Are you surprised that nine out of every 10 new jobs during Trump 2.0 have been filled by women? I sure was.
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A business newsletter from Globe Columnist Larry Edelman covering the trends shaping business and the economy in Boston and beyond.
The latest: The job market is being kept afloat by hiring in private education and health services, where women outnumber men by more than 3-to-1.
The “eds and meds” sector has added nearly 1 million jobs since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Almost all of those have been in the health care and social assistance subsector, which includes nurses and home health care aides. (Private education hiring has been anemic, more so nationally than in Massachusetts.)
The rest of the economy, where the workforce is evenly split between men and women, has shed nearly a quarter of a million jobs.
That explains the large gender hiring gap.
A similar trend is playing out in Massachusetts, but growth in private education and health services jobs here hasn’t been enough to offset losses in other sectors.
Why it matters: There is a disconnect between economic reality and government policy.
The president is fixated on manufacturing more of everything — more automobiles, more iPhones, more energy.
Using tariffs, trade negotiations, and arm-twisting, he has sought to get American and foreign companies to expand manufacturing in the United States. It’s been less than two years, but the results are middling.
Goods-producing industries — where men are more than three-quarters of the workers — aren’t growing as fast as the far larger services sector. They have added a scant 68,000 jobs since the start of 2025, with data center-powered growth in construction partially offset by declines in manufacturing and oil, gas, and coal production.
“When I listen to Washington, I hear talk about factories, construction, hard hats,” Wolfers said in an interview.
“It’s highly coded language that doesn’t mention men or women” but nonetheless puts more value on traditionally male jobs, he said, and “is completely at odds with reality.”
It’s also worth noting that the job trend is moving away from Trump’s electoral coalition, which skews male, as the midterms approach next month.
The counterargument: There are solid reasons to push for more US manufacturing and other goods-producing jobs.
Reliance on foreign suppliers for critical goods such as chips, oil, and rare earth minerals leaves the United States economically and militarily vulnerable.US production supports a domestic network of parts suppliers, shippers, and service providers, while spurring demand for the highly educated scientists, engineers, and others who drive innovation.Manufacturing has historically been an important source of middle-class jobs for the more than 50 percent of workers who don’t have a college degree.
Consider that average weekly wages for manufacturing jobs are 15 percent higher than the overall private-sector average. Meanwhile, health care and social assistance jobs pay 7.5 percent less than the private-sector average.
Final thought: Expanding American manufacturing is a worthwhile goal, but Trump’s tariffs are a misguided way to achieve it.
Import duties raise the cost of materials used to make goods and scramble supply chains. If trading partners retaliate with their own tariffs, US exports could suffer.
Moreover, technology has allowed the country to produce ever more goods with fewer people. Manufacturing will never again play as important a role in the job market as it did before offshoring and the rise of China. In 1980, the sector employed 20 percent of American workers; today it’s 8 percent.
As the country gets richer, people don’t necessarily buy more consumer goods, Wolfers notes. Instead, demand is shifting toward services. And as the country gets older, health care and elder care will continue to need more workers.
Last month, the jobless rate among men was 4.3 percent, 0.3 percentage point higher than for women.
Expect that gap to widen unless more men are prepared to move into the fields where the jobs are. The government should be promoting that shift, too.
Larry Edelman can be reached at larry.edelman@globe.com.