Does the Future Really Belong to Women?

Or could we be about to see a reversal?

This is a longer piece - work in progress for something I may publish later. Really appreciate comments, including critical ones….

There is a consensus narrative forming that women are dominating post industrialised societies, and this trend is going to accelerate. But how good is the evidence for this really? Are the advances women have made particularly vulnerable to fiscal and economic shocks, particularly if part of the progress made has come from interventions which may not be sustained, or involving a degree of ‘thumb on the scale’?

A female future?

There is little doubt there is an education attainment gap, starting in school. In the UK in 2023, boys were on average 4.5 months behind girls in English and Maths at GCSE stage (taken at 16), while at A level (taken at 18), girls’ combined marks are around 1.5 grades higher than boys’. In both the UK and the US, women form a majority of those attending university (57% in the UK) and graduating.

Hanna Rosin in ‘The End of Men’ suggests that this reflects a permanent advantage women enjoy “‘the qualities most predictive of academic success are the ones that have always made up the good girl stereotype; self discipline and the ability to delay gratification”[1]

Similarly in the labour market, Brookings analysis suggest higher female participation is the overwhelming source of growth in US middle class household income in recent decades. In the UK, inactivity rates for women have fallen from 45% in 1971 to 25% now., with those for men rising from 5% to 18%. Among 18-24 year olds, 15.1% of men are now Not in Education, Employment and Training, compared to 11.2% of women[2].

As David Goodhart notes[3], in the UK, the gender pay gap is shrinking, possibly almost to nothing in the younger generation, while 30% of wives earn more than husbands.

This trend has been cited as a major cause of the breakdown of marriage among lower income classes. In parallel there has been a startling growth in the ‘deaths of despair’ in both the US and the UK. A recent study in the UK found that standardised rates of deaths of despair increased from 22.6 per 100,000 population in 2014 to 30.1 in 2022, with the already large gap between men and women widening further in the process, from 19.4 per 100,000 to 24.7.

Some argue the modern economy is fundamentally better suited to women’s skills. Rosin claims “Technology began to work against men, making certain brawn jobs obsolete and making what economists call ‘people skills’ ever more valuable…traditionally feminine attributes, like empathy, patience and communal problem-solving, began to replace the top down autocratic model of leadership and success”

Some studies have suggested this is reflected in higher performance by female managers, like the "Leadership Circle Profile", which focuses on the five ‘creating competences’ of relating, self awareness, authenticity, systems awareness and achieving, on which female managers typically score higher in 360 degree reviews.

As Richard Reeves put it, ‘we need a prosocial masculinity for a post-feminist world. And we need it soon’[4]

Or Is It?

Digging deeper into the numbers suggests a more complex picture, however.

Women are definitely doing better in school. This is an international trend, with complex and deep seated reasons. Some suggest that boys are disadvantaged by the predominance of women among teaching staff, inclined to deploy teaching methods better suited for girls than boys. While the gender balance in teaching in the UK has not changed much recently, there has been a longer term reduction in the proportion of male teachers at secondary school, from rough balance in the 1970s to around 38% now.

There is, however, some suggestion that the gap in the UK has recently narrowed to the lowest level it has been for 8-12 years[5]. This could be a result of rolling back the amount coursework contributes to final marks, with an official report concluding that

“For GCSE specifications with coursework, in general female students outperform their male peers whereas, for those without coursework, the reverse is true.”

With the growing threat of AI tools, it is hard to see much of a future for coursework.

The trend towards female domination at universities is particularly pronounced at lower status universities and in lower status courses. The overall percentage of female students is 57% but at the more prestigious Russell group universities the rate is mainly lower than this[6]. Eight of the ten courses surveys identified in a BBC/IFS survey on degrees with the lowest earning potential after 10 years were above averagely female dominated, seven of them by five percentage points or more.

A recent IFS report looked at the ‘graduate premium’, finding that 15% of women and 20% of men would be financially better off if they had not studied. Less well reported was the fact that 40% of male students and 50% of female represented a lifetime burden for the taxpayer.

The reportnoted

“Adding together net private and exchequer returns yields the total return to HE around 30% of both men and women have negative total returns”

Moreover, if the main purpose of university is to provide a selection tool for employers, the net benefit of a degree to the taxpayer will have been exaggerated (because the same person might have got the job without obtaining a degree, or the same tax income could have been raised from somebody else).

