Democrats Can’t Afford to Ignore Women

Media and political leaders are very concerned about white men in particular holding onto their masculinity and status. The often unspoken consensus is that losses in their social standing indicate that the order of things is collapsing. When women, especially women of color, are struggling emotionally and financially, it is often treated as an unfortunate but inevitable part of how the system under capitalism works. In their analysis of how the economy has moved young men to the right, political pundits and leaders on the left shouldn’t forget that young women and mothers of all ages have also been unhappy with the state of affordability in this country.

Despite this heavy concern for men’s economic and political future, the economic data on their experience of the economy is mixed. It isn’t clear that men as a whole are doing a lot worse while women are “thriving,” as some coverage would suggest. 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.