The opioid epidemic is one of the biggest contributors to the decline of men in places like Ohio. According to data compiled by the Kaiser Family Foundation, men accounted for two-thirds of all opioid overdose deaths in Ohio in 2015, and the share is similar in many states across the country. Teri Minney, whose group, the Heroin Partnership Project, visits homes after people have either died from or survived overdoses of heroin and opioids in Ross County, says 70 percent of the calls she gets are for men who have overdosed. To be sure, opioid deaths aren’t only a men’s problem—women have increasingly gotten addicted and moved into drugs like heroin, too. But in states like Ohio, deaths are much more concentrated among men.
And drug addiction isn’t the only thing making men poor long-term partners. They’re also just not working. There are likely many causes of this: poor wages, poor options, and, as I’ve written before, health problems that keep people out of the workforce. Nationally, around 23 percent of men ages 23 to 54 are not working, while 31 percent of women are unemployed or out of the labor force, according to Shannon Monnat, a sociologist at Penn State. But in Scioto County, a particularly hard-hit part of southern Ohio, 42 percent of males aged 25 to 54 are unemployed or out of the labor market. “In these types of places, jobs and the dignity of work have been replaced by hopelessness, frustration, and sometimes, addiction,” she told me.
This pattern of men leaving the labor force is also happening nationwide. “There is no doubt that men are working much less during the 2000s, and it doesn’t look like it’s a cyclical pattern as much as it is structural,” said Erik Hurst, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. His research suggests that men aged 21 to 30 without a college degree worked 12 percent less in 2015 than they did in 2000, and men aged 31 to 55 worked 8 percent less. Women’s shares were lower: younger women worked 7 percent less, while older women worked four percent less. Much of this decline is not just that all men worked fewer hours, but that a large number of men just stopped working, Hurst said, a trend that he attributed to automation and the disappearance of good jobs. The fraction of men who say they had worked zero hours over the past year has skyrocketed since 2000, he found. As they drop out of the labor force, men depend on family members and partners more, in some cases quite a lot. About 70 percent of non-working men ages 21 to 30 live with a parent or close relative other than a spouse, according to the Hurst data; 20 percent live with a spouse or with friends.