Over the long term, people without a college degree, men in particular, have seen steeper falls in labor force participation, according to an Economic Policy Institute, or EPI, analysis, largely due to the decline in manufacturing and military jobs, mass incarceration, and a rise in opioid use. For Black men, the mass incarceration rates of the 1980s and 1990s, fueled by racist political rhetoric, hurt their labor force participation rates in particular.
But it’s also true that labor force participation for men in total has rebounded a bit during stronger economic times. Although the rate increased 0.3 percentage points per year for women and 0.1 percentage points per year for men, periods of high unemployment have been associated with declines in labor force participation for both men and women, the EPI report explained.
Elise Gould, senior economist at EPI, said policy makes a huge difference in how the fallout from economic crises affects different populations, and gave the Great Recession as an example.
“A lot of jobs were initially lost in areas like manufacturing and construction, so it was more men losing their jobs, but then you saw that when those jobs came back, it actually took much longer for the public-sector jobs to recover,” she said. “Austerity that was pursued in the aftermath of the Great Recession meant that then state and local governments didn’t have the funds they needed, and so a lot of those jobs, which were disproportionately women’s, didn’t come back in the same way.”