In his report covering August’s employment trends, economist Bruce Steinberg also tackles the issue of surprisingly low wage inflation in certain sectors with low unemployment. It turns out that there’s been a swell in the prime-age labor force, driven particularly by prime-age women and especially women without a college degree. The gender wage gap then intersects with labor force issues:

The reason for the boom in employment for the less-educated is fairly easy to explain. Those jobs are usually the first to be eliminated during a recession and the last to be created as the economy improves. And here is where the analysis from others gets really interesting… 
Those lower-skilled jobs tend to be concentrated in service industries that some believe do not attract men. Of course, plenty of men work in low-skill jobs. But the situation is more than men not willing to work in certain jobs as The Economist magazine reports that researchers point out “there is a correlation between the number of women an industry employs, as a percentage of its workforce, and how many non-managerial jobs it has recently created.”

 

The monthly report also examines employment trends across all sectors. Share these stats with your team to inform your strategic planning.

 

Learn more in this podcast covering the June US Employment Situation by Bruce Steinberg.