In May, then work and pensions secretary Mel Stride warned that access to online pornography and video games were fuelling a mental health crisis among young men, claiming this was pushing many to quit the workforce.
Academic Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men, has warned of a “silent crisis brewing among boys and men in our classrooms, workplaces and communities”.
A rise in the number of men shunning the world of work is fuelling a growing worklessness crisis across the UK. In total, 9.3m people of working age are currently neither in work nor looking for it. Long-term sickness has been widely blamed for the surge in economic inactivity in the UK, with 2.75m out of the labour force because of poor health.
The OECD analysed the change in labour force participation between each country’s record peak and spring this year.
The average change across all OECD nations was zero percentage points.
Female labour force participation also fell in the UK, but by a far smaller amount. Economic activity among women declined from a peak of 75.2pc at the start of 2020 to 74.9pc in spring 2024, a drop of 0.4 percentage points.