“They Want Us to Leave the Jobs for the Men”

August 18, 2026

Salutations, Meteor readers,

I am feeling particularly bubbly and obnoxious after reading this Nielsen report on just how big the women’s sports fanbase has grown in the last three years. Sending kisses to the 122.5 million women’s sports fans out there making it all happen.

In today’s newsletter, some disturbing findings from last month’s jobs report. Plus, mifepristone has a new enemy on the scene.

xoxo,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

The exodus continues: Everywhere we turn, people are fretting about men’s economic opportunities. Young men, we’re told, are demoralized and in a recession; America has abandoned its unremarkable dudes. But the numbers tell a different story. Six years after COVID, women and especially mothers are the ones leaving the workforce at an alarming rate.

According to a National Women’s Law Center analysis, fully 100 percent of the economy’s 23,000 job losses in July can be attributed to women’s jobs: Women lost 32,000 jobs in July, while men overall gained 9,000 jobs. And 165,000 women ages 20 and over exited the labor force that month (meaning they’re neither working nor looking for work), while men’s labor force participation stayed level. Usually, “I try not to read too much into these one-month changes,” says Jasmine Tucker, vice president of research at NWLC, which analyzes the jobs numbers every month. But July’s report was “glaring.”

In fact, those statistics put a bleak exclamation mark on a broader trend of women being pushed out of the workforce. Women’s workforce participation still hasn’t fully rebounded back from its all-time high of 59.3% in February 2020. It took a nosedive during COVID, then had an encouraging rebound but, in August 2024, began a modest but sustained downturn. The reasons for the exodus of women from the workplace have been well-covered, like rising costs of childcare and a decline in remote work. But there are more surprising takeaways too. Here are three, from our conversation with Tucker.

Black women are the ones in a recession

While women’s workforce participation overall is dropping, the numbers for Black women remain even higher than the average—especially among Black mothers with young children, whose participation has plunged to a 31-year low. “If the overall unemployment rate were where Black women’s unemployment rate was in 2025”—7.3%—“we would’ve declared the recession,” Tucker says. That percentage has come down to 5.4%, but is still “above the tolerable maximum” of 5%, and well above the unemployment rate overall. “Black workers tend to be last hired, first fired,” Tucker explains. “Their unemployment spells tend to be several weeks longer than white workers and even other workers of color. Black women were overrepresented in the government job losses [spurred by] DOGE” last year.

The DEI backlash is hurting women’s employment

As many companies sunset their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, Tucker says that leads to fewer women employees—and not just because some of the people working in those departments were women. Maybe that DEI office was “making it possible for you to have a flexible schedule or for childcare to be on the premises,” Tucker says. Or maybe it created “a very clear way to file a complaint against a coworker who was harassing you.” If those policies are no longer in place, workplaces can become “more hostile for women, and especially women of color,” she says.

The Trump administration does not see these job numbers as a problem

The trend of women leaving the workforce, most of which has happened under both Trump presidencies, is “not a sign of a healthy economy,” Tucker says. And yet it has gone unacknowledged by the administration. Perhaps that’s because their fingerprints are all over this shift: The White House has gone out of its way to push women out of the labor force, not only with anti-DEI efforts but also by attacking Head Start and sabotaging women’s higher education. “They want us to go and be homemakers and to leave the jobs for the men,” Tucker says. The reality, however, is that American women “can’t afford to become tradwives” even if they wanted to. Most women, and especially women of color, are primary or co-breadwinners. “Their families cannot afford for them to be out of work,” Tucker says. “They just can’t.”

—Nona Willis Aronowitz

AND:

More than 300 days ago, ICE agents shot and detained Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a Los Angeles-based independent journalist. Parias has now broken the record for the longest time a journalist has been held in U.S. custody as he sits with a festering gunshot wound in the Adelanto ICE Processing Center. “Perhaps no journalist has endured such a sustained sequence of violence, prosecution, and imprisonment at the hands of the U.S. government,” writes Adam Rose of The Intercept.
And speaking of how journalists in America are being treated under this administration…

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Congratulations to all of the women inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend: Candace Parker, Elena Delle Donne, Chamique Holdsclaw, and the entire 1996 U.S. Olympic women’s basketball team.

STOP ME IF YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE. TEN GOLD MEDALISTS WALK INTO A ROOM…(VIA GETTY IMAGES)

Unpopular opinion for an East coaster: I am riveted by this Lakers drama.
The ongoing trial of Lindsay Clancy, a mother accused of killing her three children while in a state of postpartum psychosis, has opened the floodgates of conversation around postpartum mental health, from what we know about it to how it is or is not treated. Academics and practitioners in the field have been using the trial to educate the public on what has been called an “unfinished” science impacting scores of women. In a story as dark as they come, this wave of awareness may be the only silver lining.
On Sunday, actress Hayden Panettiere died from an apparent cardiac arrest. She spent nearly all of her 36 years of life in front of a camera, having started her career at only 11 months old. To millions she was the beloved Sheryl Yoast, “Remember the Titans”’s precocious football know-it-all, or Claire Bennet, the cheerleader on “Heroes” who would save the world. But she was also a mother, plagued by postpartum depression and struggles with alcohol abuse—experiences later reflected in the storyline of her character, pop-country star Juliette Barnes, in the TV show “Nashville.” Panettiere spoke openly about her experiences having her first child and later revealed the ways she was punished for her candor.