By any metric, America’s working women are doing poorly compared to men. Since January 2024, women’s employment rates are down about 2 percent from where men’s are, according to Michael Madowitz, the principal economist at the Roosevelt Institute. Put another way — as Time magazine did — 212,000 women left the work force between January and August of this year, while 44,000 men entered. The gender wage gap is widening, notes the economist Kathryn Anne Edwards, and, she said, “There is no racial group or educational class within the working population in which women outearn men.”
The picture is even worse for specific subsets of women. The share of mothers of young children in the labor market fell almost 3 percentage points in the first half of the year. Unemployment for Black women has risen disproportionately over the past two years, and cuts to the federal work force have hit Black women particularly hard. According to analysis from the left-leaning Center for American Progress, as of 2023, 45 percent of mothers overall and 69 percent of Black mothers were breadwinners for their families. When women lose their jobs, they, their families and the broader economy suffer.
This administration seems unconcerned about these statistics, and they’re certainly not shy about signaling how they see the American worker. A series of posters advertising a website for apprenticeship opportunities put out by the Department of Labor on X depicts a brawny, blond man in retro work clothes against a backdrop of cranes and construction sites. The text across his torso reads: “Make America Skilled Again!” and “Build Your Homeland’s Future!” (I usually refuse to be trolled into Nazi comparisons — because these posters are a deliberate provocation — but sometimes it’s impossible to ignore the similarity to fascist propaganda.)
There are other signs from the government that the interests of working men are paramount, most notably the planned defunding of the Women’s Bureau, an agency within the Department of Labor that is supposed to advance the interests of working women. The Trump administration cannot eliminate the Women’s Bureau because it was established by law in 1920. But it is suggesting that the agency receive no money for the 2026 fiscal year, calling it “an ineffective policy office that is a relic of the past.”
And then there is the way the federal government is treating its female employees. Pete Hegseth, who leads the Department of Defense, shut down an advisory committee that encouraged women to enlist in the military. Politico’s Paul McLeary reports that Hegseth “also shut down a program that boosts the number of women in peace building and conflict prevention efforts, calling it ‘woke’ and ‘divisive.’”
Addressing hundreds of senior military leaders on Tuesday, Hegseth vowed to hold soldiers to the “highest male standard.” Though he claims to “value the impact of female troops,” he also said, “I don’t want my son serving alongside troops who are out of shape or in combat units with females who can’t meet the same combat arms physical standards as men.” It can seem as if the answer to the question “What is the problem with the U.S. military?” is increasingly “Women and D.E.I.”
In May, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency cut all grants for the Women in Apprenticeship and Nontraditional Occupations program, which is meant to support women in male-dominated fields. But after a public outcry, those grants were “quietly reposted” in July, according to reporting from Mother Jones’s Julianne McShane.
The sidelining of female workers was outlined in Project 2025, which calls for anything dedicated to tracking gender equality to be rebranded as serving “women, children and families.” That’s a pretty overt declaration of their view of women’s place in society.
The Project 2025 authors accused the Women’s Bureau of perpetuating “a politicized research and engagement agenda.” They encourage Congress to create an assistant commissioner of family statistics, who would track “metrics like marriage and fertility rates, the share of children living with both biological parents, the cost of a standard basket of middle-class essentials, and the share of families whose highest-income worker earns more than twice the poverty threshold.”
Since the federal government seems less and less invested in whatever is going on with female workers right now, I asked three economists why they think there has been a decline in the number of women working. They all said there isn’t an obvious reason; industries that are predominantly female, like health care, continue to add jobs. “There are so many negative pressures on women working today that we can’t easily point to one story,” Kathryn Anne Edwards told me.
Misty Heggeness, who is an associate professor at the University of Kansas, said that the cost of child care has outpaced overall inflation during the past few years, which may push some women who are in dual-earning families back home. Child care costs increased an eye-popping 29 percent from 2020 to 2024.
Edwards speculated that college-educated, young female workers without children may be opting to ride out a bad job market by getting more education. She added that return-to-office mandates championed by the president may be pushing some mothers out of the job market because they had built their lives around hybrid or remote roles, and can’t manage without that flexibility.
All of these explanations make sense to me, but I think there’s also an unquantifiable chilling effect that the government’s priorities may be having. In its all-out assault on the concepts of diversity and inclusion, the Trump administration is sending a message: Women and nonwhite people who have a “good job” that is well paid and has a chance for advancement might be there for reasons — tokenism, for instance — other than their own merits.
Despite all these headwinds for women, high-profile pundits and politicians of all political backgrounds continue to be laser-focused on the plight of boys and men. The pervasive, incorrect idea behind this special pleading is that men’s employment is absolutely essential to our country’s economic and social well-being; while women’s employment might be nice to have, their job loss doesn’t constitute a serious obstacle.
Private-sector companies are already reflecting this attitude, and the government’s abandonment of women’s achievement as a policy goal. The Bloomberg columnist Beth Kowitt explained that many private companies have stopped tracking gender statistics — fewer S&P 500 companies are disclosing information on women in management and on their boards, and on pay equity. If you’re not even keeping track of the problem in the first place, you can’t define the issue, or understand why it’s happening.
If you gut the agencies that give you data you don’t like, you can create your own nostalgic reality where American men are skilled again and women know their place.
End Notes
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B-a-n-a-n-a-s: I’m still reeling from this tragic story in The Cut, “Why Karolina Went to Bali,” by E.J. Dickson. It’s about a Polish woman with a long history of disordered eating who became part of the raw vegan community on social media, and ultimately died while at a resort. Dickson draws connections between extreme diets, online rabbit holes and fringe conspiracy theories. I wish I did not know the phrase “fruitarian influencer” (there is one called Freelee the Banana Girl who has hundreds of thousands of followers).
Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The Times, covering family, religion, education, culture and the way we live now.
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