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.
Ruffian and Foolish Pleasure should have been mating and not competing in a match race at Belmont that fateful day. It was all about the money.
Mish, the BLS makes it very clear in all its statistical methodology statements and webpages that the household survey is only to be used for the unemployment rate and demographic info; those things you mention don’t change with the experimental data.
Anyone using this household survey data for employment levels will get bad data because the BLS says not to use it this way.
That’s what they use the employment survey for.
The only barometer that really matters is the proportion of working age males with bread-winner jobs (to use David Stockman’s term).
Imagine how surprised I was (years back), after all the wailing about unemployment in France, to discover that a higher proportion of French men 25-55 had a full-time job than in America with its purportedly dynamic labor market.
I always notice when markets get crushed, that comment volume is down. No time for commenting when damage control is in full swing.
This has ended up a very, very special comments section. I’d have to agree that guys with real dough in the oven are probably running to move it. Long bonds ho!
As this post shows, government data reporting is suspect at best. For a missive on the subject with some analysis and comparative graphs, have a squint at the linked article:
https://brownstone.org/articles/since-lockdowns-a-12-gdp-loss-half-of-us-dollar-purchasing-power-stolen/
It has a lot of information on government statistics and revisions, many that Mish has covered in detail but expands to attempt to quantify how under stated bad data and trends.
I could not help but think about the discrepancy between GDP and GDI. Is the data distortion affecting one data collection methodology more than the other revealing the bias in the government’s own data publications?
Great website Mish. Breath of fresh air in a dark internet. It’s obvious BLS numbers are junk.
And the Fed relies on the BLS to make their decisions on how to suppress salaries and which buddies to bail out.
You cant believe anything coming out of Trump, the White House or the Commerce, Labor or Treasury Depts. Live by the lie, die by the lie.
No government numbers – especially inflation- are honest or can be trusted.
Bureau of Lying Sycophants
You have my vote on that one.
The men’s movment tards will love this obviously flawed data point.
Incel basement dwellers are fully employed finding scapegoats for their failure at life.
This is the unshakable Trumpstien base.
The estimate of roughly 65 million abortions since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 represents a massive missing segment of the population. However, from a statistical and economic standpoint, the impact isn’t just the initial number—it’s the compounding generational loss.
Strip away the intense political, moral, and legal debates, and what remains are undeniable, hard demographic and economic realities. A society cannot subtract tens of millions of potential individuals over a 50-year span without fundamentally altering its trajectory.
The real-life consequence is a smaller, older, and fiscally strained society that must completely reinvent how it funds its safety nets and staffs its economy.
Abortions have risen since Roe was overturned, study findsReports an 11% increase in clinician-provided abortions in 2023 compared to 2020, despite reduced access and fewer locations offering services.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12462416/
– The estimate of roughly 65 million abortions since the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 represents a massive missing segment of the population.
> So by only enjoying the fun of the event, and wiping out the outcome, we are now importing other cultures, that often misalign with our countries values and beliefs. We have labor shortages as a result. We have unskilled and untrained workers as a result. We are falling behind in areas of abilities, due to lack of resources and those we do have, at times have proven untrustworthy, or unwilling.
>> Yes, I agree 100%!! This quote: “it’s the compounding generational loss” is scary when you really think about it. The effects from this may be felt for an actual generation as a result. You get what you put in, or in this case, more like should not have put in…
– A society cannot subtract tens of millions of potential individuals over a 50-year span without fundamentally altering its trajectory. > Spot On! You also can’t replace those individuals from other cultures and beliefs and expect them to all match up nicely with our own. It’s simply not realistic to do so (Ex. See France right now).
– The real-life consequence is a smaller, older, and fiscally strained society that must completely reinvent how it funds its safety nets and staffs its economy. > Can it be done in America is the question I suppose. Have we ever been in a situation such as this before?
>> Excellent Post!!
bullshit the billionaire took all the money if we had actually had a fair taxation and wages we would all be living a much less fiscally strained. With the technological advances and less people each piece of the pie should be bigger. when a few hundred people own 35% of the wealth the system is broken. More unwanted poorly raised people will not make a better society.
The Children don’t matter, once they leave the womb… then it becomes “cant afford ’em? Shouldn’ta had ’em”.
Then they’re shocked that nobody has ’em.
Generational loss?? Gee, what was the effect of the hundreds of thousands of years where most people died in the first decades of their lives? Seems we climbed out of the slime then.
Yeah there’s no reasoning with that line of crazy.
Reality is educated women don’t want to pump out babies and stay at home. Birth rates are dropping all around the world regardless of local access to abortion.
US has an amazing counter to offset birth decline and protect the wealth of the nation (immigration) and we have actively squandered it due to the same kind of morons who think women owe them babies.
America’s greatest resource was her reputation as a beacon of light on the hill where anyone could build a life. Republicans have done everything in their power to destroy that reputation over the last decade.
