Harriet Torry

It's not easy.

And this is also an economy that doesn't have the levels of state support that perhaps other developed economies do.

You know, many countries in Europe subsidize childcare to a high degree because they see it as important economic infrastructure.

Certain states do more than others in the US, but it's definitely not the case that you have nationwide childcare infrastructure or anything like that.

There are a lot of ways in which American women are poised to be extremely successful and achieve a great deal in the economy, but there are also some structural difficulties that make it hard to balance that with family life.

So the overall number of jobs added in 2025 was 584,000.

And that is a dramatic slowdown from 2024 when the economy added 2 million jobs.

So it's been a very unusual year in the sense that economic growth has actually been really strong.

And yet we've seen this real slowdown in hiring.

So what's going on?

You know, a lot of businesses seem to be very cautious because of the tariff environment that has increased costs for businesses.

And one way that businesses can try and save costs is by hiring fewer people.

And we've seen consumer sentiment really plunge.

We've seen the quits rate drop a lot, which is kind of a measure of how confident people feel about finding a new job.

So 2026 is going to be an interesting year because we could see people start to feel more confident about the outlook for tariffs and inflation.

But at the same time, there just seems to be this general hesitation and uncertainty.

It's taking job seekers longer to find work and a lot of people are struggling.

So the good news for the Fed is that the unemployment rate ticked down.

But at the same time, job growth is still pretty weak.

The general consensus is that they're likely to stay on hold in January.