The Email Job Bubble Is Wrong About Women’s Work · Storyflo

The Email Job Bubble Is Wrong About Women’s Work · Storyflo

In case you missed it, 98% of new non-farm jobs added to the US economy in August went to women.

Because the Internet is the Internet, we saw two very incorrect conclusions drawn: either that this news represented a major #girlpower success for women and was a referendum on men being unemployable losers, or that the nefarious feminist forces behind the dastardly Gen Z Boss and a Mini video were, right under the Trump administration’s noses, continuing to orchestrate the hiring of useless women for cushy six-figure (yet fake) marketing executive roles, robbing men of jobs and tanking the birth rate.

One explanation came a bit closer to the truth: the theory that most of these jobs were low-level roles in healthcare, which men typically don’t seek (and yes, healthcare is an especially fast-growing sector.) But the full story is even less clickbaity: yes, there was some job growth in healthcare (with more than half of those related to unsexy home health care services) but the bulk of these new ladyjobs were in hospitality, food service and education—also roles that tend female, and are not particularly cushy.

Ready to get even less gendersloppy? It might all be statistical noise anyway. People with more than one job would be counted twice, and women are more likely than men to cobble together multiple part-time jobs. Womp womp.

So no, there is no huge leftist conspiracy to push men out of the workplace, nor are women taking over all the Fortune 500 companies in what Fox News might call a “girlboss caravan.” Instead, this news just tells us that most working women are not who we imagine when we are in the white collar trenches of the Internet gender wars. Most working women are nurses, food service workers, home care aides, and teachers, not marketing executives or even “HR ladies.” Most women are not working particularly highly-paying, comfortable or cushy jobs at all, nor are they overwhelmingly taking over the jobs that men want. Most women’s salaries pay for rent and food, not handbags and manicures. And perhaps most importantly, if someone really wanted to push women out of the workplace to make room for men, they would have to figure out what to do with all the understaffed hospitals and nursing homes.