Young women are starting to leave men behind

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Throughout the developed world, girls and young women have been moving forward of children and young people in the education system for several decades, and a much higher proportion of them attend university than their male counterparts.

This trend has been treated more as something to be observed than something to be taken into account. Understandably, efforts to achieve gender equality have become synonymous with improving women’s opportunities and outcomes. Men have always done better in the labour market anyway, and if women outperform men in education, this helps reduce the overall male advantage (or so it has been thought).

The problem with this approach is that in an increasing number of countries we have overcome a narrowing gap in socioeconomic outcomes and now there is a new and growing gap in the opposite direction.

Much less appreciated than the growing gap in higher education is the fact that in several rich countries young women are now more likely to be in work than young men. The UK joined this group in 2020, and since then the female employment rate advantage among 20- to 24-year-olds has widened to three percentage points. In the US, the shift has yet to occur, but the young women’s employment rate deficit has narrowed from almost 10 percentage points in 2006 to just one point last year.

In other words, the UK is part of a growing list of countries where the answers to the questions “Who does most of the work of raising children?”, “Who focuses on getting a good education?” and “OK, but who works to bring home a good income?” are all: “Women”.

If it were simply a case of women moving forward, it would be something to celebrate – and that side of the story certainly is – but a substantial minority of young men are actively moving backwards, and a growing number of them are finding themselves increasingly disengaged from society.

Across the developed world, the proportion of young men who are neither in education, employment nor looking for work has been rising steadily for decades. In countries such as the UK, France, Spain and Canada, for the first time in history there are more young men than women outside the economy. Unlike young women, these men are also often not involved in caring for other family members. They are adrift and are likely to need care themselves. More than 80 per cent of this group in the UK report long-term health problems.

Perhaps most striking of all, in 2022, for the first time, the average young woman in the UK had a higher income than her male counterpart. This is largely due to women being more likely to have a university degree and the salary that goes with it, but also to the deteriorating situation for men without a university degree, who have gone from earning 57% more than women without a university degree in 1991 to 10% less in 2022.

The story is similar in the United States, where young women without a college education and college-educated people of both sexes have seen their incomes remain stable or rise, but men without a college education have fallen in the income distribution.

While compositional change plays a role here (today’s non-college graduates are a very different group than non-college graduates 30 years ago), it cannot explain the markedly different trajectories of non-college men and women, which owe more to the ongoing transition from a Economy where jobs Tasks requiring hands, hearts, and heads were abundant and relatively remunerative compared to those in which the latter predominated.

But while discourse and politics remain focused on other things, the repercussions of these tectonic shifts are quietly playing out everywhere.

With socioeconomic trajectories taking different directions, a growing minority of young men and women I do not agreeSupport for right-wing populist parties among young men is increasing, particularly among those who are unemployed and have no university degree. Violent riots are more likely to occur with an ever-growing group of young people with little interest in society or their future.

And relationship formation itself is suffering, as increasing numbers of female graduates discover a shortage of male socioeconomic counterparts while also having less need than ever to pair up with a man for financial support.

Reversing the decline among men without a college degree will not be easy, nor should it become a zero-sum game with young women, but it is an essential challenge for the coming decades and will have positive repercussions far beyond those directly affected.

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch