Women accounted for roughly 98 percent of the jobs added to the U.S. economy last month, according to a Federalist column published Tuesday that says the striking gender split in hiring is bad news for everyone — including women themselves.
The article, written by a high school English teacher, cites the latest jobs report showing 162,000 new positions created across sectors. About 158,000 of those — roughly 98 percent — went to women, while men took just 4,000, or about 2 percent.
The column acknowledges a range of explanations offered for the disparity. Some commentators, it notes, say the numbers prove women are underpaid and forced to hold multiple jobs. Others point to the composition of the report, which skewed toward female-dominated fields such as teaching. Still others argue the monthly figures are simply evening out an earlier period when men were hired at higher rates.
But the writer argues none of those explanations fully accounts for what the piece describes as a strong preference for hiring women even in traditionally male-dominated sectors like manufacturing and construction. Citing The Post Millennial, the column notes that women surpassed men in total payroll employment for the third time in history earlier this year — a development the writer characterizes not as a statistical correction but as a continuation of a trend that took hold after President Trump returned to office.
A Pattern, Not a Blip
The Federalist piece contends the likeliest explanation is twofold: women are applying for jobs in far greater numbers than men, and employers are systematically discriminating against male applicants. It argues that if the numbers were reversed — with only 2 percent of new jobs going to women — the reaction would be immediate and national, with marches in every city and feminist politicians mobilizing in response. Instead, the writer laments, the reaction to men’s losses has been a collective shrug. The column points to President Trump, who it says joked ironically that the disparity must be why women love him so much.
The author insists the subject is no laughing matter. Relations between men and women, the piece argues, are already at a low point, and it warns that the hiring gap risks turning an existing rift into an unbridgeable chasm. Men who are denied remunerative work, the column says, lose not only income but the social standing that helps them attract a spouse — and the writer attributes that loss directly to women taking their jobs.
Even men who the column says are “making all the right moves” to find work, it argues, are being rejected because of their sex. That rejection, in turn, discourages other men who see little point in trying, feeding growing gaps in college attendance. Employers lose out on talented workers, the piece says, and the country is left with a surplus of unemployed and, in the writer’s phrasing, unemployable young men.
The Argument for Women’s Losses
The column’s central claim is that the trend is as damaging to women as to men, though for different reasons. Women, it says, are increasingly deprived of suitable men to marry because a majority of available men will rank beneath them in status and income. That dynamic, the writer argues, pressures women to pursue careers themselves and to postpone or forgo marriage and family formation altogether. And women who do find a provider and choose to stay at home, the piece says, can expect to be vilified as backward “tradwives” by other women.
The author describes what it calls a reversal of longstanding norms: women as breadwinners, leaders, and protectors, while men spend more time at home handling chores and child care. That arrangement, the column argues, has failed to make either sex happier. It points to survey data showing rising loneliness, anxiety, and depression among both men and women, and says the reversal has made each sex less attractive to the other — asking why a woman would want to date a man who earns less than she does, and why a man would want to date a woman who does not respect him.
To illustrate where the trend could lead, the writer holds up South Korea, where birth rates are less than half of replacement levels and the total population is projected to halve by 2100. Rather than uniting to address the crisis, the column says, Korean men and women often take opposing political and cultural positions, competing in what the writer calls a zero-sum game that ends in societal decline.
The U.S., with a total fertility rate of 1.62 — more than twice South Korea’s but still below replacement — is on track for similar problems, according to the piece. It blames an “abysmal dating scene” that keeps younger adults from forming families, and ties much of that to women outearning men.
Prescriptions and Pushback
The column rejects the framing that these shifts represent a win-win of female empowerment and male retreat in the name of gender equity. In reality, the writer argues, it is a lose-lose outcome: women alienated from the home, men alienated from work, and the two alienated from each other.
The usual objection to the older arrangement — men at work, women at home — was that it denied women opportunities and gave men too much power, the piece concedes. Even if that was true in specific households, the writer says, the reality was more nuanced than the caricature, and the problem is obviously not fixed by denying men opportunities and turning women into tyrants instead.
As a remedy, the column calls for a middle ground: women continuing to enjoy economic opportunities without men being shut out of the same. In policy terms, that means ending affirmative action programs the writer says unjustly favor female advancement, punishing instances of reverse sexism that target men, and pushing back on messaging that stigmatizes domestic life and promotes what the piece calls militant misandry.
Those steps, the author argues, should be paired with a society-wide effort to encourage men to strive professionally and romantically. Too many, the column says, have given up on self-improvement because they feel the world is stacked against them. The same people who tell young men to stop complaining and work harder, the writer suggests, should redirect that energy toward reforming a broken system so that hard work is recognized and rewarded. The author closes by noting a personal stake in the argument: as a high school English teacher, the writer says, the message that self-improvement is good in itself is one repeated in class every day.
The column explicitly rejects the label of “DEI for men,” framing its proposals instead as a restoration of what it calls common sense, stability, and sexual complementarity in a culture that is coming apart. Men want and need to shoulder a greater share of today’s labor, the piece concludes, while women want and need to shoulder less — and accomplishing that, in the writer’s view, would leave both sexes happier and more inclined to like one another.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/15/women-getting-98-of-new-jobs-is-bad-news-for-everyone-including-women/