This suggests the university system involves a modest but material cross subsidy of female students, which might be higher once selection effects are properly taken into account.

There are interesting differences in the type of jobs men and women go on to do. In the UK, 89.6% of women were employees at the end of 2023 compared with 83.5% of men. Conversely, around 10% of women were self-employed compared with 16% of men.

The public sector is heavily female dominated, with nearly two thirds of all workers female, and a particularly strong presence at lower grades. The civil service is around 55% female (48% at the most senior grades).

Women have a growing role in the professions. Official data shows 62% of all solicitors are women, at the largest firms 47% of salaried partners are women, compared to 32% of equity partners (the most senior level).

Within the law, there is some evidence of women gravitating towards areas involving greater personal/relationship involvement, and the areas of public law and regulation. For example, while 38% of lawyers in the criminal area and 47% on corporate work are women, property work has 54% female representation and private client work 58%.

In all sectors, the HR profession is overwhelmingly female. 80% of CIPD members are women. This split is still reflected in more senior roles (61% are female and 39% are male) but is much more pronounced in junior roles, where 91% of those in HR administrative roles are female, compared to just 9% of men.

Claims of a distinctly female, modern style of successful management lack robust evidence. There ought in principle to be plenty of ways of testing whether female led organisations outperform male ones. Successive attempts to demonstrate a ‘diversity benefit’ like the series of influential McKinsey studies have been subject to critiques without any apparent response thus far, suggesting the criticism may be well founded.

Similar fashionable trends in management promoted by many within HR like the ‘servant leader’ phenomenon, supposedly also particularly suited for female managers, are interesting, but data light. It is striking that the vast majority of wealth growth on the US stock market has been delivered by a narrow range of tech companies in the ‘FAANG’ group whose founders and chief executives like Jobs, Zuckerburg Gates, Musk and Bezos tend to demonstrate pretty old fashioned, even macho, management styles.

While female presence at the board of major UK companies is now approaching 50% (46%), this is heavily driven by non executive roles. Forbes claims around 7% of established Fortune 500 CEOs are female, while in the UK the number is similar. There are fewer female board members at private companies not subject to the same public and regulatory pressures to improve gender balance, with 31% at the top 50 private companies, and possibly even fewer elsewhere

The Government commissioned Rose Review noted that just over 20% of new company formations were ‘all female led’, and female involvement was particularly high in sectors heavily dependent on public spending, like health and social care and education. In 2017, women were responsible for just over 11% of Uk patents, compared to around 10-15% in the US[7]

Government Policies and Women in the Job Market

A number of government policies have influenced the job market to women’s benefit; sometimes intentionally, sometimes indirectly.

Employment protection rules are a cost imposed on business to meet social ends. Some benefit women directly (eg maternity pay). In other cases the impact of the rules are more indirect.

Sick pay in the uncertified period is not a statutory requirement, but is provided by most employers. A study suggests women take considerably more sick days, whether or not they have children, and this gap seems to be growing in most European countries.

Increases to minimum wage rates since 2016 have reduced rates of low pay, particularly for women. The Low Pay Commission estimated that around 6.4% of female employees aged 25 and over were paid at the relevant minimum wage rate in April 2022, compared with just under 4.4% of male employees[8].

The Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, triggered primarily by the 1968 strike at the Ford factory in Dagenham where 850 female sewing machinists went on strike after being paid 15% less than their male colleagues performing similar work.[9]

Since the Act was first passed, its remit has gradually been expanded to introduce the concept of work ‘of equal value’. This has ultimately led to massive awards in cases like Birmingham City Council, bankrupting the council.

These judgements are also impacting the private sector. In a recent case, 3,540 workers at Next Retail Limited were awarded an equal pay claim,[10] made on the basis that pay rates for warehouse workers were higher than for retail workers, the latter having a higher proportion of women. The tribunal determined that differential pay between the two jobs was an example of pay discrimination, irrespective of the job market arguments presented by the company, including that retail workers had rejected the offer of warehouse jobs.

The Equal Pay Act has created an odd situation where courts are asked to make judgements about the relative status of quite different jobs, irrespective of the workings of the market.

