For just the third time in history, women now  outnumber men in the workforce. Or at least that's  

the story. As of 2 months ago, this gap stood at  around 100,000 more jobs held by women. And last  

month, that difference grew to 150,000, which  in the grand scheme of things of the national  

workforce is basically a rounding error. But the  fact that this is so close at all is a sign of  

some major changes in the labor market that have  really only been seen before in 2008 and 2019.  

So, you know, maybe not a good sign. Now, by  itself, there's absolutely nothing wrong with  

this. Some women want a career and some  men want to be stay-at-home parents. So,  

if these non-traditional gender roles become more  accepted and end up splitting the workforce almost  

perfectly 50/50, that is basically the perfect  outcome, right? Except, of course, that's not  

what's actually happening here. Besides the small  little inconvenient detail that every news outlet  

reporting on this issue so far has either been  maliciously or incompetently misunderstanding  

what the data actually means, there is still  a much bigger issue. For a number of reasons,  

this kind of statistical reversal is not really  an indication of women getting ahead or even men  

falling behind. It's instead normally the sign of  some relatively serious issues across the entire  

job market. Which means it's only fair to ask if  the same thing is happening here again. Women now  

outnumber men in the workforce, helping fuel the  rise of the stayathome boyfriend. I've been a stay  

at home dad for 13 years, and I've been a stay  at home dad for approximately 8 years. Officially  

became a stay-at-home dad. Men are missing from  the American workforce. New government data shows  

more men are out, more women are in, many of them  working in fields traditionally dominated by guys.  

A record number of people in the US have more than  one job. That's according to the Labor Department.  

and women appear to be leading that trend. Okay,  so I guess the first thing we need to get out  

of the way is how is this claim even possibly  true? Anybody who even takes a cursory glance  

at the actual numbers might see some pretty  obvious problems with this statement. Sure,  

the labor force participation rate for men has  infamously been falling for a long time now, and  

the participation rate for women is much closer to  its all-time peak. But there is still a 10% point  

difference between them in favor of men. According  to the most recent BLS data, 66.8% of men aed 16  

and over were participating in the labor force,  while only 56.6% of women were. Now, to be fair,  

participating in the labor force does include  people who are looking for work, but not actually  

holding down a job. It takes everybody in these  groups and divides them by the total population,  

outside of a few narrow exceptions, which we will  discuss later. But even if somehow unemployment  

only applied to men, that still wouldn't explain  the disconnect between these numbers and this  

claim. If we wanted to make it even more simple,  we can just look at the BLS's own data and see  

plain as day that in June of this year, there were  84.9 million men employed in this country and only  

77.4 million employed women. So, uh, when these  articles said that women now outnumber men in the  

workforce, what they actually meant was, well, men  still outnumbered women by more than 7 million.  

So, this raises the pretty obvious question of,  were they just straight up lying? Well, no. They  

were doing something much worse. They were either  misunderstanding or outright misrepresenting the  

data. The government effectively runs two separate  job surveys every month. One asks businesses how  

many names were on their payrolls and the  other asks actual households who is working.  

What has actually flipped slightly in favor  of women, is the number of payroll jobs held  

by these genders, which might sound like exactly  the same thing as the number of people employed,  

but it isn't because people can have multiple  jobs. And holding down multiple jobs is quite  

common as a bit of foreshadowing, especially  when they are struggling to get by. All right,  

to show you what I mean here, take 10 men  and 10 women. Two people from each group are  

retired. Three of the women and one of the men are  stay-at-home parents. And sure, for good measure,  

let's say one of the men is out of work entirely.  That leaves five working women and six working  

men, which is actually roughly indicative of the  actual US population, where men do still indeed  

outnumber women in the workforce. But now, let's  say that these two women and one of these men pick  

up an extra job to help pay their bills. Well,  now between the two groups, men have claimed seven  

jobs and women have also claimed seven jobs. So  even though there were more men employed, both men  

and women are working in the same number of jobs,  which is again basically exactly what is happening  

here. Women are statistically more likely to hold  multiple separate jobs. Partially because they  

tend to favor flexible schedules that can work  around other commitments, but also because they  

