Young women are now consistently earning more than their male counterparts for the first time, according to a report that warns of a social “crisis” gripping young men.
Women and girls aged 16 to 24 in both white-collar and blue-collar jobs make nearly 10 per cent more on average than their male peers, according to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank.
The report, Lost Boys, highlights how a generation of young men are facing far worse outcomes than young women in education and beyond, falling further behind by virtually every yardstick, while changing social attitudes leave them feeling isolated.
“Boys and young men are in crisis,” the report says. “Whilst the last hundred years have been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women, in this generation it is boys who are being left behind. And by some margin.
“From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls."
The report found that the coronavirus pandemic and the consequences of lockdowns have only increased the gap between young men and women
“Since the pandemic alone, the number of males aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training has increased by a staggering 40 per cent compared to just seven per cent of females,” it adds.
"For those young men who are in full-time work, the much-vaunted gender pay gap has been reversed. Young men are now out-earned by their female peers, including among the university-educated.”
In 2020-21, the average young man earned £24,032 and the average young woman £23,021. Those figures cross the following year. Then, as male wages virtually stagnate, female wages climb significantly. By 2022-3, the average young man earned £24,283 and the average young woman £26,476, which is 9 per cent more.
The report blames the decline of traditionally “male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and construction” for causing a rapid fall in “secure, well-paid and meaningful jobs that used to be available to non-university educated young men”.
The CSJ’s analysis also shows that “at all stages of our education system, boys are behind”, beginning in early years and persisting all the way to higher education.
The report also warns that young men are lacking key role models and that traditional male values have been undermined. A poll conducted for the report found that more than four in ten agree society does not value traditional masculine values such as courage, resilience and competitiveness. At the same time, half of men aged 18 to 24 say men are too often shown by the media as “a bit pathetic”.
The CSJ has a long track record of having its solutions — which, for this issue, are due to be presented in a second report — adopted by governments. Founded by the former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith, its state-of-the-nation reports on the broken welfare system were the driving force behind the creation of
universal credit and landmark legislation to combat modern slavery and human trafficking.
The think tank enjoys cross-party support and its interest in social issues is shared by the
Blue Labour group, which is growing in influence on Labour’s backbenches. The Lost Boys report was also endorsed by Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester.
The former Conservative MP Miriam Cates, a senior fellow at the CSJ, said: “For too long, politicians, policymakers, the media and the arts have turned a blind eye to the needs of boys in the name of ‘equality’. We are now reaping the whirlwind.
“Far from creating equality, we have penalised young men for the crime of being male, labelling them ‘toxic’ and ‘problematic’ and failing to provide a positive vision of masculinity. Things need to change, and fast.”
The report was backed by Lawrence Dallaglio, the former England rugby union captain and founder of the charity Rugby Works, which helps children who have been excluded from schools. “Something is going wrong in our society when it comes to boys and young men,” he said. “While we tiptoe around just about every other social group, when we are not taking them for granted we treat them as the lowest of the low. The result is a disaster in our classrooms, prison cells and mortuaries.
“I know this is true from my own work: 230 children are kicked out of mainstream education every week, 75 per cent of which are boys. No boys are born bad — they’re just born into chaos.
“Young boys need positive relationships that build trust, and a constructive way to vent their energy. We have been so careless in our downgrading of the traditional masculine virtues that we are in danger of leaving a whole generation behind.”
Education
Our education system is not working for boys,” the report warns. “From the day they start primary school, to the day they leave higher education, the progress of boys lags behind girls.” One of
Sir Keir Starmer’s government “milestones” is to ensure that 75 per cent of reception-age children are ready for school. The figure is currently 67 per cent, but this conceals a huge gender gap: 75 per cent of girls are school-ready, compared with just 60 per cent of boys.
On average, across every subject at GCSE, boys’ results are half a grade lower than girls’. At A-level, girls outperform boys by an average of more than a grade and a half across their best three subjects. Boys are also twice as likely as girls to be excluded from school, while in British universities, female students outnumber males by three to two.
Employment
From July to September last year, 15.1 per cent of men aged 16 to 24 were not in education, employment or training, compared with 11.2 per cent of women. The percentage equates to 550,000 men, an increase of more than 150,000 on pre-pandemic levels.
Young men aged 16 to 24 are also much more likely to be unemployed than young women. Male-dominated industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and construction amount to just 16 per cent of GDP in 2023, compared with more than 40 per cent in 1970.
Families
An epidemic of family breakdown means millions of boys are deprived of any positive model of manhood, the report says. About 2.5 million children in the UK — about a fifth of the total — have no father figure at home. As the report puts it: “Boys are more likely now to own a smartphone than to live with their dad.”
By age 14, almost half of firstborn children do not live with both natural parents, compared with just 21 per cent of those born in 1970. Meanwhile, a third of young men aged 20 to 34 (2.2 million in total) were living at home with parents in the UK in 2023, compared with less than a quarter of young women, (1.4 million).
Of those aged 18 to 24, two thirds of men and half of women believe fatherlessness is a leading cause of behavioural problems. It is also a burden on the taxpayer. The cost of family breakdown was previously estimated at £51 billion a year, but, the report notes, “accounting for inflation this would now be £64 billion”. It also details the social impact: 76 per cent of children in custody said they had an absent father.
Nearly half of Britons say women’s equality has gone “far enough”.
Crime
While most criminals are men, young men are also the predominant victims of violent crimes, particularly those involving knives and gangs.
As of September 2024, 96 per cent of the prison population (then about 87,000) was male. Boys in youth custody outnumbered girls by 529 to 11.
In June 2022-23, boys accounted for 87 per cent of homicide victims aged 16 to 24, and nine out of ten victims of teenage violence were male. Men accounted for more than 90 per cent of hospital admissions for knife crime.
Health
British boys “are less healthy than at any time in living memory”, the report says, with one in four boys in Year 6 clinically obese.
The report also details how boys as young as 13 are now using steroids to enhance their appearance, apparently oblivious to the health risks.
By 2023 5.1 per cent of boys — one in 20 — had an eating disorder. In 2017, the number was a statistical irrelevance.
Suicide is the biggest cause of death among young men. “Between the ages of 15 and 19, for every girl that took their own life, almost three and a half boys did likewise,” the report notes. “A man in the East Midlands is six times more likely to take [his] own life than a woman in London.”
Sex and pornography
The rise of online pornography and smartphones is transforming childhood and young men’s understanding of sex. The report also warns that social media algorithms are pushing more violent content.
The average age at which children first see online pornography is 13, while one in ten are as young as nine. One in four young men watch pornography most days or every day.
More than half of child sexual abuse and exploitation is now child-on-child, with boys the perpetrators in nine out of ten cases.
In schools, meanwhile, an increasing number of female teachers are reporting sexual harassment from male pupils.
