Last week in the FT, John Burn-Murdoch had a very interesting data story: Young women are starting to leave men behind (FT subscription required).
The main point is that in many developed countries, socio-economic outcomes for women in their 20s are starting to exceed those for men of the same age. For example, in the UK, US, Australia, and Canada, the proportion of 20-24 year olds who are employed is very similar for men and women or slightly higher for women.
New Zealand wasn’t included in the story so I thought I’d look up the comparable local data. Here’s what I found for NZ compared to the other countries in the FT story:
- The proportion of NZ women aged 25-34 with tertiary education exceeded that for men in 2005 and has continued to grow while the proportion of men with tertiary education has been flat. This trend is similar to other developed countries, although with a smaller gap between men and women (but there are differences in what counts as tertiary education across countries too).
- The proportion of NZ women aged 20-24 who are in employment remains lower than for men, although the gap has narrowed since around 2005. Compared to other countries, NZ seems to be a bit behind the trend of closing this gap but the employment rates may equalise in another 5 years or so.
- NZ men in their 20s earn substantially more than women and the gap for those aged 20-24 seems to have increased. Some of that could reflect the fact that more young women are in tertiary education at that age. The gap for those aged 25-29 has narrowed slightly. In the UK, median income for women aged 21-26 is slightly higher than that for men.
- The gap between women and men in their 20s who are not in employment, education or training (NEET rate) has reduced substantially from 13% in 2004 to 3.5% in 2023. This is due to a reduction in the NEET rate for women and an increase for men. The increase in the men’s rate in NZ is less than in other countries in recent years, although the level is similar to the UK and higher than in the US and Canada.
Overall, compared to other developed countries in the FT story, NZ seems to be somewhat lagging behind the trend of improving socio-economic outcomes for young women relative to young men.
One thing I wasn’t able to look at for NZ was the proportion of people who do other activities like caring for family members (the data is available for NZ by gender but not broken down by age). In the UK, young women are more likely than men to be caring for family members AND in work or education.
Note for data folks: I used the {ggbraid} package to help make these charts in ggplot. It’s great for shading the difference between two lines. The usual geom_ribbon() approach doesn’t work if the lines cross over.