Downward trend in employment for women nationwide, in Oregon, raising questions

Economists and think tanks have a smattering of hypotheses for what’s driving the dip, nearly all of which rely on working conditions that do or do not support motherhood, and the disproportionate role women in heterosexual relationships take on in child rearing.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in early August released two key data sets that indicate women are disproportionately represented in the 23,000 jobs the U.S. economy shed in July, and that the year-over-year participation rate in the labor force among women 20 and older declined by more than 1 percentage point, while participation among men rose.

The overall employment declines among women bear out in Oregon, too, though Oregon Employment Department Economist Gail Krumenauer cautioned that the sample size of Oregonians analyzed in federal payroll and survey data is small. Oregon’s trend is made more puzzling by the fact that job growth has been largest in sectors typically dominated by women: healthcare and social services.

State analysts don’t yet have the gender breakdown for workforce participation levels year over year for Oregon, but they do have unemployment levels by gender. The state’s current unemployment rate for men is 4.9%, while the unemployment rate for women is 5.6%. One year earlier, it was the opposite.

“That said, we have generally seen the number of women in Oregon’s labor force decline over the past year, while the number of men in the labor force has increased,” she said in an email.

Erin Cottle Hunt, an economist at Reed College in Portland, said that overall women’ s participation in the workforce has “gone down, but it’s not like it fell off a cliff.”

Incremental, consistent declines

The latest federal data show labor force participation among women 20 and older went from 57.6% in July of 2025 to 56.4% in July of this year. The rate has declined slightly every month for most of the last nine months, while the unemployment rate for both women and men has remained relatively flat at about 4% during the year.

The federal data indicates that many women are not struggling to find a job, but are dropping out of the workforce and choosing not to participate.

According to the federal labor bureau’s most recent household employment survey, more than 85.6 million men in the workforce in June were still in the workforce in July, while the nearly 77.5 million women in the workforce in June dropped to roughly 77.3 million in July.

“Since no men left the labor force, women made up all the losses,” Jasmine Tucker, vice president of research at the National Women’s Law Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group supporting women’s legal rights, said in an email.

The group earlier this month placed the blame at the feet of several of President Donald Trump’s policies, including cuts to social safety net and grant programs that assist new mothers and expand childcare access, and that were attacked by Trump officials as diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs.

“It’s a sign that too many women are being pushed to the sidelines,” Tucker said in a statement. “Women are leaving the labor force in alarming numbers, and many who remain employed are underemployed. This administration cannot celebrate an economy that is failing so many women.”

Data from the U.S. Department of Labor show that since 2023, labor force participation for women with children began to slightly decline, with the steepest drops for women with children age 3 or younger.

Changes in working conditions, inflation

Some economists and researchers have pointed to the potential of rising inflation on top of already high childcare costs pushing more mothers out of the work force because their savings on childcare might outweigh potential wages. Others have pointed to fluctuations in sectors most dominated by women, as well as return-to-work policies that have made it harder for women to participate in the labor force.

During the pandemic, as more men and women were able to work from home, the number of women with children participating in the workforce began to rise again.

“And our theory here as economists is that men were able to provide more childcare when they were working from home, and that enabled more women to participate in the labor force,” said Cottle Hunt, the Reed College economist.

Women have long earned less on average than men — roughly 85 cents to every $1 men earn, according to the Pew Research Center — so it’s more common for a woman in a heterosexual relationship to leave the workplace than her male partner, Cottle Hunt said.

“As work from home arrangements are becoming less prevalent and less generous, the old social norms are falling back out. And who is going to drop out of the labor force in the family if one or both parents have to go back to working in person? In practice, a woman is more likely to drop out,” she said.

Although inflation on top of childcare costs could drive more women from the workforce, Cottle Hunt said it’s harder to pin down because households respond to inflation differently, and the impact of rising prices does not impact all families the same way.

The year-over-year decline in labor force participation was slightly steeper among Black women, which Cottle Hunt said is typically predictive of labor market outcomes for all workers down the line.

“If you’re seeing a decrease in employment for Black women, and all women, it could be foreshadowing that lots of people are going to lose their jobs in the future,” she said.

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