are over represented in fields that run on shift  work, and they typically just have less stable  

employment, especially if they are moving into  the workforce involuntarily. Men on the other hand  

are also more likely to have more work without a  typical payroll because they are running a small  

personal business as a sole proprietorship and  well yeah also because they are over represented  

in gig work. This still counts as having a job  obviously but doesn't count as a regular payroll  

because of course in contract work like this there  is no payroll. The point is the payroll number  

just isn't counting what these reporters think  it is counting. And look, the misrepresentation  

of this statistic is really disappointing for  two separate reasons. The first is that a lot  

of these articles just took a cool sounding data  point, failed completely to explain what it meant,  

and used it entirely to justify whatever story  they already wanted to write. In just a beautiful  

encapsulation of everything wrong with reporting  these days, one outlet used the data to declare  

the manchild stay-at-home boyfriend an official  economic trend. And another outlet used the same  

figure to support that men were all becoming  communists. Again, maybe you personally agree  

with one and or both of these ideas, but the point  is this figure, while it sounds cool, isn't saying  

what they think it is saying. It's not great,  but it gets worse. Because, well, the second  

reason this is so disappointing is that even with  a proper understanding of what this data actually  

means, it's still really important. Men do still  technically outnumber women in the workforce.  

But this payroll reversal is a real statistical  phenomenon and one that has really only shown up  

in not the greatest of economic times. So I guess  it's worth asking why is this happening now? Well,  

a few reasons. The first one is honestly that  well yeah, even though it's not yet a majority,  

more men really just are choosing to stay at home.  The trend of the stay-at-home dad is much more  

socially accepted today than it was even just  a decade ago. And by Pew's most recent count,  

dads make up almost one in five of America's  stay-at-home parents. Women have also had a  

higher rate of university attainment than men  for a while now. As of last year, nearly half  

of all employed women held a bachelor's degree or  higher compared to about 42% of employed men. So,  

it stands to reason that a lot of them would  choose to actually put that degree to work by  

well, working while their partner stayed home. For  what it's worth, as a personal anecdote, my wife  

makes more than I do as she works a real job and  I have fallen into the prototypical 21st century  

insufferable influencer/trophy husband role.  Now, obviously, that is the best case scenario  

to explain this trend. But let's be honest, most  households these days really need two people  

generating an income in order to survive. And  yeah, in twothirds of married couples with kids,  

both parents already work. So another major driver  is that a lot of these men have started opting out  

of these traditional commitments including the  workforce entirely. This means that in order to  

survive they either rely on their parents, their  partner, government benefits or some combination  

of all three. For young men this group has been  given the name neat not in education, employment  

or training. A classification that now covers  roughly 1 in 10 young men. Among young adults,  

20% of men are still living in a parents home  compared to 15% of women. We have already made  

a whole video about the causes of these trends.  And the TLDDR is that it has largely been the  

result of people effectively seeing that they will  never get ahead through traditional employment. If  

working 40 hours a week provides no meaningful  benefit over just sitting at home, then a lot of  

people who are falling behind are making the  logical decision to fall behind in comfort.  

Now, this has impacted men more so than women,  partially because of the traditional expectations  

that are placed on men to be the breadwinners.  But again, already a whole video about that.  

Even still, this is a long slow drift that has  been playing out over decades. The share of prime  

working age men participating in the workforce  peaked all the way back in 1954, and it has been  

sliding lower across most of the decades since.  So a slow multi-deade slide at the same time that  

women were entering the workforce in mass due  to a combination of necessity and empowerment  

did help to close the gap. But what it can explain  is the very steep flip that just happened and has  

only happened two other times in history. So it's  time to learn how money works to find out why this  

badly misrepresented statistic might legitimately  be a recession indicator. This video is sponsored  

by Monarch. If you have ever tried to track  your money across multiple apps and accounts,  

you know how easy it is to lose sight of the big  picture. Monarch is a private ad-free personal  

finance platform that syncs all your accounts from  13,000 plus institutions into one clean dashboard.  

What I like about Monarch is that it does not  make you try to obsess over every transaction.  

