For men, a bachelor’s degree isn’t worth what it once was.
The labor market is in flux, as job growth slows and AI eats up entry-level jobs. But, under the hood, the differences in how earnings are evolving by gender are stark, and men might offer a warning signal for how the economy is changing.
Business Insider analyzed the Census Bureau’s historical earnings figures by educational attainment and gender. For men with a bachelor’s degree and up, cumulative wage growth since 1991 has fallen and stalled; for women, it’s the opposite.
Men are still outearning women, but we’re seeing stagnation in male-dominated fields like tech and professional and business services, while female-dominated professions like education and healthcare have taken off. As the labor market tips toward those traditionally female professions, Gen Z men might be some of the first test subjects of the economy’s new shape.
“The fact that the labor market was gendered was more to the disadvantage of women,” Richard Reeves, the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, said. “I think we’re entering an era where it’s going to be more to the disadvantage of men.”
The state of men in the labor market
Fewer young men are working, and their labor force participation — a measure that tracks whether they’re working or actively seeking work — has stagnated.
At the same time, the unemployment gap between young men with a degree and similar young women has widened, with men increasingly likely to be unemployed.
“Part of what we have going on as a macro story is, obviously, a softening labor market,” Ben Glasner, an economist at the Economic Innovation Group, said. Job-hopping is down, and wage gains from job-switching are falling. Along gendered lines, Glasner said that industries that are predominantly exposed to men with higher education are softening faster than industries that were more exposed to women with higher education. And so, Glasner said, men might now be the first exposed to a weakening labor market.
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“This might be kind of a leading indicator of a weakening job market, but it’s not totally clear how much that’ll spill out into other industries and lower degree holder fields,” he said.
At the same time, fields traditionally dominated by women are rare bright spots in a more dreary labor outlook; in August, payroll additions in healthcare helped offset losses in other industries, with private education and health services adding 46,000 jobs. Continued growth in the labor market right now is essentially all about nurses and teachers.
“Those are basically the only jobs that we’ve been adding for at least this year,” Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at the Groundwork Collaborative, said.
A role reversal in the job market
It all shows a role reversal in the labor market, and underscores that it might be time for both the labor market and men to adapt to a new reality. After all, roles in healthcare are projected to boom over the next decade.
“There’s also a real change in how our economy works, what our economy is focused on, and that is really favoring women in this labor market,” Emerson Sprick, the director of retirement and labor policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said.
One barrier that could be preventing men from going into these more robust fields might be pay. As Glasner said, the industries that are female-dominated, like education and healthcare, are seeing wages increase — but still paying less than more male-exposed ones; beyond the gender divide, as those sectors grow, it might also be time to figure out how to bolster salaries there accordingly.
Another aspect, Reeves said, is that we’ve made huge progress in increasing the share of women in professions that were previously inaccessible to them, but we’ve gone the other way in fields that are traditionally seen as female. The share of male public school teachers has dropped from 30% in 1987 to 23% as of 2022, per an analysis from Reeves’ American Institute for Boys and Men. In elementary schools, per Pew Research Center, 89% of teachers are women.
“My read of it is that actually there’s a lot of jobs there that are pretty good that a lot of men could get, but because they’re seen as women’s jobs, they’re not going for them,” Reeves said.
There are some signs of progress, or at least a way forward. As Reeves noted, a growing number of states are working on initiatives to get men into teaching. And some younger men are also potentially adapting by seeking out vocational training, setting themselves up to go into fields that aren’t as touched by a softening white-collar labor market. At the same time, labor market demand might finally boost wages in these growing fields to the point that they could draw more men in.
“I think there will be a wage level at which the opportunity cost, even for controlling for all the cultural and social hesitation that young men have to enter these jobs, is likely to be overcome,” Jacquez said. “As we continue to have a shortage of these jobs being picked up, the wage picking up even more is likely the way that employers are going to entice more people in.”