An overworked engineer says he's an example of men taking on too much because of their 'bigger egos.' It could be why so many of them are leaving the workforce.

• Mason Garfield has been an engineer for over a decade.
• He used to enjoy his job, but when his employer got bought, he said he began working 80-hour weeks.

Mason Garfield didn't realize how much work ruled his thoughts until he had to take a break.

For 12 years, he was the engineering manager for a global supplier to the mining industry in Australia. Garfield, 38, spoke on condition that his real name not be used and that his employer remain anonymous for privacy reasons, but both have been verified by Insider.

It was a job he liked. For more than a decade, he told Insider, most of his workweeks were 40 hours. When he occasionally worked up to 70 hours on a tight deadline or in an emergency, he said his employers would acknowledge the extra time with rewards such as flying employees out to see a motorsport race in Melbourne.

"It was not work-related but just a way to show appreciation for our efforts," he said.

Things changed for Garfield when another company bought his in 2019. He said his new employer expanded his responsibilities without a pay raise and that the company no longer acknowledged employees' extra effort. Seventy to 80 hours weeks became the norm for Garfield and his team.

"The new company was only focused on sales and didn't ensure we had the manpower to actually execute the work," he said. "We very quickly became overwhelmed with workload, and when I showed that my department needed more resources, I kept getting knocked back."

People began to quit as the workload grew, he said.

"Now my time was taken up by reading résumés and conducting interviews, while trying to get a newer team up to speed and still execute projects that I didn't have the manpower to achieve," he said.

Garfield was stressed out and overworked, he said. Then he got shingles, which research has linked to stress' influence on the immune system.

He worked from home for a few days, even though it was too painful for him to put on a shirt and sleeping was "extremely difficult," he said. He didn't take time off because he didn't want to make his situation at work worse, he added.

But after recovering, he said, he knew his body needed a break. He booked a two-week vacation with his wife, but for the first week, he said he was still fixated on work.

"In the second week, I started to relax and finally started realizing how crazy the situation was," he said. "My mind was always occupied with work, so I needed to make a change."

After his vacation, he confronted management, saying he would work only 40 hours a week going forward — what he was paid to work — and that the company needed to hire more people. Garfield's move was similar to the "quiet quitting" phenomenon sweeping the workforce, in which employees do the work they're paid for and no more. But he was vocal about it, and management didn't argue with him.

Ultimately, though, Garfield migrated to a new company running a different lab, where he's been for five months.

He's a lot happier, he said. He's getting paid more and has a more-manageable set of responsibilities. That makes all the difference to him, Garfield said, and may indicate why other workers are quitting their jobs amid a persisting "Great Resignation" — especially men.

"I think COVID has also got people to reflect on what's important, and people are tired of being taken advantage of," he said. "People want fair pay for fair work. That's it."

More men may be quitting because they believe they aren't being compensated fairly — and because of their egos

Over the past four decades, men's labor-force participation has declined. A recent paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that this exodus had been largely driven by working-age men without a four-year college degree.

The study, conducted by Pinghui Wu, a researcher at the Boston Fed, found that men without a college degree were more likely to stop working or seeking work when their expected earnings fell in comparison with other workers. Men without a college degree have seen their real earnings fall 30% since 1980, the study said, compared with those of all "prime-age" workers, or people between 25 and 54.

For these men, jobs aren't just a source of income; they're a source of social status, Wu found, something that's especially true for white men and younger men. Concerns about marriageability were one reason that Wu mentioned, but she referenced several other factors: Some of these men are going back to school, and a large percentage of prime-age men who left the workforce reported disability conditions at the time of their exits, which stress and low self-esteem can contribute to.

But in thinking about the aspects of pay and social status, Garfield said that in his experience, not getting paid for the work you do could hurt your self-worth. In general, research has found that men are socially conditioned to not ask for help when they need it.

"I think too many men don't want to say they are overloaded or have too much on their plate," Garfield said. "I think men have bigger egos and don't want to look weak, and unfortunately, companies use this to their advantage."

Garfield said recognizing that his work life was influencing his physical and mental health pushed him to change his relationship with work.

"Work-life balance is now extremely important to me," he said. "It wasn't really a factor before. I am very clear and create strict lines between work and home."