You probably know a woman supporting an unemployed man. Maybe you’ve been that woman. What used to be an embarrassing secret has quietly become a macroeconomic data point, and now teh Federal Reserve has the receipts.
As of early 2026, women held more payroll jobs than men in the United States. This has happened twice before — briefly during the Great Recession and again just before Covid — and both times it reversed. Laura Ullrich, a former regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who authored a new analysis through Indeed’s Hiring Lab, says this time is structurally different.
“It definitely doesn’t, to me, seem like the change has been driven by a recessionary period, which is what typically drives it,” she told Fortune. “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 gap by the numbers
In the early 1990s, men held nearly 7 million more jobs than women. That gap gradually shrank over the last three decades, and is now gone.
The trend continued over the last year, Ullrich said, pointing to labor force participation rate data from the Federal Reserve. Over the last 12 months, jobs held by men fell 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 gap in labor force participation rate has also narrowed. The male rate has fallen nearly 20 points since tracking began in 1948, from 86.7% to 67.2% today. The female rate jumped from 32% to 57.2% in that span.
It’s not women entering, it’s men leaving
This is where the narrative gets complicated — and more interesting.
Both male and female participation rates are lower than they were in 2000. But men are falling off at a rate that dwarfs women’s decline. Right before Covid, the male labor force participation rate was 69.2%. It’s now 67.2% — a two-point drop. The female rate dropped just 0.6 points over the same period.
“It’s fewer men entering,” Ullrich said. “Younger men today are less likely to be working than their fathers were at that same age.”
So who’s supporting them?
“There has been more of a transition where parents are supporting their adult children for longer,” she said. “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.”
And then there are the partners. “Almost everybody you talk to will have a story” about supporting an unemployed man, Ullrich said, adding that what’s changed isn’t the dynamic itself, but the fact that it no longer carries the stigma it once did. The stay-at-home boyfriend, once a punchline, is now 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 aren’t working are being spent on video games and recreational computer use. The economists calculated that improvements in gaming technology since 2004 alone can explain nearly half the increase in young men’s leisure hours.
“I think that’s part of the story — the basement story,” Ullrich said, in reference to a trope of young men playing video games in their parent’s basement.
The opioid epidemic compounded it, hitting non-college-educated men especially hard. And critically, men, compared to women, largely don’t qualify for government assistance programs like SNAP or TANF without a disability, meaning when they exit the workforce, the financial burden falls on whoever is closest to them.
The jobs that are growing and the jobs that aren’t tell you almost everything.
Healthcare and social assistance, which are 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. But male-skewing sectors like manufacturing, tech, financial activities, and media have been stagnant or contracting.
One driver for this is women already have the training for the jobs that exist. 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 jobs most protected from AI displacement — caregiving, healthcare, in-person services — are female. The jobs most exposed to AI are disproportionately held by men. More strikingly, Ullrich noted, is as women move into the workforce and up the corporate ladder, they create jobs for women, including daycare, pet care, and in-home services.
What it means
Economist Richard Reeves, a Brookings scholar who dove into the economic data behind the male loneliness epidemic in the book Of Boys and Men, has argued that the same cultural efforts that moved women into STEM need to be applied in reverse, steering men toward healthcare, education, and psychology.
So far, there’s little sign of that happening. The educational programs feeding the growth sectors are, if anything, becoming more female over time.
As Ullrich put it, the trend in the labor force participation gap shows no post-recession bounce, no cyclical correction, no historical parallel to prior reversals. It’s more like 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 just a TikTok trend. He’s a Federal Reserve data point. And the woman paying his rent is, increasingly, the American economy.
