That’s what BLS data shows. Believe it? 
A couple of Tweets caught my eye today on male vs female employment.
Employment Level Detail in Thousands
Employment Details Since December 2025
- Male Employment Down 1.54 million
- Female Employment Up 419,000
That’s what the data shows. But some are skeptics.
What’s Going On?
Professor Plum asks “Does anyone have any ideas of what could be going on? /S”
“/S” Is Sarcasm.
Change in Employment Level in Thousands
What Did “Not” Happen
- Employment did not suddenly rise by 2.245 million in January of 2025.
- Employment did not suddenly fall by 895,000 in January of 2026.
- The male/female breakdowns of the above also did not happen.
All Household Data Numbers Are Wrong
Repeat after me “All the Standard Household Data Numbers Are Wrong”.
I have been commenting on this for years, every month.
Since the household numbers are wrong, stop believing them. The BLS does not believe them either. They just refuse to correct their charts because it’s their usual practice.
BLS Statement: “(Official CPS estimates for December 2025 and earlier months have not been revised, in accordance with usual practice.)” CPS stands for Current Population Survey.
What the BLS is saying: The standard data series is totally effed, and we know it, and we won’t correct it, but if you know where to look, you can find better numbers.
Let’s take a look at my latest jobs report, including comments that I repeat every month.
Please consider Jobs Rise a Better than Expected 172,000 in May, Unemployment Rate Steady
Understanding the Lead Chart [The Preceding Chart]
If you have seen this explanation, please skip to down to the subtitle “My Charts” to continue reading.
Every January (typically), the BLS has annual revisions to nonfarm payrolls and household population employment. The BLS does not back revise the household charts.
Because the BLS does not back revise, we see ridiculous numbers such as employment rising by over 2 million in a month (first yellow arrow).
To correct for the population adjustments, the BLS provides an adjustment series to normalize employment levels to match nonfarm payrolls. The BLS calls this “experimental” data but the regular posted data is admitted nonsense.
The experimental series is LNS16000000, “Employment Adjusted to CES Concepts“.
We did not suddenly add 2.245 million jobs in January of 2025, all US-Born. (Difference between the dashed blue line and the yellow line).
Moreover, there is no valid historical data on full vs parttime employment, on foreign born employment, and many other BLS data series.
All posts on foreign-born employment, parttime employment, etc., suffer this flaw. All year-over-year (or December-to January) analysis you find on these stats is permanently flawed.
2025 Experimental Data
In April, the BLS released Experimental series accounting for January 2026 population control effects.
(Official CPS estimates for December 2025 and earlier months have not been revised, in accordance with usual practice.)
Experimental Series
In 2025, BLS produced new experimental time series measures to account for the size and timing of the large population changes reflected in the January 2025 population control adjustment.
The experimental series use the monthly time series (back to April 2020) available from the Census Bureau’s Vintage 2025 population estimates that form the basis of the January 2026 CPS population control adjustment.
The experimental series are smoother over time, as they do not show the annual effects of the population control adjustments that occur each January in the official series.
The experimental series adjusts data back to April 2020, the decennial census reference point.
All standard year-over-year household data comparisons are nonsense. Comparisons between January and December of the prior year are also invalid.
My Charts
I will continue to use what the BLS refers to as “experimental data” because the official series household data is admitted nonsense.
Making Things Simple
All BLS historical Household Data on all standard charts is invalid.
Q: What’s included in that statement?
A: Employment levels, Unemployment Rates, Full Time Jobs, Part Time Jobs, everything, to varying degrees.
Employment numbers are much worse than the rest.
Household Data
All historical references to any of those items is, to varying degrees, nonsense.
Q: Is anything missing from the above list.
A: Yes, notably foreign born employment.
Foreign Born Employment numbers are even worse than employment levels because the numbers are not seasonally adjusted and they should be.
And foreign born employment numbers are not in the experimental data.
That means all references to foreign born employment, even month-to-month current year are invalid.
Otherwise, excluding comparisons of January to December of the prior year, month-to-month comparisons are valid until the next annual Benchmark Revisions in January.
But we have had two huge revisions back-to-back.
The BLS first understated employment then overstated it.
BLS Issues
- Undercounting then overcounting illegal immigration
- Missing economic turns
- Sampling procedures
- Sampling rates
Are illegals claiming unemployment? Even answering the phone?
What About the Establishment Survey?
The Establishment Survey (the headline jobs number) has it own set of issues.
Those issues include a questionable Birth-Death model, sampling procedures, and sampling rates.
There is no reason to believe any of this. That’s a statement I make every month.
What Is Believable?
The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) and Business Employment Dynamics (BED) reports are believable.
BED is a very large subset of QCEW.
