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Women's Share of U.S. Jobs
Women as a share of nonfarm payroll jobs and of employed people, %
Plays the chart through its history. Pauses are where the data set a record or moved most.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics, seasonally adjusted. BLS publishes payroll jobs held by women; jobs held by men are total nonfarm payrolls less those (Palanor calculation). Payrolls count jobs, so a person with two jobs counts twice. Household survey: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, seasonally adjusted, people aged 16 and over. The survey was not collected for October 2025 (the 2025 lapse in appropriations): the line breaks there. New population controls each January can step the levels.
Five decades of women moving into paid work, from both BLS surveys. Women hold a larger share of payroll jobs than of employed people because they are more likely to hold more than one job and less likely to be self-employed.
What this chart reads
- Women's Share of U.S. Payroll Jobsas “Payroll jobs”latest 2026-09-01
- Women's Share of Employed People, Household Survey (U.S.)as “Employed people (household survey)”latest 2026-09-01
Sources
Women's Share of U.S. Payroll Jobs. Source: Palanor calculation from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll data (CES0000000010, PAYEMS), via FRED. Public domain.
Women's Share of Employed People, Household Survey (U.S.). Source: Palanor calculation from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics household survey data (LNS12000001, LNS12000002), via FRED. Public domain.
Charts are drawn from Palanor's signal library and recomputed from source data on every view. Transformations (changes, indexing, year-on-year rates) are Palanor's.