I only first heard it 20 years ago, I heard the phrase started in the 80's though. I heard it mostly used by older generations discussing why their children hadn't moved out after high school. Discussions which seemed to always ignore the increased generational cost of living gap and extreme rents at the time, while expecting young adults to be in full-time education. It was not used in a gender-specific way, probably because where I lived there had been changing expectations about women's independence and educations.
I can imagine that for other communities, which still expected that women would get married off young, stop working, and start having children, that there would have been additional expectations for the men they married to be able to provide for them.
I have women in my family who worked in organisations with rules which said that women had to resign when they got married. They were common rules for the time, along with no-divorce marriages. Were I a young woman back then, I would have been very selective about my long-term survival prospects too, faced with the choice of who I needed to rely on. If i were a young man back then, I also would have hated struggling to afford an extra group of people when being at the bottom of the pay/experience ladder.
tl;dr 'Incels' has a vastly different connotation to me and strict gender roles hurt everyone in different ways