Maybe you know a woman who supports an unemployed man. Maybe you have been that woman. What was once a shamefully quiet secret has become a point of macroeconomic data, and now teh Federal Reserve has receipts.
As of the beginning of 2026, women held more paid jobs than men in the United States. This has happened twice before – briefly during the Great Recession and again before Covid – and both times it reversed. Laura Ullrich, a former environmental economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who wrote a new analysis on Indeed’s Hiring Lab, says this time is different in nature.
“To me, it doesn’t seem like the change is due to a recession, which is what usually drives it,” he said. Good luck. “This appears to be a long-term decline that has led to a permanent transition forward, or at least a permanent one.”
A gap in numbers
In the early 1990s, men held about 7 million more jobs than women. That gap narrowed gradually over the past three decades, and now it’s gone.
This trend has continued over the past year, Ullrich said, pointing to labor force participation rate data from the Federal Reserve. Over the past 12 months, men’s jobs have fallen by 142,000, while women’s jobs have gained 298,000. Of the 1.2 million jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026, two-thirds are for women.
The gender gap in the labor force participation rate has also narrowed. The male rate has dropped by about 20 percentage points since tracking began in 1948, from 86.7% to 67.2% today. The percentage of women rose from 32% to 57.2% during that time.
It’s not the women who come in, it’s the men who leave
This is where the story gets complicated – and more interesting.
Both men’s and women’s participation rates are lower than they were in 2000. But men are falling at a faster rate than women. Just before Covid, the male labor force participation rate was 69.2%. It is now 67.2% – down two points. The rate for women dropped by just 0.6 points over the same period.
“Few men are coming in,” Ullrich said. “Today’s young men do not have the opportunity to work like their fathers at that age.”
So who supports them?
“There’s been a lot of change where parents support their older children for a long time,” he said. “Data shows that more young men live with their parents than women. Wealth being passed down from older generations to younger ones is part of that story.”
And then there are the partners. “Almost everyone you talk to will have a story” about supporting an unemployed man, Ullrich said, adding that what has changed is not the power itself, but the fact that it no longer has the stigma it once did. The stay-at-home guy, once a punchline, is now an important labor market phenomenon.
Important paper published in Journal of Political Economypublished for the first time by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that nearly 70% of young men’s idle hours are spent on video games and recreational computer use. Economists estimate that improvements in sports technology since 2004 alone can explain nearly half of the increase in young men’s leisure hours.
“I think it’s part of the story — the story underneath,” Ullrich said, referring to a group of young men playing video games in their parents’ basement.
The opioid epidemic compounded it, hitting uneducated men especially hard. And seriously, men, compared to women, are especially ineligible for government assistance programs like SNAP or TANF without disability, which means that when they go out of work, the financial burden falls on whoever is closest to them.
Growing jobs and jobs that don’t tell you nearly everything.
Health care and social assistance, which is 78.9% women, added 1.8 million jobs between July 2023 and July 2025, accounting for more than half of all US job growth during that period. But male-dominated sectors such as manufacturing, technology, finance and media are stagnating or contracting.
One driver of this is women who already have training for the jobs available. As of 2023, 87% of nursing bachelor’s students were women. In speech-language pathology, a six-person major, 96.4% of master’s students are women. Medical schools have been predominantly female as of 2019.
“Women are the ones who have the training for these jobs,” Ullrich said. “Economic growth in terms of jobs is happening in sectors controlled by women.”
The pipelines are women, the growth sectors are women, and the jobs most protected from AI — care, health care, personal services — are women. The jobs most exposed to AI are disproportionately held by men. Even more surprising, Ullrich noted, as women enter the workforce and move up the business ranks, they create jobs for women, including childcare, pet care and domestic services.
What it means
Economist Richard Reeves, a Brookings scholar who delved into economic data on the epidemic of male loneliness in the book. Of Boys and Menshe has argued that the same cultural efforts that have pushed women into STEM need to be applied in reverse, directing men into health care, education and psychology.
So far, there is little sign of that happening. Academic programs that feed into the majors, if any, are increasingly female over time.
As Ullrich said, the pattern of the labor force participation gap does not reflect a recession, no cyclical adjustment, no historical parallels with previous changes. It is very similar to a one-way door.
“If you look at that downward trend, it’s just a downward trend,” he said.
The guy who stays at home isn’t just a TikTok trend anymore. It is the Federal Reserve database. And the woman who pays the rent is America’s economy, increasingly.
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