history. You see, we've seen something
like this play out before. In the mid to late
nineteenth century, a majority of Americans worked in agriculture. Today,
agricultural employment cray it's about one percent of the American workforce.
So what happened, Well, who didn't become less important? Instead,
agricultural technology and productivity rose so much that we know
no longer need millions of people to grow all the
food we want. In fact, if you visit a modern
day farm, you'll probably see more machines than people.
And here is the other half.
As societies get richer, people don't keep thinking to themselves, Gee,
I wish I could spend more income buying more wheat. Look,
the same basic story plays out in manufacturing. Manufacturing, like agriculture,
still matters enormously. America continues to produce vast quantities of
manufactured goods, but technological advances mean we can produce far
more manufactured goods with fewer workers than were used to.
Modern factories, like modern farms, are more machines than people.
And also, as we get richer, we don't keep buying
extra washing machines. What we want instead is better healthcare,
better childcare, more aged care for our longer lives, more education,
more of the things that make a rich life feel
like a.
Rich and full life.
This is one of the deepest truths about economic development.
As productivity rises in some sectors, labour gets freed up
to go to others, and as income rises, demand shifts,
and at the moment it's shifting towards services, especially services
that have to be offered person to person. So the
rise of healthcare jobs It's not some fluke. It's one
of the central stories of what happens when a country
like ours gets richer, when it gets more productive, and
also when it gets older. And this brings us to
an incredibly important final point. There's nothing inherently female about
a lot of this work. There's nothing biologically female about
helping a patient stand up, moving medical equipment, running diagnostics,
doing rehab support, transporting people through hospitals, assisting older Americans,
or what I do working in education. These jobs, they
require real value. Reliability, strength, competence, patience, responsibility, you know
what else required?
All of those.
Things the jobs that politicians keep putting on the poster.
So let's update the poster. If this is where the
labor market's growing, a healthy society should help men see
these jobs as honorable and normal and not as somebody
else's dirty work. Now this is actually a little personal.
My better half, Betsy Stevenson. She was the chief economist
at the Labor Department. She was a member of Obama's
Council of Economic Advisors, and frankly, during those years, she
was the person in our household who was doing the
serious labor market work. In her case, thinking about the
lave market while I was off doing school pickups and
pretending that candidate's research.
Well, Betsy's made a similar point. If we want job.
Growth for men to be as strong as it is
for women, men may need to move toward the kind
of jobs that are actually growing.
That seems exactly right to me.
As serious jobs agenda should care less about whether work
that comes with a hard hat or scrubs, but more
about whether it's needed, paid, respected, and available. Hey, so
here's the takeaway.
Since January of twenty twenty five, nearly.
All the net new payroll jobs I'll get precise eighty
six percent of them have gone to women, and women
now hold slightly more of these jobs than men. That
happened because the parts of the economy that were growing
were already heavily female, especially healthcare. There's also a broader
lesson here. If we don't understand and confront where job
growth is actually coming from, we risk ending up building
economic policy around the styalagia rather than reality. The good
economic starts with the world as it is in a rich, aging,
productive economy like ours. That means recognizing something important, A
lot of tomorrow's dignity and opportunity is going to be
in the service sector. Today, these are coded as feminine jobs.
Some people even call them pink collar jobs.
So I reckon.
If we're going to get this transition right, we need
to recognize one more important reality.
Real men were pink