It separates your fixed and flexible spending,  keeps everything organized with your own rules and  

categories, and when something unusual happens,  it explains what changed in plain English.  

you stay aware without being overwhelmed. My  partner and I actually use the shared view for  

our monthly check-ins. We both see the same  dashboard, the same goals, the same recurring  

bills. It has cut out most of the awkward money  conversations because there are no surprises.  

Monarch also tracks your net worth over time and  gives you clear payoff timelines for savings and  

paying down debt, so you can see whether you  are actually making progress instead of just  

hoping you are. And because you are the customer  and not the product, Monarch is completely adree  

with bank level encryption. No ads, no data  selling. Try Monarch for yourself. Scan the QR  

code on screen or use the link in the description  and use code HMW50 to get 50% off your first year.

Okay, so women entering the workforce and men  opting out of it has helped to narrow this gap  

over the years, but a full inversion is usually  the sign of something going not quite right in  

the wider economy. So, the second big pressure  flipping these scales is that women typically  

have roles that are more secure in an economic  downturn, especially in fields like healthcare.  

According to Indeed's hiring lab, America added  1.2 million new jobs between 2024 and early 2026,  

with 2/3 of those being new jobs going to  women. That was largely because basically  

all of our recent workforce growth has been in  healthcare. as our country slowly transitions  

into being a giant glorified age care facility  with a little bit of data center construction  

tacked on the side. That is barely even an  exaggeration. By the way, over the last 12 months,  

healthcare and social assistance added more  jobs than the entire American economy did on net  

because everything else combined actually shrank.  Care jobs are also much harder to hand over to  

the clankers or layoff in a downturn. And there  are more people getting older and more reliant  

on that care every single year. People over the  age 65 now outnumber children in 11 of 50 states,  

up from just three in 2020. And that's after  CO did a bit of statistical trimming. So yeah,  

there's plenty of positions available to people  looking after the elderly and sick. Again,  

we have already done that video. But on the other  hand, something like construction, which is still  

about 89% male, is incredibly cyclical. If the  economy isn't building, there just naturally isn't  

stable demand for that work. Now, of course, men  can have healthcare jobs, too, but nursing, admin,  

and care work are heavily female-dominated  fields. Registered nurses, for example,  

are still about 87% women. Doctors are closer to  a 60/40 split in favor of men, but they only make  

up a small share of the healthcare workforce.  About 1 million physicians, spread across more  

than 80 million healthcare jobs. Additionally,  statistically speaking, healthcare jobs also tend  

to be shiftbased. And it's much more likely for a  nurse to pick up shifts at two or three different  

facilities, each with its own payroll, than it is  for an engineer to somehow work at three separate  

firms. This again means that women are likely to  hold more payrolls without there actually being  

more women working. Now, as for the wider effects  on the workforce, the reality is that women have  

spent decades being actively encouraged to go  take on roles in typically male-dominated fields  

like engineering, finance, or even the trades. But  there has never really been an equivalent push for  

men to move into typically female dominated fields  like nursing, primary care, social work, or early  

childhood learning. Betsy Stevenson, an economist  at the University of Michigan, said in an  

interview that we have to help men understand that  they can do caregiving roles and stay masculine.  

Now, this is a noble ambition and all, but there  are a few reasons for the split, and one of them  

is simply that these fields don't typically pay  as much. Laura Oric, an economic researcher,  

put it as plainly as an economist can. if you're  seeing a shift towards more female employment, all  

else equal, you would see a shift towards lower  wages. Now, as a quick little interlude, this  

isn't always true, and a lot of healthcare rules  pay extremely well, even outside of the ones that  

require medical school. But even still, for better  or worse, men have been apprehensive about making  

that move. Although, as a side note, the men who  do go into these fields often enjoy a good amount  

of job security and some suspiciously fast career  progression. Sociologists have been calling this  

the glass escalator for more than 30 years. And  male registered nurses today earn about 25% more  

per week than their female colleagues. Part of it  is just a practical reality. A lot of this work is  

quite physically demanding. So having a bigger  guy around to do the literal heavy lifting is  

genuinely useful in many of these settings. Even  still though, despite this very interesting little  

tangent, most people don't go into healthcare  or age support for the paycheck, and men are  

typically more financially focused when picking  a career path. And well, to play devil's advocate  

once again, the third reason that women are  holding more jobs than men is just desperation.  