The past 15 years has seen a marked compression of wages in the public sector, particularly the civil service. This was part of a conscious Government policy to mitigate the impact of austerity for the lower paid. This has reduced differentials, and has also indirectly benefited women who are slightly more represented at lower grades.

Affirmative action in the US sense is illegal in the UK, which only allows ‘positive action’ to encourage applicants from protected groups and a preference for such a candidate in a competition if their ability is otherwise equal. While the courts have taken a series of cases on indirect discrimination, evidence of direct discrimination against women is now very rare. The same is not necessarily the case in the opposite direction, however. An enquiry commissioned by the RAF found the RAF had unlawfully discriminated against white men in a recruitment drive aimed at boosting diversity.

The expansion in the university sector has obviously seen a huge increase in the number of graduates. This has led to the growth in ‘credentialism’, a requirement for degrees in jobs that did not previously need them.

The vast majority of degree requirements are not statutory or imposed by a professional body, but a result of internal company policies or practice, mainly emanating from HR departments. This will stem both from an assumption that a degree demonstrates higher cognitive skills as well as organisational ability and conscientiousness. It may also, however, be a defensive approach, both making the recruitment process more manageable and introducing an apparently objective criterion less likely to be challenged.

Manjari Raman of Harvard Business School has noted in the US a significant degree gap – the discrepancy between the demand for a college degree in job postings and the proportion of current employeeswith a college degree. For example, in 2015, 67% of production supervisor job postings asked for a college degree, while only 16% of employed production supervisors had one.”[11]

Given what has already been noted about growing female dominance in the degree courses, degree requirements will introduce a structural bias in favour of women.

Wider Policies and their Differential Gender Impact.

The decline of male blue collar work is often presented as an inevitable feature of the modern economy. But highly paid, male dominated, blue collar work has also suffered as a result of policy choices by successive Governments whose differential impact has never been analysed (despite the theoretical requirement to do this under the Equality Act).

Nowhere in the world has manufacturing contracted as a share of the economy as rapidly as in the UK, driven particularly by Net Zero policies and the associated very high energy costs. Every additional percentage point decline in the manufacturing share of the workforce represents almost 400,000 additional jobs lost, mostly male.

North Sea Oil exploration and extraction is being phased out as a conscious act of Government policy, and fracking continues to be blocked, also on Net Zero grounds (though the gas will only be replaced by imported LPG with a larger carbon footprint). These are particularly well paid, largely male jobs.

The UK famously struggles to build infrastructure. The Lower Thames Crossing has already spent £300m before any decision has been taken, with the application running to 360,000 pages. Norway built the world’s longest road tunnel for less than this. This has an interesting gender aspect too. Instead of engineering and construction workers (male dominated) the money has gone on a range of legal, compliance, environmental and public affairs work, more white collar and in much more female dominated sectors.

There is general acceptance that the UK is way behind where it needs to be on housing, driven by a range of NIMBY and environmental concerns. If construction workers had the same share of the workforce as during the 1960s and 1970s there would be an additional 400,000 or so jobs, again largely male.

Gender Dynamics

One of the most complex challenges in forecasting future trends is the possible existence of ‘tipping points’. In the past, female domination of professions tended to be associated with the profession losing status and experiencing relative salary decline. The most famous example is teaching, which became dominated by women, particularly for younger children, from the mid 1800s.

As the Littleton School Committee of Littleton, Massachusetts commented in 1849, “God seems to have made women peculiarly suited to guide and develop the infant mind, and it seems…very poor policy to pay a man 20 or 22 dollars a month, for teaching children the ABCs, when a female could do the work more successfully at one third of the price.”[12]

Similar patterns were seen for clerks who became typists, or personal secretaries becoming personal assistants, or shop assistants.

The same happened to doctors in the old Warsaw Pact countries, where women “tend[ed] to gravitate to, and make up the majority of those enrolled in, medicine, education, arts, and the humanities”[13]. This seems to have led to a dramatic reduction in the status of the medical profession. In the 1980s Soviet Union, 70% of all doctors were female. A general practitioner earned 130 rubles a week, more than a hospital orderly but less than a typical bus driver[14] (quite how this was reconciled with Marx’s Labour Theory of Value is unclear).

