Almost 90% of jobs created since Trump’s reelection have gone to women — for one specific reason

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Women have filled nearly nine in 10 jobs created during President Trump’s second term — with men now outnumbered in the labor market for only the third time in history, according to new data.

Since Trump’s second inauguration in January 2025, the US economy has added 468,000 payroll jobs due to the enormous growth of healthcare and education — traditionally female-dominated industries, according to data from economist Justin Wolfers.

Of those, 86% — or 403,000 of the jobs went to women — with only 65,000 going to men, the data shows.

There are now more female than male employees on non-farm payrolls for only the third time in history, a staggering reversal from 1970, when men outnumbered women on non-farm payroll by a ratio of nearly two-to-one.

Non-farm payroll excludes agricultural jobs.

Almost 90% of jobs created in President Trump’s second term have gone to women. AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein

The dramatic figures under Trump’s second term can be chalked up to the huge number of jobs created in mainly female professions and the loss of jobs in mostly male professions, according to Wolfers.

“The mainly female category added 828,000, the mainly male category lost 218,000, and the roughly equal group lost 142,000 jobs since the start of Trump’s second term,” he wrote.

Many of those new jobs have come in the private education and health services sectors, an employment category that was already more than 75% female when Trump took office for the second time, according to the data.

Women now make up a majority of the non-farming workforce. Getty Images

Wolfers highlighted what he called the disconnect between old political debates tied to the 1970s image of work with the reality of jobs in America in 2026.

He pointed out that a majority of Americans worked in agriculture in the mid-to-late 19th century, an industry that only employs around 1% of Americans today.

“This shift didn’t occur because food became any less important. Rather, agricultural productivity improved so dramatically that we no longer need tens of millions of people to grow all the food we want,” Wolfers said.

And as the US became a wealthy country in the 20th century, Americans had surplus money that they could spend on things other than food, he said.

A similar pattern is playing out in American manufacturing, Wolfers explained.

“America continues to produce vast quantities of industrial goods — but technological advances allow us to manufacture far more with far fewer workers than before. Modern factories, like modern farms, are often more machines than people,” he said.

As productivity rises, labor is freed up to go into other, less labor-intensive jobs, and as incomes rise, the demand shifts, according to the economist.

The American economy is increasingly geared toward services, such as healthcare, childcare, education and elder care.

“This is a central story of what happens when a country gets richer, more productive, and yes — older,” Wolfers said.

All of these jobs have historically been associated with women, the so-called “pink-collar economy,” and still suffer from a lack of male interest, he argued.

He pointed to a recent opinion piece from Betsy Stevenson, a former Labor Department chief economist, in Bloomberg.

“If we want job growth for men to match that for women, men may need to move toward the industries that are actually growing,” he said.