A lot of people retired or otherwise left the workforce. For example stay at home parents substantially increased and has stayed increased since. They're talking about people who left the workforce as in, no longer working/looking for work, you're talking about death exclusively.

The "Civilian Labor Force Level" isn't a relevant statistic because of its definition:

> Civilian Labor Force is the sum of civilian employment and civilian unemployment. These individuals are civilians (not members of the Armed Services) who are age 16 years or older, and are not in institutions such as prisons, mental hospitals, or nursing homes.

This, by definition, ignores people who exited the workforce. Here is the two charts you want to compare instead:

- 2019: https://www.bls.gov/cps/aa2019/cpsaat03.htm

- 2023 https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat03.htm

Specifically the "Not in labor force" column. That's a 4M loss. Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.

> Specifically the "Not in labor force" column. That's a 4M loss. Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.

Ok, here is the same data from fred (sourced from BLS). Both the labor force and "not in labor force" increased by ~3M from pandemic to now. Given overall population growth of 8M, it looks like normal numeric growth of any statistical cluster within a growing population.

  Date.    Labor Nonlabor  Pop
  Feb 2020 164M   95M      259M
  Apr 2020 156M  104M      259M
  Aug 2022 164M   99M      264M
  Jul 2023 167M   98M      267M
  Net.       3M    3M        8M

Labor: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CLF16OV

Nonlabor: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU05000000

Population: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CNP16OV

> Out of those it is disproportionately women and older people.

Is the loss disproportionately among women? In terms of people not in the labor force, I don't see strong evidence for that. Stats for both women and men not in the labor force have returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Is job loss disproportionately among older people? Given that numbers of people in the labor force are now above pre-pandemic levels, we would have to posit a counterfactual world without a pandemic. I'm not going to do a whole regression with it's own assumptions of biz cycle etc. Eyeballing the chart, the current level could be in the range of alternative futures starting from April 2020. Its hard to say though with the boomers retiring out how many retired early or decided to not retire late.

All, Men, Women Not in Labor Force: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?id=LNU05000000,LNU0500000...,

A million died. A large number were disabled (probably more than were disabled).