Why are men vanishing from the work force?
As the labor market continues its plodding improvement, a significant trend is emerging: men are disappearing. The labor force participation rate for all male workers (age 16 and up) has been in decline for decades, while that of women has increased sharply. In 1972, there was a 35 percentage point gap between the labor force participation rates of men and women (79 percent of men participated vs. 44 percent of women). By 2012, that gap had narrowed to 12 percentage points (male participation was 70 percent; female was 58 percent).
Participating in the labor force does not necessarily mean that a person has a job. Someone is counted as being in the labor force if they are not working, but actively looking. This distinction sheds some light on how strongly men and women are attached to the labor market.
Women appear to be less likely to drop out of the labor market entirely after leaving a job. On the other hand, when men quit or are terminated, they are more likely to exit the labor force altogether and not look for another job.
Further, men’s labor market experience has declined over the last three decades along four important dimensions: the acquisition of skills, employment rates, occupational stature, and real wage levels. Therefore, men aren’t getting job market skills at the same rate as they did previously (or as women are), leading to less satisfying and lucrative jobs, and less incentive to look for other work when they lose a job.
Which leads to the question of why—why are men so hard to find in the labor market? Researchers don’t know the full answer to this question yet, and suspect it is combination of factors. Among the possibilities are the increase in globalization, the decline in labor unions, and the explosion of technological change as a substitute for labor, all of which are more likely to affect relatively male-dominated industries such as manufacturing.
The increase in women’s labor force participation means that some men feel less pressure to participate in the workplace as they did in years past. Women being equal – or primary – breadwinners is not the anomaly it once was. Cultural expectations have changed somewhat, and stay-at-home dads are now 16 percent of all stay-at-home parents. About one quarter of these men say they are caring for the kids because they cannot find a job.
But there is another, more pervasive possibility. The decline in male labor force participation is particularly concentrated among men who grew up in single-parent households, primarily headed by women. In one sense, this is not surprising. Boys in single-parent families are at risk for a variety of adverse outcomes – lower graduation rates (from high school or college), greater risk for criminal activity, lower socioeconomic status. All of these can lead to less participation in the labor force. But girls growing up in these environments, facing the same adverse outcomes, do not exhibit the same labor market patterns. It appears that boys are disproportionately affected by the absence of a male role model when it comes to the strength of their subsequent attachment to the labor market, even after taking these other outcomes into account.
It is likely that labor force participation rates for both men and women will start leveling off. But recent research suggests that if we want to increase participation of men in particular, we may need to look to solutions that begin long before they are old enough to work.
As the labor market continues its plodding improvement, a significant trend is emerging: men are disappearing. The labor force participation rate for all male workers (age 16 and up) has been in decline for decades, while that of women has increased sharply. In 1972, there was a 35 percentage point gap between the labor force participation rates of men and women (79 percent of men participated vs. 44 percent of women). By 2012, that gap had narrowed to 12 percentage points (male participation was 70 percent; female was 58 percent).
Participating in the labor force does not necessarily mean that a person has a job. Someone is counted as being in the labor force if they are not working, but actively looking. This distinction sheds some light on how strongly men and women are attached to the labor market.
Women appear to be less likely to drop out of the labor market entirely after leaving a job. On the other hand, when men quit or are terminated, they are more likely to exit the labor force altogether and not look for another job.
Further, men’s labor market experience has declined over the last three decades along four important dimensions: the acquisition of skills, employment rates, occupational stature, and real wage levels. Therefore, men aren’t getting job market skills at the same rate as they did previously (or as women are), leading to less satisfying and lucrative jobs, and less incentive to look for other work when they lose a job.
Which leads to the question of why—why are men so hard to find in the labor market? Researchers don’t know the full answer to this question yet, and suspect it is combination of factors. Among the possibilities are the increase in globalization, the decline in labor unions, and the explosion of technological change as a substitute for labor, all of which are more likely to affect relatively male-dominated industries such as manufacturing.
The increase in women’s labor force participation means that some men feel less pressure to participate in the workplace as they did in years past. Women being equal – or primary – breadwinners is not the anomaly it once was. Cultural expectations have changed somewhat, and stay-at-home dads are now 16 percent of all stay-at-home parents. About one quarter of these men say they are caring for the kids because they cannot find a job.
But there is another, more pervasive possibility. The decline in male labor force participation is particularly concentrated among men who grew up in single-parent households, primarily headed by women. In one sense, this is not surprising. Boys in single-parent families are at risk for a variety of adverse outcomes – lower graduation rates (from high school or college), greater risk for criminal activity, lower socioeconomic status. All of these can lead to less participation in the labor force. But girls growing up in these environments, facing the same adverse outcomes, do not exhibit the same labor market patterns. It appears that boys are disproportionately affected by the absence of a male role model when it comes to the strength of their subsequent attachment to the labor market, even after taking these other outcomes into account.
It is likely that labor force participation rates for both men and women will start leveling off. But recent research suggests that if we want to increase participation of men in particular, we may need to look to solutions that begin long before they are old enough to work.
Bootstrap and free market economics only.