Even though men dominate the disability rolls, their health problems have a ripple effect on the women in their lives. Women tend to be the ones managing their husbands’ care, driving or accompanying them to doctor appointments and therapies that eat into a day.

Women’s lower wages and family responsibilities have always batted them in and out of jobs — and in and out of the labor force — with much more frequency than men. A sick child or a family emergency can quickly push someone out of a job.

And as wages, particularly at the lower end of the scale, have stagnated, the payoff from working decreases, as does the level of attachment. Women who ended their education at high school graduation, or earlier, dropped out of the labor force at even greater rates than their male counterparts between 2000 and 2015, according to a report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But what has noticeably changed is the degree to which men’s work patterns are increasingly matching women’s in that they are regularly cycling in and out of the work force every few months. Stability and security are ever more elusive.



Although the share of prime-age women who are in the work force some but not all of the time has remained remarkably steady over the years (at 18 percent), for men, it has roughly doubled in the last four decades to 11.8 percent, according to new research by John Coglianese, a doctoral candidate at Harvard.

To some analysts, the single-minded focus on sidelined men without a closer look at women has placed too much attention on the failings of potential workers instead of the quality of the jobs.