The detachment of large numbers of men from paid employment is one of the most significant social changes of the last twenty years or so. The once near universal expectation that men's working lives would extend from the time of their leaving school through to their state pension age has been shattered, probably for good. In Britain – the focus of the new research reported here – more than one in five of all 16–64-year-old men, or nearly 4 million men in total, are no longer in employment.

There has always been unemployment, of course, and during the 1980s and 1990s redundancies hit men very hard. But only a minority of the men who are now detached from employment are conventionally unemployed. Early retirement, ill-health and domestic responsibilities – and sometimes a combination of these with an important element of unemployment thrown in – are all key factors, too.

There is scant evidence that this increase in labour market detachment among men was ever anticipated by policy-makers or academic analysts. It has grown quietly, year on year, and even now the true scale of this phenomenon is not widely recognised. What is more, the trend among men stands in marked contrast to what is happening among women, who are becoming engaged in paid employment in ever larger numbers. Women's rising ‘labour force participation’ is well known and has been the subject of much research and vast discussion in the media.