The pandemic caused a massive number of Americans to leave the workforce. As a result, the U.S. labor force participation rate was the lowest since the 1970s.1 Women played a critical role in the post-pandemic recovery of the U.S. labor force participation rate.2
Women power post-pandemic labor force participation recovery.
Figure 1: U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate by Gender, indexed to April 2020
What about Utah? The data are more limited and consequently not as clear. First, Utah’s labor force participation rate decreased less during the recession, and the state reached its pre-pandemic level by January 2022. However, Utah’s labor force participation rate peaked from July to September 2023 and has since fallen, while the U.S. rate has still not reached pre-pandemic levels.
Utah weathered the pandemic well in terms of labor force participation
Figure 2: Labor Force Participation Rate, U.S. and Utah, indexed to January 2020
Women powered the nation’s labor force participation recovery, but how about in Utah? To answer this question, we turn to another data source.3 However, this source only produces annual data, with 2023 being the most recent. Looking there, we see that Utah’s labor force participation among men slightly decreased from 2019 to 2023, while the rate among women increased by 2%. The big question we cannot answer with currently available data is whether the decrease in Utah’s labor force participation rate in 2024 was due to a decline in participation among men, women, or both.
The Utah Foundation expects to delve deeper into labor force participation in 2025. Keep an eye out.
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1 The labor force participation rate examines the share of those 16 or older (the working age population) who are either employed, or actively looking for a job. See Hoevelmann, Kaitlyn, 2023, “The labor force participation rate, explained,” The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2020/august/labor-force-participation-rate-explained
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2 See Considine, Sabrina, Brandon Miskanic, Nicolas Petrosky-Nadeau, and Deepika Baskar Prabhakar, 2025, “What’s driving labor force participation among women?” The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, https://www.frbsf.org/research-and-insights/publications/economic-letter/2025/02/whats-driving-labor-force-participation-among-women/
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3 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics labor force participation data are not broken out by sex by state, unlike the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
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