Women now make up the majority of the U.S. labor force

[samspenc]

My key takeaways from the article:

* "Women held 50.04% of nonfarm payroll positions in December, the highest share since 2010."

* "Over the past year alone, they’ve taken on a greater share of positions traditionally held by men: they make up 13.8% of mining and logging jobs, up from 12.6% a year earlier, as well as a growing share of manufacturing work..."

* "Women have the biggest presence in education and health services -- holding more than three-quarters of those positions -- and government services with about 58%. They account for 56% of positions in financial activities."

[shiado]

The labor force participation rates for men and women are currently at 69.2% and 57.7% respectively. They arbitrarily exclude farming positions but cite mining, logging, manufacturing, transportation, and warehouse roles traditionally occupied by men. This article doesn't really seem to paint a full or accurate picture.

[IfOnlyYouKnew]

FWIW I see "non-farm employment" rather often when anything related to unemployment happens. From what I gather, it's how all the data has been categorized forever.

So while I can't give you the reasoning behind it, and don't know if it's still valid or now just being done to make the data comparable, I can assure you choosing this statistic wasn't a bad-faith attempt to manipulate.

[boomboomsubban]

I doubt the exclusion of farming positions is arbitrary, the area is full of self/family employment and illegal employment that probably caused the exclusion. It does paint a false narrative though.

[AnimalMuppet]

Wait, so women make up the majority of the non-farm labor force, but the labor force participation rate is 12% higher for men? How does that work? Are 12% of men either in the military or on disability? Or what?

[empath75]

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/nonfarmpayroll.asp

[teclordphrack2]

Farm work much of the time is ephemeral. There is a small window for goods to be picked. There is a small window for the tractors to be up kept post or pre harvest/planting. And, as others have said it can be a paper money transaction business.

[missosoup]

So the total labor force participation rate is ... 126.9% ?

edit: ok, ok, I got confused with the wording, I get it, you can stop hammering with downvotes. I'll leave the above up as my mark of shame.

[deeg]

I find this fairly astounding. The typical stay-at-home parent is the mother and while it's getting closer to parity I don't think it's anywhere near even. For that reason alone I would expect more men in the work force. What are men doing if not working? On disability? Homeless? Retiring earlier?

[phkahler]

>> What are men doing if not working? On disability? Homeless? Retiring earlier?

Some are living in their parents basement until they're 30 to 40. It has been hypothesized that with the breakdown of families in the US, men are giving up, and that includes efforts to build a stable foundation for their family. See MGTOW but dont read too much, it can be kind of depressing.

[notadoc]

> What are men doing if not working? On disability? Homeless? Retiring earlier?

Committing suicide?

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

It's a horrible observation, as men are obviously in crisis.

There's a large percentage of working age men not in the labor force too.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS15000001

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2018/beyond-bls/mens-declining-...

Some perhaps they lost prior jobs and did not regain positions of parity, now they're disenfranchised, socially isolated, in some form of despair, or even homeless.

Anecdotally, the homeless populations I see everywhere in the west coast are 99% males aged 25-50.

[tmpz22]

Well, it may be interesting to look at what industries ballooned during this time. Video games, weed, online sexual services, ...

[klaudius]

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/when-young-...

[outime]

From what I anecdotally see (outside US) some men got frustrated with society and just don’t want to work. Everything they need seem to be found at home, similar to the hikimori in Japan albeit not so extreme. It’s sometimes (so not always) related to dating failures. I could argue that dating is getting increasingly difficult for the heterosexual male and that paired with bad jobs would make some men think twice about participating in the society game. Some other people linked articles/studies talking about this so my non-scientific observation can be supported somewhat.

[munk-a]

I wonder if women are tending toward holding multiple jobs more often than men - and since women live longer on average they may simply be working more years of their lives then men.

[lopmotr]

Some are being "proprietors, private household employees, unpaid volunteers, farm employees and the unincorporated self-employed." From a link somebody else posted https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2019/july/nonfarm-payr...

Unincorporated self-employed sounds like tradesmen, laborers, and some kinds of professionals which is a lot of men.

[epicureanideal]

Apparently this was also true in 2009 and 2010 or at least for parts of those years based on the graph in the article.

Also, it doesn't seem to distinguish between part-time and full-time. So a mother working part-time when her kids are at school would count the same as a full-time worker.

[russdill]

Keep in mind, the US population is 51% female. So there is still a higher percentage of employed males vs employed females.

[40acres]

A lot of them are on disability or in jail.

[closeparen]

This the sort of question economists study, and reading their output may be more informative than forum comments. Keyword is "declining labor force participation rate."

[xenihn]

The article specifies payroll positions. I don't know what that means exactly, but I assume it would discount sharing-economy jobs (are we still calling them that?).

