America’s Young Men Are Falling Even Further Behind - WSJ.
Sept. 28, 2024 9:00 pm
In Spanish, parents call it encaminado: making sure your children are on the path to an independent adulthood. Out of Dan and Joana Moreno’s four grown kids, only their daughter is encaminada. She recently graduated from business school and got engaged. The Morenos’ three adult sons are still sleeping in their Miami childhood bedrooms. The younger two dropped out of college, and the oldest never went. All three are single. Their only work experience is with the family business.
“Something has gone amiss here,” says their father, Dan, who owns the repair chain Flamingo Appliance Service. “We love them, we love having them around, but that’s not how you build a life.”The life trajectories of America’s sons and daughters are diverging.
Presented with a more-equal playing field, young women are seizing the opportunities in front of them, while young men are floundering. The phenomenon has developed over the past decade, but was supercharged by the pandemic, which derailed careers, schooling and isolated friends and families. The result has big implications for the economy. More women ages 25 to 34 have entered the workforce in recent years than ever. The share of young men in the labor market, meanwhile, hasn’t grown in a decade.
As of August, 89% of this cohort of men were employed or looking for work, more than 700,000 fewer than if the current labor-force participation rate was at 2004 levels, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data by Aspen Economic Strategy Group policy director Luke Pardue. Women’s participation is up 6 percentage points in just the past 10 years, to 79%. A fifth of men in this same age range still lived with their parents as of 2023, according to the Census, compared with 12% of women.
Among noncaregivers who aren’t disabled, men are more likely to be neither employed, in school nor in workforce training, what economists refer to as NEET. Around 260,000 more 16- to 29-year-old men than women fell into this category as of the first half of 2024, according to think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research, representing 8.6% of young men and 7.8% of young women. Rates are up for both groups since 2019, but down from a Covid high.
Until the past decade or so, “there was an assumption that men just needed to show up for their life and they’ll get a job and have a family and be provided for, because they’re men,” says University of Maryland masculinity researcher Kevin M. Roy. That is no longer true. While women now expect to have more and better opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers, men are in some ways bracing for the opposite. Researchers say that has created a crisis of purpose, especially for men at the entrance to adulthood.
Roy and other social scientists cite shifts away from traditional gender roles and single-earner family structures,as well as declines in traditionally male-dominated industries such as manufacturing. Women, conversely, are flooding the labor market, thanks in part to more remote work opportunities. The divergence isn’t just economic: Young men and women are also further apart on political and social issues.
“The sense a lot of young men have is not being sure that they are neededor that they are going to be needed by their families, by their communities, by society,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a nonpartisan research organization.
One of the first clues popped up a few years ago, when educators began sounding the alarm on high-school boys’ plummeting college-attendance rates. Now that this cohort is in their 20s, their feelings of aimlessness are spilling into the social and professional realms.
Take Dan and Joana Moreno’s middle son, 25-year-old Daniel, who left college midway through his sophomore year after indecision about his major spiraled into a larger existential crisis. “I just felt so, so lost,” Daniel says. “I didn’t know what I was doing it for.” Five years later, he is still living with his parents.
“The pandemic has impacted everyonein different ways, but it’s had a disproportionate effect on the group we were already worried about,” Reeves says. Men rely more heavily on in-person activities to maintain social connections, Reeves says, and have a tougher time recovering after a setback. While Daniel dropped out before the Covid-19 pandemic, he blames quarantine in part for his transition from a popular high-schooler to a self-described homebody. Researchers concur.
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