WASHINGTON — The slowly recovering U.S. job market has helped women rebound faster than men: They’ve now regained all the jobs they lost to the Great Recession. Men are still 2.1 million jobs short.

And the gender gap is expected to persist until the job market is much healthier. To understand why, consider the kinds of jobs that are, and aren’t, being added.

Lower-wage industries, like retail, education, restaurants and hotels, have been hiring the fastest. Women are predominant in those areas. Men, by contrast, dominate sectors like construction and manufacturing, which have yet to recover millions of jobs lost in the recession.

“It’s a segregated labor market, and men and women do work in different industries, and even in different areas within industries,” says Heidi Hartmann, an economist and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Economists have long known that the recession hit men the hardest. “A man-cession,” some have called it. Or a “she-covery.”

The August jobs report issued last week spotlighted the divergence:

The unemployment rate for women was 6.8 percent — nearly a full percentage point less than the 7.7 percent rate for men.

All told, 68 million women said they were employed last month. That topped the 67.97 million who had jobs when the recession began in December 2007, the government says.

Among men, 76.2 million were employed last month. That was down from 78.3 million in December 2007.

Since the recession officially ended in June 2009, education and health services have helped drive job growth: That sector added nearly 1.6 million jobs, the second-most of any category. And women gained nearly 1.1 million of them.

While that category includes some good-paying jobs such as nurses and physical therapists, many are lower-paying positions such as home health care aides.

Women also make up more than half of the work force in hotels and restaurants, which has produced the third-largest job gain of any industry.

Even though women’s employment has recovered faster than men’s, there are still more men with jobs than women.

Not all the jobs women have regained are in lower-wage areas. They’ve also recovered jobs in professional and business services, a grab-bag category that includes both higher and lower-paying jobs, from architects and engineers to information technology workers and temp workers.