A new report found that nearly four in ten American adults don't have a job and are not looking for one.

President Donald Trump alleged – in his election-season – that America’s unemployment rate did not tell the whole story and is ‘one of the biggest hoaxes in modern politics’.  He claimed that the real unemployment rate could actually be 40 percent higher.

Anyone without a job and who has been actively seeking work in the last four weeks is considered, by the government, to be unemployed.  Slipping through the cracks are those who have simply given up trying to get back into the labor force.

A new study by Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, takes a closer look at the more than ninety-four million Americans not counted in the labor force.  In this analysis, the following questions were explored.  Of the approximately twenty four million men and women of working age who were not in the labour force in 2016:

• What are the reasons given for not working or seeking work?
• With whom are these persons living?
• How are they making ends meet?

The findings were that women with a high school education or less are overwhelmingly the largest group out of the labor force.  Excluding the care givers - who make up approximately forty percent - men and women give the same reasons for not belonging to the labor force.  Almost thirty per cent report being ill or disabled; eight percent are students and five percent have retired early.

Male and female nonparticipants were found to have different living arrangements, with females living with a spouse or partner and males living with parents.  Almost seventy five percent of these live in a household with earned income and only eleven percent report claiming income from a safety net when they are not receiving earned income.  More than 1.3 million Americans who are not in the labor force report having no income at all.   Forty five percent of households with a male prime-age nonparticipant and twenty eight percent with a female prime-age nonparticipant are in the bottom income group.

Researchers also found that more women than men sat on the sidelines in every educational subgroup, despite the fact that more women hold advanced degrees than men.

The report said, "Interestingly, the gender ratios among nonparticipants become more imbalanced as education increases. Among nonparticipants with a high school degree or less, there are nearly 2 women for every man; at the bachelor's degree level, three-and-a-half times as many women as men are nonparticipants."

Roughly 13 percent were not in any of the categories but had worked in some capacity over the course of the past year.

"Labor force participation is the key channel through which Americans contribute to and benefit from their economy, making it vital that we understand who is left out of the labor force," the report said. "Economic growth and broad sharing in that growth are both enhanced when the labor market makes the best possible use of workers' talents."