QCEW vs CES (Current Employment Statistics – Establishment Survey Jobs)
- QCEW: A near-complete census of approximately 12.3 million U.S. business establishments. It tracks jobs and wages covered by Unemployment Insurance (UI).
- CES: A monthly sample survey of about 400,000 businesses and government agencies. It provides preliminary estimates of employment, hours, and earnings.
Response Rates
- The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages (QCEW) boasts a highly comprehensive reporting rate of over 90 to 95%, because it relies on mandatory state unemployment insurance (UI) tax records.
- In contrast, the monthly Current Employment Statistics (CES) is a voluntary establishment survey and has seen its response rates decline to roughly 43%.
So, it’s 43 percent of 400,000 (perhaps weighted improperly) vs 90-95 percent of everything.
There is also reporting bias. Businesses doing well are more likely to respond than struggling businesses. And large businesses are more likely than small businesses to have someone dedicated to responding to government surveys.
A big problem with QCEW is the 5 month lag. So, everyone latches on to bogus monthly numbers for the mandatory instant gratification.
Three Things Guaranteed Invalid
- Making year-over-year assessments with standard household data
- Making December-to-January month-over-month assessments with household data
- Doing anything at all with foreign-born employment numbers.
Some data is much worse than others.
For example, unemployment rates vary little between the adjusted data and the standard data (4.6% experimental in Nov 2025 vs reported 4.5%).
Employment levels and job levels are the most suspect. Foreign born employment is the worst.
There is no adjusted employment data but not for male and female employment or full vs part-time employment.
There is no good reason to believe any of this.
It’s possible the economy added 172,000 jobs in May. Just color me skeptical.
The stay-at-home boyfriend is now an economic trend as more women than men go to work
The stay-at-home boyfriend is now an economic trend as more women than men go to work | Fortune
A government agency whose sole job is to provide honest information consistently misinforms the taxpayers paying their salaries. Emblematic of a US ruled by a corrupt cancerous organism.
Reading this blog has made me understand that a lot of people into economics are not very smart. I mean, c’mon, do people really believe women are stealing jobs from men? Maybe we need to start setting IQ caps for voting or something.
“do people really believe women are stealing jobs from men?”
No but women are privileged over men in college admissions, law and medical school admissions, and a great deal of hiring and promotion. That is just a fact.
Women are not privileged in college admissions. A lot of colleges now give an advantage to men in order to keep the gender balance from being skewed. Women come out of high school with better grades and scores than men, and if these colleges went on merit they would have way more women than men.
You can argue that high school grades and scores are the wrong measure of merit, but that is a different question.
Also, a lot more women want to go to college than men do. That is another reason that if men weren’t advantaged in admissions, colleges would be very heavily female (they already are so, but even more heavily).
I don’t know if the stats are accurate or not but I do know that men die off first than women. I have several family members that are widows and the males were the first to go in all but one case.
With the population aging, I fully expect some type of distortion like the one posted here but no one can be sure without better methods of collecting data.
There is also the theory that males are at home playing video games and not in the labor force so who knows?
The only thing we can all agree on is the demographic death spiral will continue.
Didn’t Trump last year fire the former BLS head of the agency because he didn’t like the data?
interesting: We compare employment outcomes between cities that experienced a sharp surge in ICE activity in the first half of 2025 and those that did not. This approach isolates the specific effect of enforcement surges on local economies and rules out other potential drivers of job loss, such as tariffs, war, inflation, and AI.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/ice-enforcement-employment-effects-us-cities/
Regarding the 172,000, those were healthcare (sickness), leisure/hospitality (vanity), and government which will be taken over by females just like education system. They can work and pay the taxes, they can have the jobs. Men still do all the crummy industrial disease stuff. I live in a sanctuary city and so I have seen an entire shop floor that is all female employees. It’s pretty easy to push the men out, or just not hire them. HR does the friends & family thing with bonuses, pretty soon you have all asian teams or latin american work teams, they just push other people out, this is completely normal for immigrant countries. It’s the same for females hiring females, don’t you want to work with your buddies, it’s funner. Is it a mediocrity of more expensive everything and anything, along with them taking turns giving each other raises (especially at the governmental levels), sure it is, I just call it the great dollar hegemony rebate. Groupthink is a wonderful thing, and just outsource the real work (usually to men). Take screw worm. It took laborious team building men on horses to push that back to the Darien gap because they had to use permethrin spray and chase down cattle constantly because that is where larvae hatch, and work in teams to manage the SIT strategy. Now when they (who says that?), say we don’t need men, well men hear that and we listen to our females. Now all they can do is use SIT which won’t work, you need men, good men, and they are not coming back, not this time.