Job gains in rural America over the previous year dried up in November and December, especially for women

Percentage change in jobs from December 2019 to December 2020, compared with the 5.3% national increase in jobs for that time period. Map by The Daily Yonder; click the image to enlarge it or click here for the interactive version.

"The nation stopped adding jobs at the end of last year, reversing a months-long trend of employment gains. The drop-off in jobs in the last two months of 2020 was a trend found in big cities and rural communities alike," Bill Bishop reports for The Daily Yonder. "The number of jobs plummeted with the spread of the coronavirus a year ago, but the economy began adding jobs by late spring 2020. Those gains continued until this fall, and then stopped. In November and December, rural and urban America began shedding jobs again."

Though communities of all sizes lost jobs, the trend was most pronounced in urban counties. The largest cities had 6.2% fewer jobs in December 2020 than in December 2019, whereas rural counties had 3.2% fewer jobs over the same time period, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics figures. "Nationally, there were 8.4 million fewer jobs this December than in December 2019," Bishop reports. "Rural counties have 650,000 fewer jobs this year than at the same time in 2019."

As CNN recently noted, the nation lost 140,000 jobs in December, and all of them were women. Women lost 156,000 jobs that month while men gained 16,000.

Click here for more data, charts and analysis from the Yonder, including regional analysis and an interactive map with the latest county-level data.