It’s Not Good That Women Dominate the Job Market

The Bureau of Labor Statistics released its August jobs report earlier this month, and the headline number was pretty good. The number of jobs added—162,000—was nearly triple what economists expected. But inside that number is an alarming statistic whose implications few have stopped to consider: of those 162,000 jobs, women took 158,000. That’s 98 percent.

Many left-leaning publications celebrated the news. And bizarrely, President Donald Trump and Texas Republican Senate nominee Ken Paxton did too. The media and our top political leaders treating this story as a triumph is entirely misguided.

In truth, what’s happening right in front of our eyes is that men are losing ground in—or opting out of—the workforce while women take their place. Male workforce participation is at a staggeringly low rate, while the cost of living and suicides are up. All of these contribute to birth rates now being well below replacement level.

Let’s look at where last month’s job growth came from. Local public schools added 42,000 jobs, a quarter of the entire monthly gain. Women hold close to three-quarters of those jobs. In food service, where women comprise over half of all workers, 57,000 jobs were added.

Home health care and hospitals also added to the gains. In this industry, four out of five workers are women. Meanwhile, manufacturing—the one growing sector that has historically employed men without college degrees—added a comparatively modest 16,000 jobs.

The story here is that demand for caregiving and service work has skyrocketed, while the trades and industries that once let a man support a family on one income keep shrinking or stagnating. Service jobs are also more likely to be part-time (without benefits) and pay less than the manufacturing and blue-collar work men used to rely on. This leaves fewer men with a paycheck steady enough to build a life, let alone a family, around.

Nobody should begrudge the home health aide or the kindergarten teacher her job. These are good and necessary professions. But as progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren, of all people, illuminated in her book The Two-Income Trap, families used to thrive on one income because essential costs like housing, education, health care, etc. were affordable, leaving a stay-at-home parent as a financial safety net. Today, families must spend both incomes just to compete for those same basic needs in safe neighborhoods with good schools.

Now, let’s look at the other half of this story. Male labor force participation has dropped roughly 8 percent since 2000, nearly three times the decline for women over the same period.

Around 11 percent of prime-age American men are neither working nor looking for work, one of the highest rates for that group in recent memory. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate for men rose to 4.4 percent in August, while the rate for women remained at 3.9 percent.

This matters far beyond the labor market. Men who are not working are men not marrying, and men who are not marrying are men not raising children inside stable, two-parent households.

Over the past 25 years, the gap between the number of unmarried and married men ages 20 to 39 has widened from 2.6 million to a staggering 15 million. We don’t need to outline here why this is a major problem, but it’s summed up nicely in Genesis 2:18, where the Lord declares, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

Marriage patterns tend to follow economic ones. Women, even highly successful ones, overwhelmingly prefer to marry men who are at least as educated and established as they are. So, what happens when the pool of economically stable men shrinks? The pool of men that women consider worth marrying shrinks.

The balance in the dating and marriage “market” is drastically out of balance and only getting worse.

Part of the problem is the “market” itself. Dating apps—now used overwhelmingly by young people—have turned courtship into a purely visual exercise, rewarding good photos over the qualities that actually make a marriage last. That’s a bad trade for men who may be hardworking and reliable but don’t photograph like it; and it’s a bad trade for women, who end up screening out exactly the kind of man who’d make a good husband because he didn’t clear the hurdle of a two-second swipe.

For this reason, intentionality is key. Catholics, in particular, ought to properly order the qualities in a potential spouse—like devotion to their faith and virtue, honesty, self-sacrifice, etc.—to combat the more worldly aspects of secular dating. Of course, we have to be physically attracted to the people we date, and economic factors play an important role. But we are not purely economic beings.

The Catechism says marriage is “a partnership of the whole of life” and “is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.” This correctly assumes that marriage is not just rekindling a single spark of passion for several decades until death. Marriage always involves more than two individuals, since it’s not merely a private act. Most importantly, Christ is the essential third party in a marriage. Children, too, are part of the equation.

Insofar as marriage is a public act, government also has a role to play. Vice President J.D. Vance recently championed a new policy change to pay a childcare subsidy to married couples with one stay-at-home spouse. The plan does not add any federal spending, and the new stay-at-home payment would be limited to married couples, tilting the incentive toward marriage and away from single parenthood.

It’s receiving both praise and condemnation from conservatives, and whether it would actually help families is uncertain. Hungary has attempted similar pro-family government policies that haven’t seen lasting success.

Regardless of the long-term implications, it’s simply one more way the government can encourage marriage and the traditional family structure. Whether it’s increasing job gains for men or incentivizing mothers to stay home to raise their children, much of this could be addressed with concrete federal and state policies.

At the end of the day, Washington can only do so much. Churches and families must offer a positive vision for men, encouraging them to better themselves and work hard to provide. Likewise, women ought to be discouraged from pursuing a “girlboss” lifestyle where financial gain is prioritized. Only then can we start undoing years of damage between the sexes.