More men in their prime working years are neither working nor looking for jobs — here’s why

Men have been steadily dropping out of the workforce, especially men ages 25 to 54, who are considered to be in their prime working years.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for prime-age working men was 3.4% in August 2024. This number primarily includes those who are unemployed and looking for a job. But about 10.5% of men in their prime working years, or roughly 6.8 million men nationwide, are neither working nor looking for employment, compared with just 2.5% in 1954.

“The long-term decline in labor force participation by so-called prime-age men is a tremendous worry for our society, our economy, and probably our political system,” said Nicholas Eberstadt, a political economist at the American Enterprise Institute.

Education is an important predictor of prime-age men’s odds of being out of the labor force.

“The big impacts are on the non-college-educated groups on their ability to enter and stay in the labor market,” said Jeff Strohl, a director of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

A study by the Pew Research Center found that men who are not college-educated leave the workforce at higher rates than men who are. At the same time, fewer younger men have been enrolling in college over the past decade.

“They used to graduate with a high school education and have good stable jobs,” according to Carol Graham, senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “Since then, due to technology-driven growth and a little bit due to Chinese competition, you’ve had a lot of manufacturing firms and the places where they were located that were one-horse towns become ghost lands.”

Watch the video above to find out why men are increasingly leaving the workforce.