More women are in the workforce than men -- for only the third time in American history. WMSTUDIO - stock.adobe.com

For only the third time in US history, more women are working than men — and this profoundly abnormal state of affairs could become the new normal if we doesn’t face this slow-moving social disaster.

Crucially, the other two times were both this century — after the 2008 financial meltdown and the 2020 lockdowns, and now it’s happening without any obvious crisis to explain it.

By far the most likely explanation: We’ve all but lost most clear paths toward responsible manhood.

The economy’s long shift from industrial to service-sector employment is one key reason men have increasingly dropped out of the workforce entirely starting in the mid-1960s.

Meanwhile, we’ve let social-insurance programs (disability, in particular) morph into a license to drop out of the workforce completely, never to return.

Men are simply less attracted to the “caring” professions, yet health care and social work, about 80% female, have been the source of half of all new jobs in recent years.

This dysfunction leads to higher rates of drug abuse and suicide, both far worse among men than women, as well as “failure to launch” that now sees one in five men aged 25 to 34 living “at home,” markedly more than their female peers.

And men who can’t serve as the family’s prime breadwinners tend not to form families at all, driving both the rise in single-parent (almost always a woman) homes and the decline in US birth rates.

Demographers predict that by 2038 more Americans will die than be born.

In 2000, only West Virginia had more deaths than births; today, 16 states are in net decline.

And a country that’s dying out will also face a crisis of the social-safety net: The ratio of workers paying taxes to retirees on Social Security and Medicare (plus workforce dropouts on disability) will become unsustainable.

Neither political party is much facing these grim realities, even as they’re likely driving extremism in our politics — both the increase in downwardly-mobile professionals driving the growth of far-left voters and the alienated males boosting the worst of the “manosphere.”

Left and right, these are cries for help expressed as rage: Rather than pander to that anger, the functional parts of society need to start figuring out how to inspire or coax the alienated extremes into the mainstream.