Who runs the labor market? Women accounted for 98% of U.S. job gains in August

Who runs the world (or the U.S. labor market in August?) Girls.

Women accounted for almost every job added to the U.S. economy in August, an extraordinary statistic within a jobs report full of surprises.

The economy added 162,000 jobs last month, nearly triple most economists’ projections of around 55,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Of those gains, women accounted for 158,000 of them, roughly 98% of the net increase in payroll employment.

Men, by comparison, gained only about 4,000 jobs.

Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, cautioned against reading too much into the gender split of one month, calling it “noisy.”

“I think there’s been way too much focus on the month to month—is it men gaining jobs or women?” Long told Fortune. “That moves around a lot.”

Nevertheless, the lopsided month is another data point for a broad transformation in the American workforce: earlier this year, women overtook men in total payroll employment for the third time in history. Unlike the other two times, the Great Recession and just before the pandemic,........

© Fortune