Men are disproportionately more likely to lose their jobs in a downturn because they disproportionately hold blue-collar and trades jobs. Construction, service-industry jobs like groundskeeping, and manual labor jobs. In short, men tend to hold the kinds of jobs that are the first to go down during a recession.
Women also tend to have “softer landings” during hard times because there are all kinds of social programs and support groups for them. Men are not so lucky; a man who is unemployed for a long period of time is usually ridiculed as a slacker or a couch-potato. Men are under *enormous* pressure to work and provide for their families, and when they lose their job it can be a soul-shattering experience.
Often, men *define* themselves by what they do for a living. “What do you do?” someone might ask. “I’m a mechanic!” the man might reply. Not “I fix cars” but “I am a mechanic”. And when that self-defining job is lost…there’s often nothing else to replace it. Women don’t really understand this all that well. “Just get another job,” they say (as if it were just that easy). Isn’t working the drive-tru window at Burger King acceptable to being out of work? They don’t consider the brutal humiliation a man feels at this comedown: years of striving and effort, struggling to move up; and then only the prospect of being given orders by some kid barely out of high school, and at a wage that will barely cover the cost of the gas for driving to work.
In this technological society I think men often feel superfluous. Men like to grapple, to contend, to achieve. We live in a society that sometimes demonizes this aspect of men. When a man fails in work, he fails doubly: he fails his family, but he also fails himself. A man has to be able to get up every morning and look squarely at that person in the mirror. Am I doing right by my family? Am I the kind of man I want to be?
When you stop being able to look at that guy in the mirror, when those questions bring only pain, then it gets hard to face an endless line of such days. The wife may not know because most men don’t (or can’t) verbalize this kind of thing. And even when the wife or girlfriend does know, I don’t think they really understand how devastating it is.
