I've discussed this in the past, but the basic reasoning here is that more and more people ("men" are singled out for this article but it's irrelevant) are leaving academia and not looking back, along with rising populations of people opting to not enter academia in the first place.

Science offers a shitty value proposition: spend your youth in the laboratory for poverty-wages, then your late youth doing the same for poor wages, then your middle age doing the same for poor wages, then maybe you become a professor and make average to decent wages. Sure, science is interesting, and for a certain kind of personality (mine, for instance) the bullshit can be tolerated, for a time. Some people can tolerate it forever because tolerating bullshit means they get to research something that is intensely interesting to them.

But everyone sees the writing on the wall-- science is not a path to a healthy middle class lifestyle for the current generation, and wasn't for the previous generation of scientists either. In fact, I reckon you'd have to go back to the boomers if you want to see people who really had a good thing going in the scientific establishment. There is no opportunity to "hit it out of the park" and somehow come back with a windfall.