Signs are emerging that the dominance of women in higher education is finally flowing through to income.
The Financial Times reported this week that, in the United Kingdom and the United States, young women were starting to be better paid than their male counterparts.
This was reflecting the higher education levels of women as well as the overall declining work fortunes of young men.
In the UK non-graduate young men had gone from earning 57 percent more than women in 1991 to 10 percent less in 2022.
“It is a similar story in the US, where young non-college women and college-educated people of both sexes have all seen incomes either hold up or increase, but non-college men have plummeted down the income distribution,” the paper said.
In Australia, Workplace Gender Equality Agency data still shows gender pay gaps favouring men in every age group.
However, this could be changing. For those 24 and under the gap is just 2.5 percent compared with more than 30 percent for those aged 45-64.
The latest figures show women in Australia represent 60 percent of higher education enrolments and outnumber men in completion rates.
The Financial Times report said the changing gender pay profile was also creating a new social paradigm.
Growing numbers of female graduates were discovering a shortage of socio-economic counterparts and also had less need to “pair up” with a man for financial support.
The report also said that in many developed countries young women were more likely than men to be in work and the number of young men who were neither in work, education or training was on the rise.
“In countries including the UK, France, Spain and Canada there are now more young men than women in effect outside the economy for the first time in history,” the report said.
Last month Fortune magazine reported that women were also on a trajectory to control the majority of the world’s personal wealth in the decades ahead.
The full report is on the Financial Times website. The Australian figures are on the Workplace Gender Equity Agency website.
