This study examines the relationship between gendered labor divisions and language shift from the heritage language (HL) to English in the American context. An analysis of census data from West Frisian and German-speaking Randolph, Wisconsin, and Norwegian-speaking Ulen, Minnesota, shows that women are more likely than men to be both monolingual and engaged in subsistence work rather than more specialized wage labor practices. Previous research in the Verticalization Model of Language Shift has shown that heritage communities that are more externally-oriented are less likely to preserve the HL than locally-oriented ones. Because specialized labor orients individuals toward external systems, it corresponds with a decrease in the autonomy of the household and incorporates worker-speakers into a larger and less dense social network, where HL language practices are less rigidly enforced and where linguistic and cultural innovations might enter into their social-linguistic practices. Accordingly, these data suggest that women's networks in Randolph and Ulen were comparatively less verticalized than men's, which supported higher rates of HL monolingualism. Men were more integrated into specialized labor, coinciding with lower raw numbers of monolingual speakers. More broadly, this study suggests that measurable differences in social factors affecting men and women result in different rates of shift.