Breitbart Business Digest: Liberals Are Worried Too Many Women Got Jobs Last Month

The Secretly Sexist MAGA Agenda

Liberals Express Concern About Trump’s Economy Delivering Jobs for Women

Ever since the August jobs report was released last week, the legacy media and liberal pundits have been highlighting the fact that the payrolls show the net gains for women dwarfed the gains for men. Employers added 158,000 women to payrolls in August and just 4,000 men.

“Women accounted for almost all of job gains in August. Here’s why,” CNBC announced. Fortune went with: “Who runs the labor market? Women accounted for 98% of U.S. job gains in August.”

This is a curious development. Why are the financial press and liberal pundits highlighting these job gains for women? Surely it is not to celebrate the feminist economy of Donald Trump or a great stride toward gender equality achieved by tariffs and the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Finally, an analysis from Mike Konczal, VP Policy and Research at the Economic Security Project and a former staffer at the National Economic Council, explained it. “One of the great ironies of the second Trump administration has been that, despite their attempt to reassert a male breadwinner family model and make a gender vibe shift, men have gained no jobs under it,” Konczal explained.

As it turns out, the reason for all these stories was that liberals were attacking a demon of their own imagining. They have conjured a patriarchal Trump economic policy out of nothing but their own conviction that deep down Trump and his supporters have been fashioning a world where only men work, a male breadwinner family model of the economy. The fact that nothing Trump has said or done supports this is entirely beside the point. They just know that’s what he really wanted, and they’re eager to point out that he failed at the thing they only imagined he was trying to engineer.

Even setting aside this problem, however, their analysis is askew. If you were reading these headlines and the articles that accompany them, you could easily come away thinking men barely found work in August. Yet construction alone recorded a net increase of 20,000 men. Manufacturing added another 7,000. Include mining and logging, and men gained 28,000 jobs in goods production. Declines elsewhere—in the services sector—brought the total down to 4,000.

Konczal uses the disparity in net numbers to argue that Trump’s economic policies are failing to create jobs in manufacturing, falling flat on a blue collar revival. He’s convinced that Trump’s policies cannot possibly deliver a manufacturing renaissance. But that claim is undermined by the August jobs report. Factory employment rose 16,000 that month and stood 58,000 above December 2025. We’ve gone from shedding manufacturing jobs rapidly in the final year of Biden’s presidency, to slowing the losses in the first year of Trump’s return, to actually adding jobs in the second year. Trump’s policies—particularly tariffs but also tax cuts, deregulation, and the promise of energy abundance—have moved manufacturing employment back into the plus column.

Deportations Are Obscuring Job Gains by American Men

Another problem with the “all the jobs went to women” claim is that it ignores the fact that so many foreign workers have left the workforce, either because they were deported or because they departed voluntarily. And the departures have been heavily concentrated among men. As a result, even if American-born men are filling jobs rapidly, the exits of foreign-born men can almost entirely offset the gains.

While the establishment survey used by Konczal and others does not ask whether workers on payrolls are natives or foreign-born, the Labor Department’s household survey does. Its published estimates show native-born male employment increasing by 1,072,000 between January 2025 and August 2026. Over those same months, foreign-born male employment fell by 949,000, leaving an overall male increase of just 123,000.

For women, the reported native-born gain was 242,000, against a foreign-born decline of 45,000. The remaining increase was 197,000.

Women thus finished with the larger aggregate gain even though the reported native-born increase was more than four times larger among men. Foreign-born declines absorbed nearly nine-tenths of men’s increase, compared with less than one-fifth of women’s.

(A note of caution here: The survey’s population adjustments and possible differences in response rates could distort these changes, so the figures are suggestive rather than conclusive. And the figures we’re using here aren’t seasonally adjusted. But there’s little reason to suppose the problems with the surveys would distort the divergence of sexes.)

Consider what happens if three native-born men and three native-born women find work, while employment falls by three among foreign-born men and one among foreign-born women. The net increase is two, entirely female. Six people found work, half of them men.

It’s Not Bad When Women Are Hired, Liberals

Konczal finds that industries already employing many women account for most of women’s payroll gains. That helps explain the industry pattern. It shows that many parts of the economy, especially healthcare, are hiring at a rapid rate. That’s a positive economic development, regardless of whether it fits the imaginary sexist economic agenda liberals just know MAGA is secretly working on.

A lot of women found jobs in August. So did a lot of men. This is a Trump policy success, not a policy failure.