Women have tipped the scales in the US workforce — holding more jobs than men for the first time in a decade, new labor stats show.
American women held 50.04 percent of jobs, according to data from last month, surpassing working men by 109,000. The last time this happened was in mid-2010.
The stats — which exclude farmworkers and the self-employed, whose jobs are not counted on payrolls — reflects the growth in service industries that employ more women than men, particularly education and health care, experts told the Wall Street Journal.
The payroll gender gap has been narrowing in recent years, and is not necessarily good news for women, as service industry work often pays less than other fields.
“The sectors that are growing, like education and health care, are predominantly women’s employment,” Ariane Hegewisch of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research told the Journal.
“Looking at the 21st century, it is really amazing how profound some of the [sex] segregation is in the labor market.”
Confounding the stats is that men are more likely to be self-employed or to work on farms, and therefore to be counted in payroll stats such as those released Friday.
Women are also more likely to hold multiple jobs, the Journal noted. An individual woman with multiple jobs would be counted repeatedly in the payroll data.
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