Why are American women leaving the labour force?

FOR ALMOST 80 years, since America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics began splitting data by gender, at least one story has been true: women have been gaining on men. In 1948 just 32% of women were employed or seeking work, against 87% of their male peers. By the end of the 1990s, some 60% of women were in the workforce, alongside 75% of men. During the 2000s and 2010s, the gap continued to shrink, albeit because male employment was falling. Then the covid-19 pandemic pushed workers out—but women recovered faster, narrowing the gap between the sexes to just 10.1 percentage points by early 2025, the smallest on record.

Now something has changed. Although men’s participation is steady, women are leaving the workforce. From a post-covid high of 57.7% in August 2024, their participation rate has fallen by almost a full percentage point, to 56.9%—implying over 600,000 women have absconded. Labour-force data can jump about, and there is lots to explain volatility at present, from federal firings to a sharp fall in immigration. Still, the male-female participation gap has seen its biggest rise since the 1950s.

What might lie behind the trend? The obvious explanation would be a change in the nature of the American economy. Men and women work in different industries—maybe female-dominated ones are struggling. Yet the data suggest otherwise. According to surveys by the Census Bureau, the sectors that have lost the most jobs in the past year are retail, manufacturing and transportation, which are relatively balanced or skew male. Meanwhile, education and health care, which are dominated by women, have added workers.

Perhaps, then, the explanation is a social shift. “Tradwives”, who sing the praises of old-fashioned gender roles, are ascendant on TikTok—maybe they are in real life, too. Or it could be that mothers are leaving work because of soaring child-care costs. At first glance, the idea of a maternal retreat from work seems to be corroborated by the Census Bureau’s data: the participation rate for “prime-age” women (25- to 54-year-olds) with children under five has fallen from a post-pandemic high.

But that may not be because prime-age women are leaving the workforce permanently. There were 7.8m women with young children in work two years ago; there are 7.9m working now. Instead, the fall seems to reflect a rise in the number of young mothers. Many couples postponed weddings during the pandemic, leading to a surge in vows in 2022. And it is common for couples to have children a year or two after they tie the knot. Although official data on births come with a lag, surveys from the Census Bureau indicate America may be experiencing a mini post-pandemic baby boom, which could be sufficient to pull women from the workforce.

In some senses, this is good news: many will return to work after maternity leave. But the question is how the trend will interact with rules around working from home. Misty Heggeness of the University of Kansas has shown that women who were pregnant in March 2020, and could not have known what was about to occur, have higher participation rates than those who had children a year earlier, perhaps because remote work made their dual role easier.

Now return-to-the-office mandates are becoming more common among many employers. Will mothers who are part of the mini baby boom thus return to work at lower rates? Your correspondent’s experience provides some reason for optimism. She married in 2022 and late last year became the proud mother of a bouncing, babbling baby boy. You can deduce, from the existence of this article, that she has since returned to the workforce. ■