CATHERINE RAMPELL
Dollars to doughnuts.
As I mentioned on Friday, the share of men who are actively in the labor force is at an all-time low (a trend David Brooks also explored in his column Tuesday). Now Steve Hipple, an economist at the Labor Department, points me to a related paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, which helps explain why.
It finds that men typically leave the labor force for reasons systematically different from the reasons that women do. The trends basically boil down to disability versus homemaking.
A plurality of men age 25 to 54 who left the labor force over the last 15 years said they did so because they were ill or disabled:
Source: “A Closer Look at Nonparticipants During and After the Great Recession,” by Julie L. Hotchkiss, M. Melinda Pitts and Fernando Rios-Avila. Working paper from August 2012 for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
As you can see from the top dashed line, the percentage of men dropping out because of disability rose during the recession and has been falling since then, although illness or disability is still the most commonly cited reason for leaving the labor force. The shares of men leaving to go back to school or to engage in household care have also been rising.
Meanwhile, a vast majority of prime-working-age women dropping out of the labor force have been going into household care, which of course includes becoming a full-time parent.
Take a look at the right-hand vertical axis to track this share, which as of March was a touch below 60 percent:
Source: “A Closer Look at Nonparticipants During and After the Great Recession,” by Julie L. Hotchkiss, M. Melinda Pitts and Fernando Rios-Avila. Working paper from August 2012 for the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
While the share of men dropping out in order to engage in household care has been rising, the comparable share for women has been falling, a trend that predates the recession. Of women 25 to 54 dropping out of the labor force, the share dropping out to go to school has risen steeply.
The share of women dropping out to go on disability has also been rising. Economists like David Autor have suggested that idle workers, particularly older idle workers, have been turning to disability as a last resort when their unemployment benefits run out.
Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/why-men-drop-out-of-the-labor-force/?partner=rss&emc=rss