Wall Street Journal reports that women held more U.S. jobs than men in December for the first time in nearly a decade, after a brief blip when this happened in mid 2009-10. This is a development that likely will reflect the nature of the American workforce for a while near future.
To be sure, this trend has been going on since the 1980s. I think there are two large explanations based on social trends and job trends.
Social Trends. Liberalization of society and changing workplace mores, improving (despite persistent) pay gap for woman, improved family and parental assistance (even though US still lags behind), as more women now stay at work after childbirth.
Another factor is that wage growth has been suppressed in the United States, and many families are increasingly dependent on both parents working to support childcare, healthcare and living expenses.
Job trends. I think the most important contemporary trend that explains the observations is the face that jobs in the US are becoming more servicized. For instance, the recent job growth have been education and health-care services, which have predominantly hired women in the workforce. (Think of teachers and nurses, that have more women than men in the work force). Simultaneously, the traditional manufacturing jobs (which hired mostly men) are on the downturn in the United States. As I have argued on this blog before, it is increasingly difficult to in-source manufacturing jobs into the United States, without substantial workforce training.
Hence, I think this trend will continue until there is a cultural shift towards men doing service jobs.
However, there is still a puzzle. The labor-force participation rate in the US in December was 57.7% for women aged 16 and up, compared with 69.2% for men aged 16 and up. So, there are still many men working. Where do they work and why are they not captured in the data?
The above data ignore farm jobs and self-employed jobs. My guess is there there are (still) more men in entrepreneurial jobs, and self-employed jobs. Surprisingly, gig-economy workers are almost closely gender-balanced (52% men). It is worth exploring where the gap between participation rates and reconciling it with the non-farm payroll jobs.