Your Applicant Pool Is Shifting By Gender
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A number went around this week claiming that 98 of every 100 jobs added in August went to women. The real BLS figure is 158,000 of 162,000; women’s payroll employment rose 158,000 while men’s rose 4,000, and it’s still a lopsided month. Women now hold 50.1% of all payroll jobs in the country, edging past 50.0% a year ago for the first time since this data series began tracking it this way.
One month of payroll data moves around on its own, and BLS’s other survey, the one that counts actual people instead of payroll jobs, showed the opposite pattern in August: men gained 359,000 in the household count and women gained 210,000. Two surveys measuring the same month can disagree this much, which is a good reason not to build a headline out of a single month either way.
The 12-month numbers are where this gets serious. Employed men (16 and older) fell by 1,497,000 over the past year, while employed women rose by 873,000, according to BLS’s household survey. Total employment dropped by 624,000 over that stretch, meaning the labor market got smaller for men and grew for women at the same time. Adult women’s unemployment fell to 3.5% in August from 3.9% a year ago. Adult men’s rate sits at 4.0%, essentially flat, putting women’s unemployment rate half a point below men’s, a gap that didn’t exist a year ago.
The industry data explains a real share of it. Women’s employment in private education and health services grew by 399,000 over the year and by 172,000 in professional and business services. The sectors losing jobs skew differently: women lost 100,000 jobs in financial activities and 105,000 in government, the two categories where women did lose ground, while men have absorbed most of the damage everywhere else, including the information-sector losses I covered after August’s jobs report first came out.
I’d treat the viral 98-of-100 number as a hook and nothing more. The 12-month trend underneath it holds up, and it maps onto exactly what’s been happening sector by sector all year. Health care, education, and food service keep adding jobs, and women hold most of those payrolls. Information, manufacturing, and white-collar corporate roles have shrunk or stalled, and men hold most of those. Financial activities is the one exception, majority women, and it still cut 100,000 women’s jobs over the year, which tells me this is a demand story tied to which industries are hiring, not a story about employers choosing one group of workers over another.
Men’s labor force participation fell from 67.9% to 67.2% over the year, a bigger drop than women’s decline from 57.0% to 56.5%, which means part of this gap comes from men leaving the labor force entirely instead of losing a job search. The men in the hardest position right now tend to be mid-career professionals in the white-collar sectors that over-hired in 2021 and 2022 and have spent the years since unwinding it, a pattern I saw again in the flat professional and business services numbers after Uber’s management layoffs last week. The jobs didn’t move to a different title. They moved to a different industry.
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Small Businesses Can’t Find Workers, and It’s Not About What They’re Paying
NFIB released its August Small Business Economic Trends survey today, and the detail worth pulling out is 82%. Among the 56% of small business owners who were hiring or trying to hire in August, 82% said they found few or no qualified applicants for the roles they were trying to fill. This is happening in the same month BLS counted 7.0 million unemployed people nationwide.
35% of all small business owners reported job openings they couldn’t fill at all, down 1 point from July but still 11 points above the historical average. Hiring plans cooled a bit too: a net 17% of owners plan to add jobs in the next three months, down 3 points from July’s reading, which had been the strongest since October 2022. The Optimism Index itself slipped 1.1 points to 98.7, just under July’s 12-month high and still above its 52-year average of 98.0.
The real signal sits in what owners call their biggest problem. Labor costs as a top concern dropped to the lowest level since March 2021, while concerns about labor quality or availability eased only slightly and stayed far above their long-term average. When wage complaints fade but the applicant-quality complaint doesn’t, the issue has stopped being what the market pays and become who’s available for the job on offer. NFIB’s chief economist, Bill Dunkelberg, put the split plainly: “While expectations for the overall economy dimmed, Main Street owners remain largely positive in the health of their own businesses.”
Small businesses employ close to half the private workforce, so a 3-point drop in hiring plans in one month is worth watching heading into the fall. If you’re a small employer hitting this same wall, the gender and industry shifts in this morning’s jobs data are part of the answer: the workers available in your local market may be concentrated in industries or skill sets that don’t match the roles you’re trying to fill, which is exactly the kind of mismatch a staffing partner is built to close.
More Workers Are Taking a Second Job, and It’s Not the Group You’d Expect
A new brief from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond adds a third layer to this week’s data: how workers themselves are responding to a job market growing unevenly. The share of employed Americans holding more than one job hit a pandemic low of 4.1% in April 2020, climbed every year after, peaked at 6.0% at the end of 2025, and eased to 5.5% by July 2026, roughly 8.7 million people, up about 3.2 million since the pandemic low.
The growth didn’t come from the bottom of the income scale. Middle-income families with incomes between $50,000 and $150,000 saw their multiple-jobholding rate climb from 4.7% in 2021 to 5.6% in 2025, the largest increase of any income group, and now close to the 5.8% rate for families with incomes of $150,000 or more. Families under $50,000 rose only from 4.2% to 4.9%. College graduates made up about 35% of multiple jobholders in the 1990s and roughly 50% by 2024. Incorporated self-employed workers now hold a second job at the highest rate of any group, 8.0%, ahead of private for-profit employees at 4.6%.
Kyle DeMaria and Urvi Neelakantan, the brief’s authors, write that “taking on a second job can signal financial strain, opportunity or both,” and the data leans toward the second explanation for a lot of these workers: multiple jobholders tend to make more at their primary job than comparable single jobholders, and a second job supplies about 28% of a multiple jobholder’s total quarterly earnings. The authors read that as “capacity and opportunity rather than an inability to secure adequate hours at a single employer,” a description that fits a worker with in-demand skills selling them twice, the group most likely to hold a second job by choice.
The measurement gap is the detail I’d hand to any employer reading this. Administrative records put the true multiple-jobholding rate near 8% back in 2018, about 3 points above what the household survey showed at the time, because the survey requires at least one wage-and-salary job to count someone as a multiple jobholder at all. A worker who drives for a ride-hailing app and delivers food and does nothing else doesn’t show up in this data at all. DeMaria and Neelakantan put it plainly: “Because official statistics miss much informal and platform-based work, the figures reported here are best treated as a floor.” If the real rate sits closer to 8% than 5.5%, something like 1 in 12 of your full-time employees already works for someone else on the side, and you have no way to see it in any survey.
