I can, and will only speak for myself, but as someone who has been unemployed for years now, I think my experience can lend some insight. Not because I have the pulse on the situation, but because I cannot be the only guy out of 3.5 billion that feels the way I do. So with that out of the way:
My career field (occupational safety and health/workplace safety/human factors engineering) is one that is extremely competitive. According to what I read on the website of the professional society that oversees the profession, entry level positions typically had over 300 applications, and it could be well over a hundred for mid-level management positions. Standing out from the crowd is difficult with that much competition, and in order to stand out, a person in my field MUST pursue professional certifications that are worth nothing but the privilege of having letters behind your name, AND, the "norm" for someone in my field is to change jobs every couple of years - staying longer is seen as stagnation and stagnation = BAD.
What I discovered through learning all of this really distilled down to one fact - the job I had to do on the jobsite is NOTHING like what I was asked to study in school. I found this to be completely unacceptable and felt as though I had been duped to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars in student loans to get through school. However, the reasons for my being unemployed long term have very little to do with what I just typed although they do contribute. The real reasons are:
1. I have a very bad attitude. I find trying to get along with other people to be much more trouble than it is worth.
2. I am not driven to succeed. Mediocrity is perfectly acceptable to me. I never sought a management position, and now with 10 years of experience under my belt, I am not looked at for entry-level positions.
3. Schooling focused on "hard skills" like my being able to take air samples or perform a time and motion study, rather than what is REALLY needed to succeed at work - soft skills like being able to get along with other people, workplace decorum, etc.
So in my typical long-winded way, I am saying that there are a lot of factors that come into play for why a man might be consistently unemployed. Sometimes it's that they have unrealistic expectations of what they should be doing; sometimes they just have the wrong attitude and personality to fit in with potential co-workers; sometimes they are being too picky about what constitutes "acceptable" work and won't take something beneath them; sometimes they have been turned down so many times that they just give up and go back to menial jobs and harbor resentment; sometimes men are just lazy and with the current state of the world, being lazy isn't looked down upon like it used to be.
