Justin Fox, Columnist

There Are Still a Lot of Men Without Jobs

Women’s employment-population ratio in the U.S. is back to the highs of the previous expansion. Men’s isn’t.

August 3, 2018 at 2:51 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

Two sides to every jobs report.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg

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The prime-age employment-population ratio, that most straightforward of job market measures, hit a new post-recession high of 79.5 percent in the U.S. in July, according to today’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This means that of Americans ages 25 to 54 who aren’t uniformed military service members or behind bars, 79.5 percent have jobs. The advantage of this metric over the oft-maligned unemployment rate (3.9 percent in July) is that it includes those who aren’t actively looking for jobs.

So anyway, 79.5 percent is a big improvement over a few years ago. It’s not breaking any records, though.