Around the developed world, data shows that young men and women increasingly diverge in their political ideologies.

Young men are much more conservative than young women.

That is not a problem in its own right, but it can have severely negative consequences. A deepening ideological divide makes dating and partnering harder, for example.

In an earlier piece I described the poor mental health of young people and hinted at the negative consequences of a large cohort of disenfranchised and unhappy young men.

Today we look at education, employment, and social data through the lens of young men in Australia. Is there a cohort of young men that are left behind, that see little economic hope, whose mental health and potential for political radicalisation are at crisis point?

Unemployment among young people (aged 15-24) is markedly worse for men (141,000 or 11.3 per cent) than for women (95,000 or 8.2 per cent).

This gender gap exists because Australia continues to transform into a knowledge economy. Highly educated workers on average take home bigger paycheques.

There are clearly exemptions where middle-skilled mining workers and some tradies out-earn university educated folk by a mile, but education more than anything determines your career prospects.

Women are already much more educated than men in Australia.

Of the five million Australians who completed a university degree, 2.7 million are women (19 per cent more women than men hold at least a BA degree). Below the age of 67 women are more educated than men. The education gap has only been widening in recent decades.

Looking at the current enrolments in higher education, we can see that the gender education gap will only intensify in the future.

At the 2021 Census, around 1.2 million people were formally enrolled at our universities. Almost 700,000 of them were women, accounting for 58 per cent of all enrolments.

Since the best........

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