[wyldfire]

> What are men doing if not working? On disability? Homeless? Retiring earlier?

The article claims:

> ... close to 100% of working-age men used to participate in back in the 1950s. Now that figure is 89%, and had been falling up until 2014. Economists cite multiple reasons: lower demand and wages for unskilled uneducated workers, retiring baby boomers, and an opioid crisis that disproportionately affects men.

[irrational]

Playing video games, watching porn, etc.? At least a lot of the articles I see about men leaving (or never entering) the workforce - entertainment seems to be the main way of filling up their time.

[watwut]

People have less children then before and are waaay more likely to go back to work after being stay at home temporary.

The stay at home moms might not be that large portion of population.

[bargle0]

My gut says prison.

[iagovar]

Depressed, committing suicide or just doing nothing. But apparently nobody cares.

[uncle_j]

Why does it have to be even? Why does it matter?

Equal Outcome != Equality of Opportunity.

Unfortunately the two are often conflated in an attempt to imply there is some form of discrimination taking place by people with nefarious motives.

[nightski]

I don't have data to back this up, but it's something I am now going to try to research. However I feel that there is a slight trend away from your traditional payroll job into independent small business careers (youtuber, blogger, streamer, freelancer, etc..). I'm curious how that affects these numbers.

[tribune]

"[Women] make up 13.8% of mining and logging jobs, up from 12.6% a year earlier..."

That seems like a huge recomposition in a single year. What caused this?

[arkh]

From the Bureau of Labor Statistics: "All employees"

So I'll hazard a guess about a change in what part of those mining and logging industries hired: less manual workers and more office ones as they get consolidated into bigger conglomerates. But I may be wrong.

If I read this correctly: https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm in 2018 you had

  - 2.6% women for logging workers
  - 5% for Mining machine operators

[bluGill]

Assuming a 25 year career, you replace 4% of the workforce every year, so just hiring an even number of females would be more than that. (I don't know what the retirement age is for loggers, I'd guess younger than 65 based on it being a union physical labor job)

[alf-pogz]

A lot of talk about younger men, but what about middle-aged men leaving the workforce? If I don't get married and have children within the next 5 years, I'm out too since I can retire early.

[jacquesm]

The more interesting thing is the distribution of income. I would happily bet that there still is a considerable gap between women on average and men on average and that the total amount taken home by that majority is significantly less than the total amount for the men.

[mrwebmaster]

On average, there is no hourly pay gap for unmarried women and men without kids. After they get married, there is an hourly salary gap, and this gap is even larger for married parents. As hours worked per day increase, the hourly pay rate also increases and married men spend much more time at their jobs (on average). Hourly pay also increases as experience increases. Married men with children spend more time at their jobs (vs. married women w/ children, on average), so they accumulate more experience over the years. The gap increases when they get older (on average).

[rjkennedy98]

What about marriage? If a man makes more money and he is married is HE talking more? Isn't that income split (or in reality spent by the women)? I have never understood why data on married men is treated as if the men are single and it's their money alone.

[nkkollaw]

Women tend to choose jobs that pay less.

They're on average more interested in people, so they tend to choose to become nurses, teachers, etc., while men are interested in things and become software developers, engineers, etc.

I have no idea why income HAS TO be distributed equally. Unless you want to force women to become software developers..? But why.

[RenRav]

Are farm workers excluded because it's easier? Wouldn't matter I suppose just curious.

[nsonha]

women v machines

[dang]

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[cblades]

Not sure what inequality you're talking about, given that the US population is right at a 50/50 split between men and women. Then again, I'm not sure how genuine you're being here.

[djohnston]

There are some legitimate concerns related to having basically only women teaching young children, but the issue seems to predominantly be that men don't want to do it.

[08-15]

I'm confused. The headline talks about women holding more than 50% of jobs. But the tagline underneath says females make up the largest share of the labor market! That ain't make no sense! In the current year, not all women have a vagina. I didn't think Bloomberg was transphobic, but now I know better.

[macmichael01]

So much for diversity and inclusivity. In colleges and universities we are all taught to site our sources but if you are Bloomberg you can just make up data points to push a political agenda. It would be nice if there was a data source to reference to understand how they arrived at their stats. But hey we're just supposed to believe in pretty graphs with no source as being truthful and representative or the facts. Not to mention treading at Hacker News so it must be true.

It's also important to remember that: "76% of all statics are made up including this one!"

Here's something else to ponder!! Where were all of the women over the last 10 years when we were building out all of this tech? We needed women software engineers!! I saw very low numbers in my 13+ years in the bay area. The only women in software engineering roles were here on VISA. Now that we have leadership roles and political narratives.... we all of the sudden have a huge turnout. But hey what do I know. 13 years in the bay area working at top tech companies. No credibility at all. Argue with me and tell me know I am clearly wrong!