For the first time in almost a decade, women outnumber men in the U.S. workforce. In December, women just barely surpassed men at 50.04% of the labor force, providing 109,000 more workers in all industries, excluding farmworkers and the self-employed.
Ariane Hegewisch, program director of employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, told the Wall Street Journal that one explanation for the shift is the expansion of female-dominated industries.
“The sectors that are growing, like education and healthcare, are predominantly women’s employment,” she said. “Looking at the 21st century, it is really amazing how profound some of the [sex] segregation is in the labor market.”
But Nicholas Eberstadt, author of Men Without Work, has a different view. In the latest issue of National Affairs, Eberstadt argues that for men, “today’s work crisis is not an unemployment crisis.”
It’s not just that the mining and manufacturing industries are cutting jobs. Some men just aren’t looking.
“What economists call ‘demand-side effects’ cannot plausibly account for America’s overall men-without-work predicament — and might not even account for most of it,” Eberstadt argues.
In fact, nearly 7 million men in the United States are neither employed nor seeking employment.
Eberstadt points to family structure, dependence on government benefits, and mass incarceration as factors that can influence men’s participation in the labor force. Men who are married “are decidedly more likely to be in the workforce than men who have never married.” Many men are relying on government benefit programs, and men who have been incarcerated find it much more difficult to get a job after they’re free.
Forbes reports that “unemployment is prompting men to consider traditionally female jobs.” But if Eberstadt is correct, guiding men to more traditionally female jobs such as nursing and teaching may not be the solution to bringing them back into the labor force.
The answer lies in structural change, from the way the government treats felonies to how it provides social services.
Finally, the government may not be able to engage in a large part of the solution, which will involve the restoration of family structure and a renewal of purpose. It may be that men go to work when they have a good reason to, and modernity isn’t giving them much of one.
