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Women now outnumber men in the paid workforce. This is raising alarm bells for many as they worry about the decline in good jobs for middle- and working- class men as well as the downstream effects, such as declining marriage rates, and men who have dropped out of the labor market entirely. The good news is there are many possible ways to help male workers. But they aren’t going to fit into a 280-character tweet about the gender wars.
The federal government recently released this remarkable statistic: When it comes to non-farm jobs, there are more gals than guys. This has happened before. More women than men were working during the Great Recession in 2009, as well as right before the 2020 pandemic. Overall, however, the changes in male vs. female workforce participation are dramatic. In 1990, there were about 7 million more employed men than women. Today? The gender gap has narrowed to nothing.
The Left looks at these stats and interprets them as a story of women’s empowerment and female career success. Many conservatives, by contrast, see potential long-term negative impacts on the social fabric, including fewer marriages and children. Stepping back to look at the full picture of male and female employment, however, provides another option: We don’t need to have another round of the gender wars in 2026. To be clear, male unemployment is a serious issue that should receive sustained attention from politicians interested in the common good. However, prudent policymakers should consider how to help American men find good jobs while resisting calls to place them in a zero-sum competition with women.
First, the stats. Women now narrowly outnumber men in non-farm jobs, but this doesn’t tell the whole story, since men on average still significantly out-earn women. Likewise, many more women than men are simply not in the labor force at all, frequently devoting themselves to full-time care of the home, children, or the elderly in unpaid, but still enormously socially valuable, work. Put another way, the number of women in the paid workforce has increased significantly, but men still get paid more and are less likely than women to drop out of the labor force entirely to care for family and community.
Focusing on the men and women who work in our formal economy, the trend line is striking. Women are clearly working at much higher rates than they did 40 years ago. Whatever social media personalities might claim, however, it is far from obvious that the presence of women in the workforce is disadvantageous to men.
Instead, looking at the broad picture: declining male employment in recent years is largely driven by broad economic forces. American companies just aren’t hiring as much in fields that used to provide stable jobs for working-class men. As Axios reports, hiring “in construction and manufacturing has been relatively flat or negative.” Pushing women out of the workforce isn’t going to increase the number of jobs in sectors dominated by blue-collar men.
The most likely solutions instead will come from well-designed industrial policy to boost domestic manufacturing and thoughtful responses to industrial automation. Efforts to boost infrastructure investment and housing reform will also likely help, since both should lead to an uptick in hiring in fields more likely to employ men. Likewise, some analysts believe limiting immigration in sectors that are predominantly held by men could also boost both employment of U.S. citizens and their paychecks.
Additionally, men have fallen behind as the economy shifts toward greater reliance on the healthcare sector, which is traditionally disproportionately female. These jobs don’t need to remain overwhelmingly held by women, however. Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has called for efforts to get men into “HEAL” jobs — health, education, arts, and literacy — in order to meet this challenge. Reeves notes the success of businesses and policymakers in moving more women into the STEM, or science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields. He suggests that the failure to integrate men into nursing, teaching in K-12 schools, and the like, means “missed job opportunities for men as well as a damaging lack of men in some vitally important roles.”
As the mother of four kids, three of whom are boys, I can attest to the importance of making sure young men have a wide range of positive male role models in their lives. For many boys, the presence of more men as public school teachers, running after-school education programs … or even as EMT techs or ER nurses … might make a significant difference in the trajectory of their lives, providing needed examples of healthy masculinity that focus on service and stability — rather than video game addiction and pot. Additionally, when my dad went through a period of extensive hospitalization, I remember his male nurses with fondness. Although the women who cared for him were wonderful, he seemed to have a special connection with the men who took competent, careful care of him when he was too ill to care for himself. Encouraging men to join the HEAL professions can fill a needed gap not only in the economy but also in providing a positive, distinctly masculine contribution to an important sector. We sometimes think of jobs in the “care economy” as “pink collar,” but just as a family benefits from the distinct contributions of both dad and mom, the nursing and education professions would benefit from more men.
There are two elephants remaining in the room to consider. It is shamefully true that in both the C-suite and certain prestigious fields of work (like fiction writing and screenplay creation), there are still numerous DEI measures and explicit or implicit quotas that have disadvantaged (primarily white) men to the benefit of women. While the average male construction worker is not personally negatively implicated by DEI hiring in elite publishing houses, that doesn’t make those programs right. We must pay more attention to measures that could help working-class men in the trades and manufacturing, but we also ought to work toward ending unjust discrimination against men, including getting rid of the justly unpopular disparate impact test, which pushes large businesses to consider the proportion of men vs. women on their payroll.
Likewise, it’s impossible to talk about male employment numbers without also talking about male unemployability. As Patrick Brown, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, writes: “One in 4 young men use weed, and a good many are acting out violent scripts they learned from pornography or gambling their weekly earnings on a prop bet.” Many working-class men seem caught in a vicious circle, in which various vices — especially drug use — make it harder for them to find and keep stable, good-paying jobs, resulting in them leaning further on drugs, video games, etc. to get through the days.
The declining number of men in the American workforce is indeed a serious problem. But the problem is not women. Instead of trying to return to an idealized vision of the 1950s, addressing male workforce participation will require a complex and sophisticated bucket of fixes that looks at construction and manufacturing, immigration, drug policy, and DEI measures. A push for creating well-designed policy measures to boost male workforce participation is not going to go viral, unlike calls to kick women back into the kitchen. However, they are the changes that will actually help America’s working-class men, who need and deserve a hand up from their elected officials.
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Ivana Greco has several jobs, but her favorite is being a homeschooling mom of four.
