By Carson Gorecki
March 2022
In the spirit of National Women's History Month in March, we put together a visualization looking at the history of women's employment by industry in Minnesota. The Tableau visualization below is a way for users to explore and compare trends in women's employment share and number across industries in a visually-appealing format.
Historically, women have been much more likely to work in service-oriented sectors such as Health Care and Social Assistance, Educational Services, and Finance and Insurance, where currently over seven of every 10 employees is a woman. Goods-producing sectors such as Mining (8.9%) and Construction (13.7%) have had much lower shares of female employment. Similarly, less than a quarter of Transportation and Warehousing, Wholesale Trade, and Utilities workers were women in 2020.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Health Care and Social Assistance also has the largest number of women across all sectors at 381,404. The three sectors with the next largest number of female workers were Educational Services (150,602), Retail Trade (138,582), and Accommodation and Food Services (98,434). Those three sectors combined had just 6,000 more women workers than Health Care and Social Assistance. Manufacturing had the fifth most jobs filled by women, yet their share of the sector workforce (29.5%) was the sixth smallest across all 20 sectors.
Despite the lower representation of women in their workforces, Mining (6.7%), Construction (7.2%), Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting (4.8%), and Utilities (5.9%) were the sectors to see the fastest relative growth in female employment from 2015-2020. The sectors that saw the largest relative declines of female employment share were Retail Trade (-7.3%), Information (-5.1%), and Real Estate Rental and Leasing (-5.0%). Despite the contraction of women's employment, those three sectors' workforces remain majority female. Across all industries women's share of employment fell from 51.8% to 51.4% (0.8%) over the same period.
