Breitbart’s Business Digest is pushing back on a wave of liberal commentary about August’s jobs report, arguing that the media and progressive pundits are showcasing female job gains to score a political point rather than report on economic reality.
According to the Breitbart piece, employers added 158,000 women to payrolls in August versus just 4,000 men. That stark split drove headlines like CNBC’s “Women accounted for almost all of job gains in August. Here’s why,” and Fortune’s “Who runs the labor market? Women accounted for 98% of U.S. job gains in August.”
The Digest frames these stories as ironic: outlets are highlighting women’s gains not to celebrate the Trump economy, but to argue that the administration’s alleged attempt to restore a male breadwinner model has backfired. It quotes Mike Konczal, vice president of policy and research at the Economic Security Project and a former National Economic Council staffer, who wrote that “one of the great ironies of the second Trump administration has been that, despite their attempt to reassert a male breadwinner family model and make a gender vibe shift, men have gained no jobs under it.”
Breitbart’s response is that the premise itself is invented. The Digest argues that nothing Trump has said or done supports the claim that he is engineering a patriarchal economy, and that liberals are attacking a demon of their own imagining — then faulting him for failing at a goal he never pursued.
The Headline Numbers Hide a Lot
The Digest contends that the raw net figures also distort the picture. If readers came away thinking men barely found work in August, that impression would be wrong, it says. Construction alone recorded a net increase of 20,000 men, manufacturing added 7,000, and including mining and logging, men gained 28,000 jobs in goods production. Declines in the services sector dragged the overall male total down to just 4,000.
Konczal’s argument, as described by Breitbart, is that the disparity shows Trump’s policies are failing to deliver a blue-collar revival. The Digest counters that August itself undercuts the claim: factory employment rose 16,000 that month and stood 58,000 above December 2025. The piece traces a trajectory from rapid manufacturing job losses in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency, to slower losses in Trump’s first year back, to actual gains in the second. Tariffs, tax cuts, deregulation, and the promise of energy abundance are credited with moving factory employment back into positive territory.
Foreign-Born Workers and the Native-Born Picture
Breitbart also highlights a data problem with the claim that “all the jobs went to women.” Foreign workers have been leaving the workforce, whether deported or departing voluntarily, and those exits have been concentrated among men, according to the Digest. That means even if native-born men are filling jobs rapidly, the departure of foreign-born men can largely offset the gains.
The payroll survey that Konczal and others rely on doesn’t distinguish native-born from foreign-born workers. The Labor Department’s household survey does. Its published estimates show native-born male employment rising by 1,072,000 between January 2025 and August 2026, while foreign-born male employment fell by 949,000. The net male increase was just 123,000.
For women, the reported native-born gain was 242,000, against a foreign-born decline of 45,000, leaving a net increase of 197,000.
That means women finished with the larger aggregate gain even though the reported native-born increase was more than four times larger among men. Foreign-born declines absorbed nearly nine-tenths of men’s increase, compared with less than one-fifth of women’s, per the Digest.
Breitbart cautions that population adjustments and possible differences in response rates could distort these figures, making them suggestive rather than conclusive. The numbers cited are also not seasonally adjusted. Still, the piece argues there’s little reason to think survey problems would distort the divergence between the sexes.
To illustrate, the Digest offers a hypothetical: if three native-born men and three native-born women find work while foreign-born male employment falls by three and foreign-born female employment by one, the net increase is two — entirely female — even though six people found work, half of them men.
A Hiring Boom Is Not a Gender Story
The Digest concedes one point in Konczal’s analysis: industries already employing many women account for most of women’s payroll gains, which helps explain the industry pattern. Healthcare and other sectors are hiring rapidly, which Breitbart calls a positive development regardless of whether it fits what it describes as an imaginary sexist agenda liberals attribute to MAGA.
The piece’s conclusion is straightforward: a lot of women found jobs in August, and so did a lot of men. Breitbart frames that as a Trump policy success rather than a failure — and as a rebuke to commentators who read a gender war into a single month’s payroll data.
Source: www.breitbart.com — https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2026/09/10/breitbart-business-digest-liberals-are-worried-too-many-women-got-jobs-last-month/