As the gender wage gap is closing, men and women’s lifetime earnings distribution seem to be offsetting one another.

New research shows men’s median lifetime income has declined by 10 percent to 19 percent (adjusted for inflation) when you compare men who entered the workforce in 1967 with men who entered it in 1983; meanwhile, women’s median lifetime income increased by 22 percent to 33 percent between the cohorts who entered the workforce in 1967 and those in 1983, according to a report published in the National Bureau of Economic Research that used data from the Social Security Administration.

Men in the lower three-quarters of income distribution faced the most struggle, seeing little to no rise in their earnings. New workers are not catching up, said Greg Kaplan, an economics professor at the University of Chicago and a co-author of the report. “Rather they’re starting lower and staying lower.”

Because the report was based on lifetime income, there was not much data on younger cohorts, such as those beginning their careers in the late 2000s. However, data did show stagnation continued for younger cohorts and median incomes have been declining from 1998 onward.

So why were lower-income men not seeing a rise in lifetime earnings? Gray Kimbrough, a micro-economist in the DC area, said they have fallen victim to a double-edged sword of lack of education and job availability. Jobs for the less educated have been on the decline, and more women are also taking over less-skilled service jobs than they were six decades ago. More highly educated people also tend to be more attached to their jobs, Kimbrough said. (They also are more likely to juggle multiple jobs, one study showed.) This could be troublesome for men hoping to increase their income, especially since their peak earning years tend to come in their early 50s, research shows.

Women aren’t exactly the winners here, however. Their lifetime income may have increased, but they started out at a much lower point than their male counterparts — with far fewer women in the workforce, experts said. There’s also a clear gap between highly educated workers based on gender: Take for example people who graduated from business school in 2007. Men’s and women’s salaries were relatively similar ($105,000 for men versus $98,000 for women), but by 2014, the gap had widened (to about $175,000 for men and $140,000 for women), a 2015 Bloomberg analysis found.

As the amount of money earned over your lifetime has changed dramatically over the last six decades, so too has the definition of the middle class. Some members of the middle class are getting richer while millions of other, lower-income people are not, according to a recent report from nonprofit think tank Pew Research Center. The middle class has been hollowing out for decades, and the number of members of the middle class is dwindling in the US: down to 59 percent in 2010 from 62 percent in 1991. Some say the vision of the American dream has changed dramatically in this time — forget the house with the white picket fence and two-car garage, in other words — and that younger Americans have a long, harder road ahead.