Male Gen Zers have been dropping out of the labor pool in droves — and experts warn that the spread of artificial intelligence could accelerate the ugly trend even further.
Last month, the US unemployment rate — the percentage of Americans who are jobless and actively looking for work — dipped to 4.1%, its lowest level of the year and well below the 5.6% average since the end of World War II.
But there’s a grim corollary to the rosy-looking numbers: Also in July, the labor force shrank by more than a quarter million people versus a year earlier, hitting its lowest levels since the pandemic.
One key point of worry: the share of men aged 16 to 24 participating in the labor market dipped to 56.1% – tumbling nearly 13 percentage points from 69% in 2000, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What’s more, the share of young, unemployed men who are not looking for work at all has doubled since the 1990s to 8%, according to Ben Smith, head of research at the American Institute for Boys and Men.
That last figure raises concerns that a growing number of young men in the US are struggling to leave the nest — and the question of why has become an increasing point of concern for economists and social advocates alike.
Artificial intelligence has already been cited in 184,538 layoff announcements since 2023, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. While tech leaders have argued that AI will create new jobs in the long-term, the new technology is widely expected to disrupt entry-level roles in fields like tech, finance and manufacturing.
Smith warned that the effects of AI are uncertain, but “if it substitutes for those jobs entirely, men and the occupations they tend to be in are more susceptible to being displaced by AI.”
Maria Flynn, chief executive of nonprofit Jobs for the Future, said entry-level hiring is being hit at retail, at factories and across a swath of white-collar jobs that young men used to enter en masse.
“The longer the individuals sits out of the labor market, particularly early in their career, the harder it’s going to be for them to build the skills and the network and the work experience that really shape earnings in future decades,” Flynn told The Post.
The stats for young men look dire versus other key groups: Over the same 26-year span, labor force participation actually increased for those 65 and over – to 19.2% in July from 12.5% in 2000. Men aged 25 to 54 saw just a 2.9 percentage point drop over the same period, while men 55 and over saw a slight increase.
Women aged 16 to 24 also saw a drop, though not as much as men, while all other women age groups saw an increase. Indeed, women now hold slightly more jobs than men in the US for the third time in history, according to a survey by the Indeed Hiring Lab, and that gap is only expected to widen further.
Meanwhile, for men 16 to 24, the NEET rate – those who are not in education, not employed and not in training – has risen to 12% from a rate of 10% in the 1990s. While the NEET rate for women is similar, it’s the result of a sharp drop over the same time period. It’s a far cry from 1990, when men held nearly 7 million more jobs than women.
The real concern among researchers is the smaller subset of male NEETs, who are not working or looking for work at all – and why they’ve stopped trying.
Gen Z has already established itself as pessimistic and skeptical of capitalism. A new CNBC poll showed more than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 now favor Democratic Socialism. Some Gen Zers are turning to trade work as they grow fearful that AI will wipe out white-collar jobs.
Paul Iaccarino, a millennial whose Building Trades Educational Benefit Fund trains Local 363-A electricians across New York state, said Gen Zers now account for 66% of his free, five-year apprenticeship program in East New York. The average age of an enrollee in the most recent program was 26.2 years old – down from 30.9 years in 2021.
While Gen Zers have displayed enthusiasm for blue-collar work as they look for steady employment and guaranteed careers, Iaccarino said he’s also noticed a “general divide” as more young men drop out of the labor force altogether.
“A lot of these kids struggle to take off,” Iaccarino said. “There is a fear that it’s not enough, even in the beginning, so why bother? That’s kind of the gist of it.”
“It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna take me forever to make six-figures or whatever I’m going to need to make in order to buy this house,’” he told The Post. “I think there’s just a lot of pressure, especially on young men these days, and it’s unclear how to get over these hurdles.”
Some men have reported reducing paid work hours to spend more time with their children and contribute to housework. Still, a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that men, when they’re not working, spend about 70% of their non-working hours playing video games.
While a fifth of NEET women report caring for children, only 3% of NEET men do, according to AIBM.
The vast majority of job growth, meanwhile, is coming from healthcare – a field that’s largely dominated by women, which could help explain why they’re outpacing their male peers in the job market.
Eric Pachman, executive director at nonprofit Data 4 The People, which tracks government labor market data, noted that most of the strength, ironically, is coming from the need to care for those aging out of the workforce.
“Men need to go start becoming home health care aides. This is a booming industry and if they want good employment, that’s the kind of jobs they’re going to have to take,” Pachman told The Post. “For the last two to three years, there’s been increasing overreliance [on women].”
In 2025, women joined the labor force at nearly three times the rate of men. Of the 1.2 million jobs added between February 2024 and February 2026, two-thirds went to women. Last year, a whopping 77% of payroll job growth came from healthcare and social assistance, while male-majority industries like manufacturing and warehousing suffered declines.
Though higher education is frequently cited as a potential reason for the delay in entering the labor force, men are fast disappearing from college campuses – less likely to both enroll and complete a program.
In 2021, men accounted for 42% of total undergraduate enrollment. They were outnumbered by roughly 3.1 million more women. The difference was even more apparent in those earning their doctorate – down to 44% in 2021 from 90% in 1970.
Those who are attending college find that their degree isn’t worth what it used to be. Men and women with bachelor’s degrees have historically been less likely to be unemployed than those without. But the jobless rate of young college-educated men is approaching the jobless rate of men without bachelor’s degrees, according to AIBM.
However, drastic drops in male employment aren’t a reality yet. In July, the number of women ages 20 to 24 that are not in the labor force outnumbered men of the same age by millions, according to unpublished BLS data.
Both male and female labor market participation rates are lower than they were in 2000, meaning both young men and women are working less than their fathers and mothers did.
The labor force participation rate for men ages 25 to 29 and men ages 30 to 34 has been on a steady decline since the 1980s, while women of the same age have been climbing, according to BLS data aggregated by Data 4 The People.
But the labor force participation rate for women ages 20 to 24 – which was 66.8% in July – was roughly the same as what it was in the 1980s, and below the same-aged male rate of 73.6%.
