For only the third time in American history, women hold more payroll jobs than men—and that trend isn’t likely to reverse anytime soon. Yet even as women pull ahead on job counts, men continue to out-earn them at nearly every stage of their careers, starting the day they leave campus.
A new study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) found that women who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in the class of 2023 earned an average starting salary of $59,778, while men with the same degree earned $72,190. That works out to women taking home roughly 83 cents for every dollar their male classmates made—before their careers have even begun.
Women last held a payroll majority only twice before—briefly during the Great Recession around 2010, and again just before the pandemic in early 2020. Both times a downturn had wiped out male-dominated jobs in construction and manufacturing. What makes this crossover different is that it arrived without a recession.
Women have long been paid less, but they now dominate the raw number of jobs held, particularly in the post-pandemic era, when men’s employment failed to bounce back the way women’s did. Over the past 12 months, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of employed women grew by more than 870,000, while men shed nearly 1.5 million jobs.
In a tight labor market, female-dominated fields such as health care, education, and hospitality have logged consistent gains. Men accounted for just 2% of the jobs added in August’s report, with women making up 158,000 of the 162,000 total positions created.
The imbalance has intensified concern about men’s declining presence in the workplace. Roughly 7 million fewer men are employed today than in the 1990s, and the labor force participation rate for men aged 20 and older slipped to 69.4% as of August 2026, down from 75.8% in August 2006.
Explanations vary. Some argue that video games amount to “the crisis of the American male” and are driving the retreat. Other economists, including the University of Connecticut’s Remy Levin and Daniela Vidart, contend that young men who come of age in a market defined by high unemployment and weak wages grow pessimistic about their prospects and opt out of work altogether.
Whatever the cause, the decline appears to be structural—a lasting reshaping of who fills American workplaces rather than a temporary swing tied to recession. “This seems to be more of a long-term decline that’s led to a more permanent shift going forward, or at least a semi-permanent,” Laura Ullrich, director of economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab and a former senior regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, told Fortune.
Women may be commanding workplaces, but they still aren’t commanding paychecks. They earn just 81 cents for every dollar men make, and the gap widens with age. Over a typical 40-year career, women will earn $542,800 less than men—with women of color bearing the heaviest burden, losing more than $1 million over the same span.
Why the gender pay gap persists
The very fields where women dominate—education, nursing, and care work—are the ones propping up monthly job reports, and they tend to pay less. Women make up two-thirds of workers in low-wage jobs, a concentration that widens the overall wage gap. They outnumber men in teaching by 3 to 1 and in nursing by 8 to 1, while remaining underrepresented in more lucrative fields such as finance, construction, and STEM, where they account for less than a third of the science and engineering workforce.
Parenthood, though, is the single biggest driver of the gap, especially as women get older. In the research that earned her the Nobel Prize, economist Claudia Goldin found that early-career pay gaps are relatively small—until a woman has her first child. From that point, her earnings fall and never climb at the same rate as those of men who become fathers, even when the two share identical professions and levels of education.
Men, as a rule, still shoulder less of the child-rearing. Women more often step away from work to care for children, stalling or halting their career progression, and post-pandemic return-to-office mandates have disproportionately hit the mothers who serve as primary caretakers.
So the milestone comes with an asterisk. “You could look at it and say, ‘Yay, women.’ But I don’t think it’s necessarily a positive story for women overall,” Ullrich said of August’s hiring spree.