In a traditional single-income family, if the  breadwinning man of the household loses his  

job in one of those more precarious fields, his  wife or girlfriend might need to go out and take  

on a job where they would typically have been a  stay-at-home spouse. Economists literally call  

this the added worker effect. Studies tracking  laid-off workers found that a wife picking up  

extra work ends up covering about a quarter of  her husband's lost income. In plain English, as an  

example, say you lost a decent job and your wife  goes from staying at home to a part-time role at  

the local clinic, plus a weekend shift somewhere  else while you look for a new primary job. Your  

household budget is still going to be in serious  trouble. But on paper, your family just went from  

one payroll to two. This is pretty much what  we saw in 2008 when men bore almost 80% of the  

recession's early job losses thanks to their over  representation in construction and manufacturing.  

The same thing happened again at the end of 2019  as the result of slowly losing traditional jobs in  

manufacturing and mining and replacing them with  more female dominated service roles. Stevenson,  

the same professor from a minute ago, told NPR  back then that she felt very strongly that women  

would still hold the majority a year later.  Of course, a couple months later we were hit  

with the pandemic which had a bigger impact  on service fields instead, which meant that  

uh that prediction did not age well. So yeah,  as much as it would be nice to say that this is  

a statistic of empowered girl bosses or even  a story of lazy dudes who would rather smoke  

cones and play video games, the actual story  is that the workforce is getting shafted. But  

certain corners of the workforce are getting  shafted slightly less. Someone holding one job  

is usually in a much better position than someone  juggling four of them. Because in most fields,  

the only reason to do that is that one or two  jobs just isn't enough to survive on. The Fed's  

own researchers profiled this group and found that  they average almost 50 hours a week of work across  

their jobs and that for the first time ever about  half of them have college degrees. It sounds bad,  

but it gets worse. Remember when I said about 10  minutes ago that the labor force counts all people  

looking for or actively engaged in work outside  of a few narrow exceptions? Well, there is one  

other statistical anomaly that men in particular  generally turn to in hard economic times. The  

military. Despite being a very real job, the BLS  does not count active duty military personnel as  

part of the regular workforce. And despite getting  a paycheck, their payrolls don't count either.  

Typically, when people, and especially young  men, can't find work anywhere else, the military  

is happy to welcome them with open arms and a  steady wage. And well, yep, as of 2 months ago,  

military recruitment has actually hit a 15-year  high. Every single military branch met or beat its  

goal last year, and the army filled this year's  entire quota about 4 months early. Now, I suppose  

it's possible that young people are just feeling  really patriotic about our on-again, off-again  

special military operation in Iran. But it's  also possible that people are signing up because  

it's the easiest way left to get some financial  stability. The Pentagon's own compensation reviews  

literally treat the civilian job market as a core  recruiting variable. where finding a job gets  

harder for you. Enlistment gets easier for them.  Now, I know this probably isn't a shock to you,  

and even the Army is honestly pretty open about  this. Their own director of market intelligence,  

yes, the Army has one of those, explained the  recent recruiting boom by pointing out that  

job openings have been falling and that we're  postured well to compete in that arena. This  

means that there is a statistically meaningful  group of men out there holding down what are  

effectively payroll jobs that just don't get  captured in this comparison. And yes, of course,  

before the comments say it, there are women in the  military as well, but it is a very male-dominated  

employer. Women make up about 18% of the 1.3  million people on active duty. If these jobs  

were counted normally by the BLS, men would still  comfortably claim more payrolls than women by some  

margin. So, yeah, these claims are wrong. They're  wrong for bad reasons. And even by the narrow  

definition that they are correct, it's really not  the good news or the particular brand of bad news  

they are trying to sell. It's all a little bit  dumb, but it gets even dumber because even in the  

industry that started this whole layoff trend, the  companies driving the cuts have ended up hiring  

back the exact same jobs all over again. So, go  and watch this video next to find out what all  

of this was actually for. And don't forget to like  and subscribe to keep on learning how money works.