They’re disabled (mentally or physically)
My husband and I lived in China for over a year in a city that was undergoing intense revitalization. Centuries old hutongs were being torn down and replaced with glass and concrete and asphalt. Most of this work was done by peasant laborers, carrying bricks and rebar and shingles on their backs, up rickety ladders, with no safety or proper work gear of any kind. They wore canvas shoes or sandals and it was not at all unusual to see a man with mangled feet and legs being rushed down the street in a wheelbarrow towards a medical center. It was however, very unusual, to see a disabled person on the street, or back on a work site, doing less labor intensive work, like stirring concrete or picking up scraps. It was mostly peasant women doing that work.
What happened to those men? Where did they go? I don’t know the answer to that, but it seems clear that becoming disabled in emerging economies is a career-ending prospect.
According to the UN, around 1 billion people live with some sort of disability, making them the world’s largest minority. 80% of those people live in emerging or developing economies. As usual, the UN focuses on women and girls with disabilities, and ignores men and boys, but hidden in their report is this:
In most OECD countries, women report higher incidents of disability than menI think it’s a pretty sure bet that in most non-OECD countries, the vast majority of disabled are men – if it were women, you can be sure the UN would have trumpeted that loud and clear.. The World Health Organization also dances around the gender issue, citing women, children and people with disabilities. Gee, it’s almost like there’s some form of institutional discrimination going on here.
In the West for certain, and likely everywhere else, too, having some sort of mental disability excludes men from the labor force. PTSD in veterans is the most clear and obvious example: being unemployed is the biggest predictor of how severe PTSD symptoms are manifesting. Two thirds of all PTSD patients are unemployed in the US, and I doubt that’s significantly different anywhere else you go in the world.
Depression is one of the leading causes of disability for both men and women, affecting some 350 million people worldwide, likely keeping them out of the labor force.
Disability, either mental or physical, knocks men out of the workforce.
They’re reviled
Another big reason men might be out of the workforce is that they belong to some scorned group no one wants to employ. In many countries, being gay is enough to trigger unemployment or underemployment. In countries with caste systems, like India, being a member of a reviled caste results in unemployment, no matter what skills a person might have.
In the US, being an ex-con is enough to remove men permanently from the labor-force. Couple that with being a Black or Hispanic ex-convict, and unemployment is virtually guaranteed.
They have no market skills to sell
The underrepresentation of men on college and university campuses is surely a surprise to no one, at this point. Lack of a college education doesn’t necessarily mean that men don’t have skills, but there is definitely a global trend towards men being left out of the ‘New Economy’, particularly in developed nations.
Men with no skills tend to be unemployed.
There are no jobs where they live
No matter what skills a man has, or doesn’t have, there has to be a job he can go to in order for him to be employed, and in many parts of the world, that simply isn’t the case. Economic opportunity is one of the biggest factors driving global immigration, a reflection of the fact that people will go to where the jobs are, given the opportunity.
They are rich, and don’t have to work
Sure, there are a few men who don’t work because they simply don’t have to – they’re inherited their wealth, but they’re called the 1% for a reason – they are statistically insignificant.
They’re in jail
Obviously, men who are in prison aren’t captured in employment statistics, even if they are being used for slave labor. Somewhere around 10 million people are held in prisons, around the world, and most of them are men.
They’re in the army
Somewhere around 20M people are serving in their nation’s military, which may or may not be counted in employment statistics. The majority serving are men.
They’re in school
It’s hard to find numbers broken down by gender on what percentage of working age men are in school or training programs, but given that higher education enrollment numbers are expected to be somewhere in the area of 260 million by 2025 (double the current number), it looks pretty safe to argue that 130 million are currently in higher education. Approximately 40% of those are men.
They’re being supported by their spouses
While the number of stay at home dads has grown dramatically in the US, men who are financially supported by their wives are still quite rare, and most of them are SAHDs due to economic circumstances, and not ambition or choice. I can’t find any global data, but I think it’s safe to assume full time, stay at home dads are an anomaly, globally.
So, 77% of men are working, around the world, and those that aren’t likely fall into one of the above categories, to greater or lesser degrees.
Let’s consider why women aren’t working.
Many of the same conditions that influence men’s employment status, also influence women’s. Women who are disabled, reviled, who have no skills, who live in areas with no opportunities, who are in school, jail or the military are just as likely to face unemployment as men, but there are two big issues that account for a huge number of women not working: sexism and choice.
There are countries in the world where sexism keeps women out of the labor force, especially women who are mothers. Japan has a huge problem with working mothers, as does Germany. The Middle East also has a sexism problem.
By and large, though, women work part time or not at all because they have the luxury of choice, something few men have. In fact, there are so few men who can choose not to work, we might as well say no man, realistically, has that choice. And women do. The United Nations spends a great deal of time boo-hooing the labor force participation rates of women, as if the fact that half of women don’t work at all isn’t indicative of some enormous privilege for a good chunk of those women. The UN might want to consider women in the Netherlands, where 90% of women work part time or not at all, and no, that isn’t because the Netherlands has no childcare or maternity leave. Even after women have school age children, they still prefer to go to yoga class, have coffee with friends, work in the garden and enjoy their lives. Dutch women are the happiest women in the world, and they are part of the 50% of women in the world who don’t work.
Darn that patriarchy! You know, when it comes to #HeForShe, it appears men have got that on lock. Half of the women in the world don’t work, and a significant number of the women who do work, do so because they choose to. All of which points to the fact that, for a great number of women, forgoing the need to earn a living in the market place is a realistic choice. And choice that will likely make them quite happy.
Patriarchy: making women happy for centuries!
You know, feminists, I think you might be doing this whole happiness thing wrong. Looks like we had it right all along. I expect to see the number of women who don’t work grow, as women reject the feminist narrative in favor of a world that maximizes their own happiness.
Now we just have to restore respect for the men who allow, who have always allowed, women to have choices.
Lots of love,
JB
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