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Tucker Carlson cited a graph with wrong numbers to try to argue that women outnumber men in the US workforce, which they do not

Dec 17, 2021, 17:32 IST
Business Insider
Tucker Carlson seen on Fox News on December 16, 2021, next to a graph showing incorrect data.Fox News
  • Tucker Carlson falsely claimed this week that more US women were in work than men.
  • Carlson used a graph showing more than 80% of women were in work, which is untrue.
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Fox News host Tucker Carlson used an inaccurate graph Thursday night to falsely argue that more US women are in work that men.

During a segment in which he attacked the labor policies of President Joe Biden, Carlson claimed that unemployment benefits and COVID-19 stimulus measures had driven people to quit their jobs.

"Our labor markets have been getting sicker for generations," Carlson said.

The host then showed two graphs, one showing that male participation in the workforce had dropped since the 1950s to around 65%, which is accurate.

His second graph showed that 80% of women were currently in work, which is untrue.

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US Bureau of Labor Statistics data from November shows that 67.8% of men are in work, compared to 56.2% of women.

The segment starts at the 9:37 mark.

The lines on both graphs used by Carlson were accurate, showing a direction of change in the US workforce which is true.

But the values for the female labor force graph were wrong.

The y-axis showing women's participation in the workforce should have started at 30% and ended at 65%, because women's workforce participation bottomed out at 30% in the 1950s and has not gone above 61% since.

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Instead it used the same scale as the male participation graph, making the data wildly incorrect. The error was first reported by The Daily Beast.

Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

"As you can tell, for 70 years we've been losing men in the workforce," Carlson said, who said that work was crucial for men to stay happy.

"It's a problem, the average man defines himself by his job ... They need to work, they tend to fall apart when they don't work," he said.

"Many call this progress on the assumption that anything bad and degrading for men must be good for America, but it is not progress," Carlson said.

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