Women account for 98% of US job gains in August

Out of 162,000 nonfarm payroll jobs added to the US economy in August, women claimed 158,000 of them. That’s roughly 97.5% of all new positions, a lopsided figure that makes the rest of the jobs report look like a footnote. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its Employment Situation report on September 4, and the gender breakdown immediately became the headline. Women now hold 79.749 million nonfarm payroll jobs, pushing their share of total nonfarm employment to 50.1%. A pattern, not an anomaly This isn’t a one-month fluke. Since January 2025, women have accounted for approximately 86% of net US job gains. The driving forces are concentrated in sectors like healthcare, private education, and leisure and hospitality, areas where female workers have historically made up a larger share of the workforce. Meanwhile, traditionally male-dominated industries have been moving in the opposite direction. Construction and manufacturing have shed positions, creating a two-track labor market where the sectors adding jobs and the sectors losing them split along starkly gendered lines. The unemployment rate for adult women dropped to 3.5% in August, a full 0.6 percentage points below the ove...