About 330,000 women aged 20 and over have left the U.S. workforce since the beginning of 2025, even as over 103,000 men have joined the workforce, new data show. The gender-skewed trend has concerned the U.S. House of Representatives’ Democratic Women’s Caucus enough that the group has written to the Department of Labor to draw attention to the trend, saying some of those departures are not entirely by choice, HRDive.com reports.
The exodus of female workers also includes over 100,000 Black women, and it’s occurring at the same time as report after report notes the entire U.S. job market is weak and stagnating with little hope of a revival in the medium term.
The letter and publicity initiative, led by Reps. Hillary Scholten (D-MI) and Emilia Strong Sykes, (D-OH), also noted that mothers aged 25 to 44 with young kids are also leaving the workforce — their participation is down nearly 3 percent since January. One cause may be that more women have to care for both young children and elderly parents at the same time. The letter noted that rising child care costs and weak safety net support may mean that the number of women quitting the workplace will likely to continue to grow.
Other factors fuel the trend, as another report about impostor syndrome and female leaders at work underlines. Social science researchers writing at The Conversation explained their investigation into the phenomenon, comparing the celebrated “girlboss” movement to the stated pressures women leaders typically face at work. The trends surrounding female empowerment are, the researchers contend, leading to a “relatively new form of feminism” that “may not be as empowering as it purports to be.”
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The trend is based on cultural acknowledgement of ongoing gender inequalities, which the report describes as the “masculine-dominated world of leadership.” The problem is that the burden of fixing the issue is often pushed by female leaders themselves. Essentially , they must deal with the day to day demands of managing colleagues, women are expected to assert and reassert their value over and over. The researchers noted that female coworkers in particular are an issue, and their “internalized bias” actually fuels a succeed-at-all-costs “superwoman impostor phenomenon.”
Meanwhile, other reports underline the unfairness that female workers face in the workplace. This week a Los Angeles state judge approved a $43 million settlement as part of a class action lawsuit brought against the Walt Disney Company that found the world-famous brand underpaid female workers. As AI technology sweeps across the working world, a July report warned that AI tools that can help advise people what to do when they’re seeking jobs sometimes advise women and minorities to ask for lower salaries than the tools tell white men to seek. In May, the U.N. raised the alarm that AI is replacing people, but that women are three times more likely to be replaced by an AI system than men are. And a September report highlighted that sexual harassment still plagues the average American workplace.
There are narratives that tell a slightly more nuanced story about women and work, such as a recent report saying CEO pay in the Bible Belt actually flips the script on gender bias. In a new paper, Brock University Professor of Accounting Samir Trabelsi and his team found that in this highly religious environment, women who become CEOs can actually earn more than men.
What can you take away from this for your company?
Simply that you should value your female employees, managers and leaders, and remember that they may be silently facing many complicated challenges your male staff do not. Auditing your fair pay practices, paid time off rules, sexual harassment policies and other social factors that impact your female workers may be a timely move in the interest of retaining talent. Encouraging your female staff to stay could be easier when those pressures are eased. That can only be good for your company culture, and, ultimately, your bottom line.