For the third time in recorded history, women hold more payroll jobs than men in the United States — and unlike previous instances tied to economic downturns, this shift appears to be structural rather than cyclical.

As of early 2026, women surpassed men in total payroll employment. The phenomenon has occurred only twice before: briefly during the Great Recession and again just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Both times, the trend reversed. This time, economists say, may be different.

Laura Ullrich, a former regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who authored a March analysis through Indeed's Hiring Lab, told Fortune that the current shift does not fit historical patterns.

"It definitely doesn't, to me, seem like the change has been driven by a recessionary period, which is what typically drives it," she said. "This seems to be more of a long-term decline that's led to more of a permanent shift going forward, or at least semi-permanent."

The shift also reflects a broader global pattern. Similar gender convergence trends have been documented across most advanced economies, suggesting that common forces — the expansion of service-sector employment, rising female educational attainment, and the long-term decline of goods-producing industries — are reshaping labor markets well beyond U.S. borders.

Decades of Convergence

In the early 1990s, men held nearly 7 million more jobs than women. That gap has gradually eroded over three decades and has now effectively disappeared.

Using labor force participation rate data from the Federal Reserve, Ullrich documented the trajectory. Over the most recent 12-month period, jobs held by men declined by a net 142,000, while women gained 298,000. Of the 1.2 million jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026, two-thirds went to women.

The gender participation rate gap has narrowed dramatically. Since tracking began in 1948, the male labor force participation rate has fallen nearly 20 percentage points, from 86.7% to 67.2% today. Over the same period, the female rate rose from 32% to 57.2%.

Why Men Are Exiting

Both male and female participation rates remain below their 2000 peaks, but the male decline significantly outpaces that of women. Just before COVID-19, the male labor force participation rate stood at 69.2%. It has since dropped two full points to 67.2%. The female rate declined only 0.6 points over the same window.

"It's fewer men entering," Ullrich said. "Younger men today are less likely to be working than their fathers were at that same age."

The question of who supports these men reveals a shifting social landscape. "There has been more of a transition where parents are supporting their adult children for longer," Ullrich noted. "The data do show that more young adult men live with their parents than women. The wealth transfer from older generations to younger generations is part of that story."

Romantic partners represent another pillar of support. "Almost everybody you talk to will have a story" about supporting an unemployed man, Ullrich said. What has changed, she emphasized, is not the dynamic itself but the fact that it no longer carries the stigma it once did. The stay-at-home boyfriend — once a cultural punchline — has become a statistically significant labor market phenomenon.

A landmark paper published in the Journal of Political Economy, first circulated through the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that roughly 70% of the hours young men are not working are spent on video games and recreational computer use. The economists calculated that improvements in gaming technology since 2004 alone can account for nearly half the increase in young men's leisure hours.

"I think that's part of the story — the basement story," Ullrich said, referencing the cultural trope of young men playing video games in their parents' basement.

The opioid epidemic has compounded the problem, disproportionately affecting non-college-educated men. Economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton of Princeton have documented how these trends — addiction, suicide, and alcohol-related death — form a broader pattern of rising mortality among less-educated Americans, further shrinking the male labor pool. Additionally, men — compared to women — largely do not qualify for government assistance programs such as SNAP or TANF without a documented disability. When men exit the workforce, the financial burden typically falls on those closest to them.

Growth Sectors Skew Female

The industries driving employment gains are overwhelmingly female, while male-dominated sectors remain stagnant or are contracting.

Health care and social assistance, a sector that is 78.9% female, added 1.8 million jobs between July 2023 and July 2025 — accounting for more than half of all U.S. job growth during that period. This surge is being driven by a structural demographic force: the U.S. population aged 65 and older is projected to grow by roughly 50% through 2050, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently ranks health-care occupations among the fastest-growing professions. Meanwhile, sectors that skew male, including manufacturing, technology, financial activities, and media, have been flat or declining. Notably, despite hundreds of billions in federal spending authorized through the CHIPS and Science Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law aimed partly at revitalizing male-dominated manufacturing and construction industries, those sectors have not generated job gains sufficient to offset broader trends.

Women already hold the educational credentials aligned with growth industries. Women have earned the majority of all U.S. bachelor's degrees since the early 1980s, and as of 2023, 87% of nursing bachelor's students were women. In speech-language pathology, a six-figure profession, 96.4% of master's students are female. Medical schools have been majority-female since 2019.

"Women are the ones who have the training for these jobs," Ullrich said. "The growth that's happening in the economy in terms of jobs is happening in female-dominated sectors."

The pipeline is female, the growth sectors are female, and the positions most insulated from AI displacement — caregiving, health care, and in-person services — are disproportionately held by women. Conversely, the jobs most exposed to AI automation are disproportionately held by men.

More strikingly, Ullrich observed, as women advance in the workforce and move up the corporate ladder, they generate additional demand for female-oriented services, including daycare, pet care, and in-home support.

Little Momentum for Change

Economist Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution scholar who examined the economic data underlying the male loneliness epidemic in his book Of Boys and Men, has argued that the same cultural investment that successfully moved women into STEM fields must now be applied in reverse — steering men toward health care, education, and psychology.

There is little evidence of such a shift. The educational pipelines feeding growth sectors are, if anything, becoming more female over time.

Ullrich cautioned that the labor force participation gap shows no signs of a post-recession bounce, no cyclical correction, and no parallel to prior reversals. The trend, she said, resembles a one-way door.

"If you look at that overall downward trend," she said, "it's just been on a downward trajectory."

The stay-at-home boyfriend is no longer merely a social media phenomenon. He is a data point in Federal Reserve labor statistics — and the woman supporting him is, increasingly, the backbone of the American economy.