No, women aren’t returning to the workforce at an unusual rate

The Wall Street Journal has a seemingly insatiable appetite for trend stories that just aren't true. Here's the latest:

Women’s Return to the Workforce Piles Momentum on a Hot Economy

American women are staging a return to the workforce that is helping propel the economy in the face of high inflation and rising interest rates. Women have gained more jobs than men for four straight months, including in January’s hiring surge, pushing them to hold more than 49.8% of all nonfarm jobs.

Blah blah blah....

I could swear that last night the headline was about service sector jobs, but maybe not. It doesn't really matter, though. Here is hiring growth since 2021:

No matter how you slice it, men have been returning to the workforce at a higher rate than women (though only slightly higher in the service sector). Nor have women been outgaining men for the past four months. By my count it's been a grand total of two months.

But maybe I made an arithmetic mistake. Or maybe the Journal is using a different measure of employment. Who cares, really? Even if women have been outpacing men for four consecutive months, that's meaningless. It's four months. And the longer term trend shows very clearly that employment has been growing almost identically for both men and women.

I really don't get it. This happens over and over. Do the Journal's editors think their readers desperately want trends to latch onto, so they invent them wherever they can? Or what?

WAIT! I was using employment levels. The Journal is using nonfarm payroll employment. I had to go out to three decimal places to replicate their findings, but I finally did it:

By this measure, women's employment has been growing faster than men's for four consecutive months. Their share of the total has been 49.8% the whole time, but if you go out to more decimal places it looks like this:

• September: 49.778%
• October: 49.796%
• November: 49.803%
• December: 49.813%
• January: 49.817%

January was a close call, with women increasing their share of employment by only 0.004%, which is way, way below the survey's standard error of 0.2%, but let's count it anyway. So it's four months in a row after all!

And just in case you think I'm trying to cheat you by snarking about just the past two years, here's the same chart going back to 2015:

Women are nowhere close to the share of employment they had before the pandemic, and by any reasonable measure their share has been below trend and dead flat for the past two years.