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Women currently hold more jobs than men in the US for the third time in history — and experts say the disparity could be here to stay as seismic employment shifts take hold in America.
The fairer sex held 79.64 million jobs as of June 2026, compared to the 79.34 million jobs held by men at the time — a difference of about 304,000, according to a fascinating survey conducted by the Indeed Hiring Lab.
That disparity has been growing sharply in recent months — in Feb. 2026, women held 96,000 more jobs than men, meaning the disparity grew by a whopping 208,000 jobs across four months this year alone.
And in the last 12 months, about 95% added positions went to women, as did two-thirds — 814,000 — of the 1.2 million added from Feb. 2024 to Feb. 2026, according to Indeed.
The percentages of men in the labor market have also dipped, with just 66.8% of men employed or actively seeking a job — down from 75.1% in 2000. Women in the labor market hit 56.6% as of June, but dropped from just 60.1% since 2000.
“This gap in male-female labor force participations rates [has] steadily declined over time,” said Indeed Director of Economic Research Laura Ullrich, who wrote the study. “As more women have worked, less men have worked.”
It’s a titanic shift from historical trends in the US, where just 60 years ago there were 24 million more men in the workforce than women. That number has been declining steadily since, but by the 1990s, men still held about 7 million more jobs than women and even by 2005, they held around 5 million more.
Women held more jobs than men just two times before, the first after 2008 when male-dominated workplaces were gutted by the Great Recession until historical norms returned. The second came before the 2020 pandemic but was inverted again when lockdowns hit working women harder than men.
The current apparent trend led Ullrich to predict it could be here to stay.
“I think we’ve just returned back to what it would have been if COVID never happened,” she told The Post. “I actually think this switch to a level that is permanent was coming before COVID.”
Exactly what is driving the trend is manifold, but increases in healthcare, education and hospitality jobs — industries dominated by women — compared to shrinking jobs in the male-dominated tech, business, and manufacturing worlds appear to be playing a sizable role, Ullrich said.
Changes in gender norms, however, do not appear to be playing a meaningful role.
“The research does not show that men are caregiving at higher levels,” Ullrich said. “It certainly has become more common for men to stay at home with children than it was 20 years ago, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s not like there’s some big wave of that. It really is a decline in just work activity.”
Ullrich characterized the reality driving that decline as “very depressing.”
“There was a paper written several years ago that showed that men are working less than men used to, and that the majority of that extra time they have is spent playing video games and on computer leisure,” Ullrich said.
That research was published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2017 and found that young men spend about 70% of their off-work hours playing video games, according to Fortune.
“All sorts of things, whether it’s the opioid epidemic, or depression or disability are all hitting men harder,” Ullrich said. “Young adult men are much more likely to be living with their parents than young adult women.”
Meanwhile, data from economist Justin Wolfers shows that women have filled nearly nine in 10 jobs created during President Trump’s second term.
Since Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, the US economy has added 468,000 payroll jobs due to the enormous growth of healthcare and education, according to Wolfers.
Of those, 86% — or 403,000 of the jobs went to women — with only 65,000 going to men, the data shows.
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