Throughout much of 2025, we heard rumblings about a new exodus of women from the labor force. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released December’s jobs report this morning, finally giving us a full picture of what actually happened last year.

The U.S. added 50,000 jobs in December. That was well below economists’ expectations of 73,000 new jobs. Unemployment fell to 4.4%, still higher than 4% unemployment at the start of 2025. Economists say it’s a “low hire, low fire” economy.

During the month, 81,000 people left the workforce. And according to an analysis by the National Women’s Law Center, those losses are entirely among women. Ninety-one-thousand women left the workforce last month, while 10,000 men joined.

Throughout 2025, women’s labor force size increased by 184,000. Men’s increased by a much higher 572,000. So: men joined the labor force at three times the rate of women last year. And as the NWLC puts it, “Women’s gains in 2025 are but a fraction of the gains women have made in previous years.”

Even as overall unemployment falls, unemployment is climbing for Black women, from 7.1% in November to 7.3% in December.

Across the economy, employers added 584,000 new jobs last year—much slower growth than in 2024, when 2 million jobs were added. It’s the weakest annual job growth since 2003. And, the NWLC’s analysis confirms, women are receiving the brunt of this impact.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@coins2day.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Coins2Day’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

ALSO IN THE HEADLINES

The WNBA's players association is preparing for a lockout.  The deadline to reach an agreement with the league is today, and it's not expected to be extended. NBC

Melinda French Gates' new foundation has some news. Pivotal Philanthropies Foundation got a $7.88 billion donation from Bill Gates in 2024 according to filings, part of their divorce settlement. That's one of the largest charitable contributions ever recorded in public. NYT

Supermajority is shutting down. Founded by the late Cecile Richards and other movement leaders in 2019, the group mobilized women voters. Its closure reflects changes in the organizing landscape and approaches to women as a demographic group in politics. The 19th*

xAI limits use of its image generation tool to paying subscribers. That follows a controversy over use of Grok's feature on X to create nonconsensual explicit photos of real women. It was also found to have generated explicit images of children, which was a major factor in this response. WSJ

ON MY RADAR

Planned Parenthood has a good-girl problem New York Magazine

How Renee Nicole Good became a martyr The Cut

Zohran Mamdani and Kathy Hochul are pals right now. Will it last? NYT

PARTING WORDS

"Popularity is a thing that comes and goes in waves. I’ve just learned to leverage it for the things that are important to me and to create impact in terms of longevity."

— Keke Palmer on what she's learned spending most of her life in the public eye