Kathryn Anne Edwards

It's been resilient, more resilient than a lot of people expected it would be, but that doesn't mean that it's impervious to economic policy that's meant to cause harm.

Policy like deportation, policy like gutting the federal government, policy like tariffs.

And now, add to the mix, policy like Iran.

Health and education are doing great.

Everybody else is doing some type of bad.

Health and education jobs tend to be educated women.

Not necessarily highly educated women, but at least a high school degree.

You'll have lots of technical occupations, master's degrees, all the way up to doctors.

That is the only sector of the economy that is showing consistent and reliable strength.

Everybody else is on some form of decline, either holding steady or outright shedding jobs for the last 12 months.

Now, men and women don't hold the same job, and neither do people of different ages or different races.

And so a lot of the pain in the economy is proxied through the type of job you are more likely to hold.

I saw a Bank of America report—I don't know if you all had seen this, it was written up in the New York Times—of just how—

Kind of ironically enough, beneficial the Biden administration was for men's employment, given that it had put so much money into manufacturing, as opposed to 2025, the first year of the second Trump administration, manufacturing shed a pretty remarkable number of jobs.

You see that pattern if you look hard enough at any job.

So you're also going to see that, you know, middle-aged Black women in, like, the D.C.

metro area were going to be hit hard by Doge versus, you know, younger graduates that have a doctorate are in health or education, you know, they'll do okay.

Those patterns hold for a lot of reasons.

Yeah.

I was reading today that a very prominent economist was saying that the answer to this puzzle of men's unemployment is to make certain jobs less feminine because they seem to be the ones that are growing for the future.