Central Minnesota has a very active labor force, with both men and women participating at higher rates than statewide. In 2021, 72.9% of men and 66.2% of women aged 16 years and over in the region were actively participating in the labor force, which was above the state rate at 72.7% and 65.6%, respectively.

A high labor force participation rate is a positive measure for many indicators, both economic and social. Although there are roughly 26,000 more men in the labor force than women in Central Minnesota, women had a substantially lower rate of unemployment at 3.2% versus 4.1% for men in 2021.

Nationally, labor force participation rates declined for both men and women in 2020 at the outset of the Pandemic Recession, but have since been making slow progress to recover losses. As of January 2023, Women are just 0.8 percentage points from recovering and men are still 1.2 percentage points away from their pre-pandemic rate in January 2020.

Although regional or local participation rates are not produced monthly, recent quarterly employment data by gender help shed some light on the pandemic's impact to men and women in the labor force. There has been no apparent shift in the share of jobs held by men and women in Central Minnesota, both are simply holding a smaller number of jobs than prior to the pandemic. This does not imply that the Pandemic Recession affected men and women in the same way, but it does imply that changes in the economy caused men and women to leave jobs at similar rates.

One challenge with aggregate employment data is that they count full-time and part-time jobs the same, so that may mask some of the larger job changes across genders. The good news is that average earnings for women increased 17.3% from pre-pandemic times through the 1st quarter of 2022, compared to 16.7% for men, though it's possible some portion of the wage growth could be from fewer women holding lower-paying or part-time jobs.

For More Information

Contact Luke Greiner, Labor Market Analyst, at luke.greiner@state.mn.us