The Wall Street Journal ran a piece this week with a familiar frame: the American labor market is tilting away from men. Healthcare and social assistance, a sector where women outnumber men three to one, accounted for nearly all net job growth over the past year. Manufacturing keeps shedding jobs. Transportation and warehousing, hit by tariffs, is bleeding workers. The employment-to-population ratio for men sits at 64.1%, down from 66.6% in 2019 and 70.9% in the 1990s.
The education gap widens the story. As of 2024, 46% of women aged 25 to 54 hold a bachelor's degree versus 38% of men. Projections suggest the gap will grow.
Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, quoted in the WSJ, points to something worth sitting with: career transitions are hard for the less-educated, and some types of work "don't fit into the identity of many men."
That's the part we want to talk about.
Because here's what the data actually says about men over 50: the headline numbers include a lot of retirees. The decline in male labor force participation is partly an aging story — men checking out, not men being pushed out. And the sectors taking hits (manufacturing, warehousing, mining) are sectors built on a specific kind of work identity that's now under pressure from automation, tariffs, and structural change.
The men who thrive in the next decade won't be the ones waiting for manufacturing to come back. They'll be the ones who treat their second act as a deliberate build — not a holding pattern.
That means a few things. It means staying current on technology rather than dismissing it as something for younger people. AI, in particular, is rewriting which skills compound and which ones decay. It means leveraging experience economically — advisory roles, angel investing, consulting, fractional work — where decades of pattern recognition is the product. And it means treating physical capability as infrastructure, not vanity. The men still in the game at 65, 70, 75 are the ones who trained for it.
The WSJ piece ends with a quiet observation from health economist Elizabeth Munnich: men entering nursing tend to do so after working other jobs. They gravitate toward higher-stakes roles. The pivot is possible. It just requires letting go of the idea that your first career defines your last one.
The labor market isn't tilting away from men. It's tilting away from a particular version of what a man's career is supposed to look like.
We're not done yet.
Source: Justin Lahart, "The American Labor Market Is Tilting Away From Men," The Wall Street Journal.