FT.com – Men’s education deficit is increasingly becoming an employment, earnings and outcomes gap, with significant repercussions: “Across the developed world, girls and young women have been pulling ahead of boys and young men in education for several decades, with much larger proportions going on to attend university than their male counterparts. This trend has generally been treated more as something to remark upon than to act on. The myriad domains in which women remain at a disadvantage to men have understandably led to efforts at achieving gender equality becoming synonymous with advancing women’s opportunities and outcomes. Men have always gone on to have better labour market outcomes anyway, and if women outperform men in education, this helps narrow the overall male advantage — or so the thinking has gone.”

See also PHYS.org: Gender equity paradox: Study finds sex differences in reading and science are largest in gender-equal countries. “A new study reveals that sex differences in academic strengths are found throughout the world and girls’ relative advantage in reading and boys’ in science is largest in gender-equal countries. Gender equality often draws attention especially in fields where women are underrepresented, such as high-status, high-paying STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) careers. Academic strengths, or a student’s best subject, strongly influence their field of study. Students with strengths in mathematics or science gravitate toward STEM fields, while those with a strength in reading gravitate toward other fields (e.g., journalism). The research team analyzed data from nearly 2.5 million adolescents in 85 countries over 12 years or in five waves (2006–2018) from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Their findings confirmed that girls’ strength is typically reading, while boys’ is typically mathematics or science. These patterns are found both across countries and time. The findings are published in the journal Psychological Science…”