Gen Z's career cliff is worse for men — thanks to one corner of the job market

• Gen Z men face higher unemployment rates than women in the current job market.
• Traditional career paths are vanishing, and AI disrupts entry-level job opportunities.
• Gen Z women excel in healthcare, a growing sector, while men lag in tech and business.

It's harder to be a man in finance lately, let alone a tech bro.

Zoomers have had a rocky debut on the job market. Traditional paths to success in fields like tech, law, and government are disappearing, and AI is disrupting the entry-level rung of the career ladder. Zoomers are questioning the ROI of a college education and increasingly pivoting toward blue-collar work. The overall labor market also took a dive in July, indicating that companies have less demand for workers and fewer Americans are participating in the labor market.

But not all 20-something job seekers are struggling at the same rate: Gen Z men appear to be speeding toward a career cliff faster. The cohort has tended to have higher unemployment rates than their female peers since the pandemic, and young women's dominance in the few healthy corners of the market could be a key reason.

"Employers are holding steady with the workers they have, and workers are also holding steady in their roles. That can make it harder for new labor market entrants to come in," Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, said, adding that "it could be tougher for men who are looking for jobs where there's just not a whole lot of hiring right now."

Gen Z women dominate in the growing healthcare sector

Gen Z women tend to have higher job stability, partially because of their dominance in in-demand sectors like healthcare and the nursing field.

Healthcare is one of few industries showing job growth for the six months ending in July. Hospitality and education — two of the other fields with growing job numbers — are also predominantly women. The data comes as the labor market is cooling: the US fell short of the expected 106,000 jobs in July, adding just 73,000 roles with an uptick in employment to 4.2%, and revisions to the previous two months showed that there were more than 250,000 fewer jobs created over that period than previously estimated. Tech and business especially are seeing a hiring slowdown and increased layoffs.

BLS data shows that the primarily-male information and business sectors — which often employ jobs like computer scientists, consultants, and analysts — have had among the lowest employment growth in 2025. They're also some of the entry-level roles that are most impacted by emerging AI and the Great Flattening.

About 9 in 10 licensed practical nurse, registered nurse, and nurse practitioner roles were held by women in 2022, per the most recently available Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis. The number of men entering the profession stalled between 2019 to 2021 after decades of consistent growth. Nursing was among the college majors with the lowest unemployment rate, per a 2023 New York Federal Reserve analysis.

Semee Lim, 26, spends her days caring for babies and supporting new parents in a Tampa-area newborn intensive care unit. It's a busy job, but Lim said her role is always in demand.

"I've been blessed enough to have a pretty smooth experience job hopping," said Lim, who moved to Florida after starting her career near her Maryland hometown. "There's always a nursing shortage."

Since graduating in 2021, Lim said she can remember working with just three male nurses.

As Gould explained, this isn't a new trend: young men have long had a higher unemployment rate than young women. But the employment gap between 22-to-27-year-old women and men with bachelor's degrees is widening. The unemployment rate for recent male graduates has risen steeply from less than 5% to 7% over the past 12 months, per a Financial Times analysis of the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey. For young female graduates, joblessness is largely unchanged over the same period.

It's also becoming more common for young women to economically and educationally outpace men. In 1995, one-quarter of both young men and young women held bachelor's degrees, an analysis of population data by the Pew Research Center found. By 2024, 47% of women ages 25 to 34 had one, compared with 37% of men. A Lending Tree analysis of 2021 US Census Bureau data found that single women also owned 2.7 million more homes in America than single men.

At the same time, industries with predominantly female workers tend to have lower pay — even if they have more job stability. It's a challenge that Lim said she thinks about often: "Nursing doesn't pay as much as I would like it to, but it's definitely such a rewarding job," she said. The median entry-level nurse salary was $65,000 annually in 2023, for example, while the median entry-level computer scientist salary was $80,000. It's likely that healthcare jobs will become even more necessary as baby boomers age.

"If you can do something about or improve working conditions and pay and benefits in sectors that may have been traditionally female-dominated, then you may attract more men into those occupations," Gould said. "I don't think it's rocket science that we have undervalued some of the work that we have historically done."

Are you a Gen Zer open to sharing your job search experience? Reach out to this reporter at allisonkelly@businessinsider.com or via Signal at alliekelly.10