Charlotte pickles unherd code#
Charlotte pickles unherd free#

Charlotte pickles unherd free#

In the UK, by 2015 an 18-year old woman was 35% more likely to enter higher education than a male peer – and for the poorest (those in receipt of free school meals) that figure is a huge 51%.

Charlotte pickles unherd code#

Alongside the many initiatives to encourage girls to code and women to study STEM, 8 we might have implemented initiatives targeted at disadvantaged young men.

And had we seen it, we might also have been actively concerned at the ever-widening educational gap between men and women. We might have seen this crisis brewing had we not, in both nations, been so busy celebrating super low unemployment.

This is compounded by the fact that wages in these sectors may be lower than in the lost manufacturing jobs, making them doubly ‘unworthy’. As the traditionally male-dominated, labor-intensive fields like manufacturing and mining diminish and are replaced by service-oriented positions in retail, healthcare, and education, men might see themselves as ill-suited for these ‘pink collar’ jobs, believing them to be ‘women’s work.’” “Culture might play a role deeper still in dictating the jobs that men think are worthy of taking. Which is where the outdated social constructs come into play (the unhelpful term ‘pink collar’ being exhibit A). It is about the changing nature of Western economies, in which service sector growth dwarfs that of manufacturing, and the future is high tech, high skill or ‘pink collar’.

6 (Though it might become one if the robots really rise.) Let’s be clear, this is not a problem of vacancies, ‘new’ jobs are being created as ‘old’ ones disappear – in the US in July there were 6.2 million job openings. Over the past few decades, while we have been celebrating increases in women’s participation in the workplace, men’s participation has been declining – in the US by a worrying 8 percentage points in the past 60 years 4 in the UK by 2.5 percentage points in the two decades to 2014. 3 Among other things, that means tackling bias ensuring access to affordable childcare, ‘returnships’ and flexible working and boosting low pay.īut it also means addressing those outdated social constructs – and that is as important for men as it is for women. 2 And with GDP growth needing all the help it can get, this is no time to take the foot off the pedal: the IMF estimates that raising the US female participation rate to that of men would add 5% to GDP (yet it’s recently started falling). In the US, analysis by McKinsey shows that increased female participation in the labour market between 19 boosted GDP by 25%. In focusing on empowering women, we have ignored a crisis among menįor decades governments in the West have sought to increase women’s participation – in education and work – and their earnings. Translated into adulthood it’s detrimental to both sexes – women are not programmed to ‘lean in’, and too many men retain an old-fashioned view of what it means to, well, be a man.Īs Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill argued in the New York Times, the problem is that while we’ve understood the damage to women and acted, meaning “women have learned to become more like men”, we have not taught men “to become more like women.” 1 The consequences can be seen in men’s sliding educational and labour market outcomes, and most devastatingly in their suicide rates.

Not always, not by everyone, and times are changing, but it would be head-in-sand denial to say these expectations don’t persist.