Around the developed world, data shows that young men and women increasingly diverge in their political ideologies.

Young men are much more conservative than young women. 

That is not a problem in its own right, but it can have severely negative consequences. A deepening ideological divide makes dating and partnering harder, for example.

In an earlier piece I described the poor mental health of young people and hinted at the negative consequences of a large cohort of disenfranchised and unhappy young men.

Today we look at education, employment, and social data through the lens of young men in Australia. Is there a cohort of young men that are left behind, that see little economic hope, whose mental health and potential for political radicalisation are at crisis point?  

Unemployment among young people (aged 15-24) is markedly worse for men (141,000 or 11.3 per cent) than for women (95,000 or 8.2 per cent). 

This gender gap exists because Australia continues to transform into a knowledge economy. Highly educated workers on average take home bigger paycheques.

There are clearly exemptions where middle-skilled mining workers and some tradies out-earn university educated folk by a mile, but education more than anything determines your career prospects.

Women are already much more educated than men in Australia.

Of the five million Australians who completed a university degree, 2.7 million are women (19 per cent more women than men hold at least a BA degree). Below the age of 67 women are more educated than men. The education gap has only been widening in recent decades.

Looking at the current enrolments in higher education, we can see that the gender education gap will only intensify in the future.

At the 2021 Census, around 1.2 million people were formally enrolled at our universities. Almost 700,000 of them were women, accounting for 58 per cent of all enrolments.

Since the best indicator for your future income is your level of education, it is all but certain that the gender pay gap in Australia will continue to narrow (and potentially even reverse).

I wrote in a previous column about how rapidly the gender pay gap in Australia is closing and really only is a primary carer pay gap for anyone under the age of 46. 

The very welcome shrinking of the gender wage gap (as the OECD refers to it) isn’t a uniquely Australian phenomenon. Gender discrepancies continue to shrink in the UK and US too, for example. Gender equality is great news for everyone and is not holding men back. 

The fact that we see fewer men in higher education while Australia continues to transition into a knowledge economy that requires more university educated workers suggests that the current education system isn’t working for young men the way it once did. 

We are leaving many young men behind as the next chart clearly shows. 

The chart looks at young people (aged 15-24) by sex that are neither in full-time education nor in the labour force. The labour force is made up of people with a job, all unemployed people, and all people away from work due to parental or medical leave. Statisticians talk about the NEET cohort (Not in Employment, Education, or Training). 

In the mid-1980s, young women finished their secondary or tertiary education to work for relatively short stints before starting a family in their early twenties.

As a stay-at-home mum, or housewife, many young women were part of the NEET segment. They weren’t in employment or education, but they were busy raising their kids and managing a household.

Young NEET men rarely were involved in such family focussed tasks. Gap years, breaks between the completion of education and start of work, or general disengagement are the most common reasons.  

The number of young NEET women declined as the age when women had their first child was pushed well into their thirties; women entered the university system at ever higher numbers, and female workforce participation rates increased year after year. 

The big question is: Why has the number of young NEET men increased so much that they now outnumber young NEET women?

To begin with, the way primary and secondary education is structured is easier to navigate for girls than boys. This is a big topic that I will certainly write about in the future. For now, we take it as fact that the setup of school is working better on average for girls than for boys. 

The second big problem has to do with changes to our apprenticeship model. Most apprentices are male (over 80 per cent) and aged 15 to 25 (73 per cent).

Today, Australia counts 80,000 male apprentices while in 2011 this number was almost twice as high. This dramatic decline in the number of apprenticeships available leaves young men with limited options. 

Thirdly, let me direct blame at technology. I described the negative impact that the online world has last week. To simplify things, young women’s self-worth is destroyed by image-based social media (Instagram and TikTok) while young men get hooked on video games and pornography.

For a more detailed analysis let me refer you to Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book The Anxious Generation. There is nothing inherently wrong with using social media or playing video games, but the addictive qualities and negative mental health issues are well documented.

Getting young men away from screens and back into the real world is a crucial challenge in minimising the NEET cohort since the negative consequences extend into the worlds of dating and politics. 

In the past women were locked out of the workforce and their only hope of climbing up the social ladder was to marry up. Sociologists call this the upwards social mobility of women.

Online dating platforms provide us with clear data showing that women still prefer their partner to be more educated than them and to have a higher income earning potential. That’s a problem for young women and young men alike. 

Young NEET men will find it hard to attract a female partner as women are looking for partners with at least equal or higher educational and earning prospects. That doesn’t mean that young NEET men couldn’t possibly find a partner, but their dating pool is smaller than it could be.

As women continue to outperform men in education and the gender pay gap continues to narrow, their pool of potential partners also keeps shrinking. This creates a social setup where educated, high-earning women and uneducated, low-income males struggle the most to find an adequate partner. 

The successful women consequently double down on their careers making it even harder to find a partner that meets their standards. Ineligible bachelors are disappointed by their dating prospects and further retreat into the digital world. A vicious circle. 

From a social perspective the single NEET men are of much bigger concern than the successful single women. Young disappointed men tend to vote for politically extreme policies (as my previous column on Thuringia in former East Germany showed) and show elevated potential for acts of violence.

It feels weird to talk about a reverse gender gap in education, but we must urgently create schools, apprenticeship programs, and career pathways that work for young men. We are all better off if we can significantly minimise the number of young NEET men.

 Demographer Simon Kuestenmacher is a co-founder of The Demographics Group. His columns, media commentary and public speaking focus on current socio-demographic trends and how these impact Australia. His podcast, Demographics Decoded, explores the world through the demographic lens. Follow Simon on Twitter (X), Facebook, LinkedIn for daily data insights in short format.