There seems to be a phenomenon in which men leave professions or institutions once female presence exceeds a certain threshold[15]. In the US, occupations experienced sharper falls in male employment rates at tipping points ranging from 25% to 45% (white collar) and 13% to 30% female (blue collar) occupations from 1940 to 1990. Similar phenomena risk happening at universities, where subjects like veterinary science have seen male enrolment collapse.

Whether modern trends will see the same hit to pay and prestige is open to question. Clearly politics and society have changed dramatically over recent decades, and regulatory or legislative measures might counteract the trend.

The particular problems of universities

While the culture of workplaces will clearly change as the gender balance shifts, normally you would not expect this to affect the underlying job that much. Universities may be slightly different however. There is growing evidence to suggest that women and men have quite different approaches to questions that are key to the underlying purpose of a university.

One study of psychology professors demonstrated major differences between male and female in the readiness to believe heterodox statements, and readiness to sanction those who hold unpopular beliefs, with women generally much more in favour of the most severe sanctions.

These findings have been replicated on numerous occasions.

Eric Kaufmann has identified what he calls ‘asymmetric intolerance’ which female students are far more likely to engage in – for example refusing to date people with different political views[16] , while his own polling also suggests that “younger and female respondents are consistently more pro[17]-PC than middle aged and older people or men, even after taking ideology into account”.

The risk for universities is that an intellectual monoculture develops, rigorous debate is discouraged, leading to a deterioration in the quality and variety of thought and the likelihood of innovation, and possibly the attractiveness of universities to donors. If this is accompanied by the sort of ‘male flight’ described above, with knock on consequences for university incomes, this could pose a serious threat to the long term health of the sector, for all its strong incumbent advantages.

Conclusions: Where are we going from here?

For many years now, policies in western countries like the UK have focused on ensuring various previously disadvantaged groups had at least proportionate presence in key jobs, ranging from politics and senior management to symbolically important roles like the police and the armed forces.

At the same time, an odd trend has been noticed in some of the societies where gender equality has gone furthest, notably Scandinavia, where a broad commitment to gender equality has actually been accompanied by growing gender diversity or even segregation in the workplace. In Sweden, for example, the public sector is 75% female, while women make up only 31% of private sector managers compared to 43% in the US. The female share of STEM graduates has also become one of the lowest in the world in these countries.

The general picture of women advancing over recent decades holds true throughout the Western world. This paper sets out a range of trends that suggest the strengthening position of women in the labour market may be on shakier foundations than generally felt, however. Obviously much depends on assumptions about future growth and fiscal trends. The economic prospects look difficult; Western societies have little room to stimulate through spending, while the low interest rate approach has been tested to destruction. There has to be a material chance of a fiscal shock requiring major spending reductions and potentially stagnant growth requiring a lightening of regulation to retore growth. Both of these could have a major impact on women in the workplace, reversing what seemed an unstoppable trend.

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[1] P119

[2] Lost Boys: State of the Nation. Centre for Social Justice March 2025

[3] The Care Dilemma, 2024

[4] Reeves, Richard Of Boys and Men

[5] The Times Educational Supplement’s take on the narrowing gap was a headline “Experts point to mental health struggles, absence, misogyny and exclusions”

[6] https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/students/whos-in-he#characteristics

[7] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/report-gender-balance-in-worldwide-patenting

[8] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN06838/SN06838.pdf

[9] LSE, ‘The Ford sewing machinist strike and the history of the struggle for equal pay’, link.

[10] Employment Tribunals, ‘Miss M Thandi and Others vs. Next Retail Limited and Next Distribution Limited’, link.

[11] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication Files/dismissed-by-degrees_707b3f0e-a772-40b7-8f77-aed4a16016cc.pdf

[12] ‘Heroes Heroines and History’ blog

https://www.hhhistory.com/2018/08/19th-century-schoolteacher-requirements.html

[13] Women and Socialism: A Comparative Study of Women in Poland and the USSR

Jill M. Bystydzienski Signs, Vol. 14, No. 3 (Spring, 1989), pp. 668-684 (17 pages)

[14] Eaton, Katherine B. Daily Life in the Soviet Union. Westport: Greenwood, 2004.

[15] Pan, Jessica Gender Segregation in Occupations: The Role of Tipping and Social Interaction

Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 33, No. 2 (April 2015), pp. 365-408

[16] See also https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/liberals-have-most-difficulty-getting-along-opponents-culture-war-issues

[17] Kaufman, Eric: Taboo