Mishelin star award.
Why don’t you also talk about the hundreds of millions of missing people thanks to birth control becoming available in the 60s? That’s the start of the decline of large families. Abortion is just a drop in the bucket next to birth control.
The truth is that at some point families had to get smaller because you can’t have infinite growth against finite resources. Bumping up against limits along with increased in medical knowledge is why you get smaller and older societies.
Nonsense! God will simply enlarge the planet when the resources run low.
Women who have had an abortion usually have a 3rd child. Right around 65 million of them. Had they not had an abortion, they most likely would have stopped at 2 children.
The less data you have, the easier it is to gaslight you about how great this economy is. We all know it’s the best economy ever but take it from the orange Jesus.
Once AI and its robot workers take over all the work that humans do, all this BS economic data goes out the window as it will no longer be needed.
No, it is pretty plausible. The maintenance economy is the only part growing.
Numbers by the BLS own data and statements are incorrect!
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
Bow to the Amazonian woman worm!
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.
We are now seeing in these comments that there does indeed need to be an IQ cap for voting. I think a 40 piece jigsaw puzzle and an hour time limit ought to sort things out. Notice how “that is just a fact” is said without a single fact to back it up.
Beliefs can be more powerful than facts at times…
You would certainly fall beneath even the most generous of iq caps for voting. Do you understand that most people around you can observe your intellectual limitations? Do you know what the dunning-kruger effect is?
56% of law students are women. Women in the Legal Profession
55% of medical students are women. Women in Medicine Statistics 2026: Latest Data
You sound like someone with no sense of what younger generations are like. Young women these days are ambitious and responsible compared to their male peers, on average. Ask and school teacher and they will tell you the same thing.
I specifically addressed college admissions. Not law school and medical school admissions.
In any case, once you get larger numbers of women going to college than men (due to more interest on the part of women, and better high school grades and scores of women), you don’t need bias to get a higher percentage of post secondary school attendance by women.
Well, to his credit he avoided the craven “If you think otherwise your (sic) just stupid”
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 say this as a white man in his prime: You’ll notice many white men are the least motivated out of any group to do anything. They’ll whine about Indians taking their jobs, they’ll whine about women taking their jobs, but you won’t find them hustling for those jobs or getting an education to get those jobs. No, see, they’re supposed to roll in automatically because they deserve this for being very special.
In my career, this is a common enough thing that I’ve noticed it as a trend. White guy shows up, contributes very little, and expects to be thanked for being there. With the lack of motivation, you get people like Brutus who I can guarantee you aren’t above middle management at best. Not that they mind being there because that’s a place they can do absolutely nothing while getting paid. If high management has an issue, they can just blame their underlings. You can always tell this kind of guy by the way they’ll proudly tell you they’ve “never screwed up” at work. AKA, they passed that buck faster than Tom Brady at the Superbowl.
Women get treated pretty badly in the trades. It’s not really an option for most of them.
Okay show me a source then.
Yes, men are more likely to work in manual labor jobs, with many trades being significantly male-dominated. For example, professions like brick masons and various types of mechanics are over 96% male.
How many of these jobs get stolen by woman, or is only specific jobs we are speaking about? Just curious how many labor intense jobs that they have stolen, if they count of course…
Academics always want to see a source. Those that know just look at what is obvious and stares them in the face everyday. You must be in a peculiar industry. In my profession we never worry about Indians taking our job. We worry about cowboys.
Good fucking grief…..another “men are being oppressed” chud.
What’s hilariously ironic about the men’s rights movment is how woke it is, but it’s adherents are to stupid to see it.
Stupid is their brand.
Women flock to government subsidized industries. Men get what is left.
5 beta losers liked your comment so far
I don’t know if I can think of something more pathetic than a man complaining about women having an advantage.
That goes for you losers who would even upvote his comment, you know who you are
Economists use decimal points so weathermen have someone to laugh at.
Like the “Stay home Dad” which came about because woman wanted to continue a more lucrative career than their husbands, so it became a no brainer?
It’s a family decision I suppose. I worked 2 jobs for the first few years, so my wife could stay home with them, and raise them through the first few years. It’s definitely a choice if you are fortunate to be able to make it. One not available to many today unfortunately.
Flawed data points like the one referenced in this blog post are ammo for confirmation bias seeking asshats.
They will read the headline, never dig deeper into the post, and claim victory.
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.
Note that none of these are matters significantly determined by current evens.
Also not noted by you or MPO45v2 is that in marriages men tend to be older than the woman so logically there will be more widows simply because of that fact alone.
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.
Note for anyone who read that slog: Screw worm was held back by building a gigantic factory to produce sterile male flies to make them unviable beyond the gap after we sprayed. Cal is retarded and thinks we live in a cowboy movie.