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For decades, there was a stubborn gender gap in employment, even as women grew more and more educated. Thirty-odd years ago, men still held 7 million more jobs, despite the fact that women were already earning college degrees at higher rates than their male counterparts. But by 2020, there was a turning point, and women outpaced men on non-farm payrolls by 109,000 jobs, which meant that they accounted for over 50% of the workforce.
Then the pandemic happened. In the years since, women have slowly regained their foothold in the labor force, although working mothers in particular have faced an uphill battle between strict in-office policies and ballooning childcare costs. As of February, however, women have overtaken men in the workforce yet again. A report from Indeed’s Hiring Lab last week highlighted that the gap has closed, driven in large part by job growth in sectors that are dominated by women.
Between February 2024 and February 2026, the U.S. economy added 1.2 million jobs. A significant portion of this growth—over 814,000 jobs—was on account of women, and across sectors like healthcare that tend to draw more female workers. Even in a sluggish job market, healthcare is one of the few industries that has continued adding jobs and helped keep the economy afloat.
In fact, over the last year, significant job growth in healthcare has offset losses across the rest of the workforce: The U.S. economy added a total of 156,000 jobs overall, due to 375,000 new healthcare jobs. This pattern is even clearer over the past year: The share of jobs held by women has increased by nearly 300,000 since February 2025, while men saw an overall drop in employment of 142,000 jobs.
It seems this uptick in women’s labor force participation reflects a broader shift that was already underway, before it was derailed by the pandemic. But as Indeed notes, the gender gap isn’t closing because record numbers of women are entering the workforce. The real driver of this change is a notable decline in men’s labor force participation, as employment has dropped in sectors that have historically been dominated by men, such as manufacturing and construction.
It’s also clear, from recent data, that women’s employment is not exactly secure: In the first half of 2025, about 212,000 women left the workforce. There was also a noticeable dip in employment for certain women, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, which found that the number of working mothers between the ages of 25 and 44 dropped by nearly three percentage points between January and June of last year.
With the rapid adoption of generative AI, new forces threaten to undermine labor force participation for all workers, just as men are facing other headwinds in the job market. And while there may be new opportunities available to women in the workforce, the very issues that have long limited their career growth—from pay inequities to caregiving responsibilities—still loom large, even as the economy continues to rely on their labor.
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