Another way of slicing things is by the industries people work in, which are tracked in the establishment survey.

Men are still in the majority in most of the bureau's industry "supersectors," but those tend to be the smaller and slower-growing ones. Overall, women hold 22 percent of the jobs in goods-producing sectors, and 54 percent of the jobs in service-providing sectors—and the service-providing sectors have gone from around 60 percent of payroll jobs in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s 3 to 86 percent now.

So women are overrepresented in the parts of the economy that are growing faster. They are also, as my Bloomberg View colleague Tyler Cowen wrote recently, taking a bigger and bigger share 4 of the economy's "cognitive" jobs, which tend to be the better ones. And overall, the numbers appear to show that indoor salary and wage labor in the United States is becoming predominantly women's work.

Women still usually don't hold the highest-status jobs, though. Men accounted for 60 percent of physicians and surgeons in 2017, 63 percent of lawyers, 70 percent of producers and directors, 72 percent of chief executive officers, and 81 percent of software developers. Men also make more money than women do—and women haven't gained any ground on that front since the end of the last recession: