5 minEconomy
Women Hold More U.S. Jobs Than Men, but Starting Salaries Still Trail by 17 Cents
Women now hold more payroll jobs than men for only the third time in U.S. history, yet a new study finds female college graduates earn about 83 cents for every dollar their male classmates make from their first job onward.
Women now hold more payroll jobs than men in the United States, only the third time that has happened in American history, but a new study shows the milestone has not closed the earnings gap that begins the moment college graduates enter the workforce.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers found that women who earned a bachelor's degree in the class of 2023 received an average starting salary of $59,778, while men with the same credential earned $72,190. That means women took home roughly 83 cents for every dollar their male classmates made before their careers had even begun.
The job-count crossover is different from the two previous episodes. Women last held a payroll majority briefly around 2010, during the Great Recession, and again in early 2020, just before the pandemic. Both times, downturns wiped out male-dominated jobs in construction and manufacturing. This time, the shift arrived without a recession, suggesting a more durable reshaping of the American workplace.
Over the past 12 months, the number of employed women grew by more than 870,000, while men shed nearly 1.5 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In August's report, women accounted for 158,000 of the 162,000 positions created, leaving men with just 2% of the gains. Female-dominated fields such as health care, education, and hospitality have logged consistent gains in a tight labor market.
The imbalance has intensified concern about men's declining presence in the workforce. Roughly 7 million fewer men are employed today than in the 1990s, and the labor force participation rate for men aged 20 and older slipped to 69.4% as of August 2026, down from 75.8% two decades earlier. Explanations vary. Some argue that video games amount to a crisis of the American male and are driving the retreat. Other economists, including the University of Connecticut's Remy Levin and Daniela Vidart, contend that young men who come of age in a market defined by high unemployment and weak wages grow pessimistic about their prospects and opt out of work altogether.
Whatever the cause, the decline appears structural rather than a temporary swing tied to recession. Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab and a former senior regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, said the pattern looks like a long-term decline that has produced a more permanent shift going forward, or at least a semi-permanent one.
Women may be commanding workplaces, but they still are not commanding paychecks. They earn just 81 cents for every dollar men make, and the gap widens with age. Over a typical 40-year career, women will earn $542,800 less than men, with women of color bearing the heaviest burden, losing more than $1 million over the same span.
The very fields where women dominate, including education, nursing, and care work, are the ones propping up monthly job reports, and they tend to pay less. Women make up two-thirds of workers in low-wage jobs, a concentration that widens the overall wage gap. They outnumber men in teaching by 3 to 1 and in nursing by 8 to 1, while remaining underrepresented in more lucrative fields such as finance, construction, and STEM, where they account for less than a third of the science and engineering workforce.
Parenthood, though, is the single biggest driver of the gap, especially as women get older. In the research that earned her the Nobel Prize, economist Claudia Goldin found that early-career pay gaps are relatively small until a woman has her first child. From that point, her earnings fall and never climb at the same rate as those of men who become fathers, even when the two share identical professions and levels of education.
Men, as a rule, still shoulder less of the child-rearing. Women more often step away from work to care for children, stalling or halting their career progression, and post-pandemic return-to-office mandates have disproportionately hit the mothers who serve as primary caretakers.
So the milestone comes with an asterisk. Ullrich said of August's hiring spree that one could look at it and say, yay, women, but that she does not think it is necessarily a positive story for women overall.
