Gen Z gender pay gap flips — young women now out-earning young men. So, what’s going on with the boys?
Mark Brooks has a history of being politely ignored. “Ten years ago, there wasn’t really any recognition that men and boys had problems,” he says. “Now the environment has changed.” That change was signalled earlier this month by health secretary Wes Streeting, who declared there is a “crisis in masculinity.” “Society has been slow to wake up to the fact that a lot of men and boys are really struggling today,” he said. “The truth is it can be quite tough to be a young man in today’s society.”
Streeting was speaking at the launch of The Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys (CPRMB), a new organisation that aims to create actionable policies addressing declines in men’s health, work opportunities, and life expectancy—an issue rising up the political agenda. Brooks—who serves as their policy adviser and has campaigned on men’s health for decades—helped produce the CPRMB’s first report. Missing Men details the challenges facing men and boys and follows the Centre for Social Justice’s Lost Boys report, which offers a similarly stark picture of male outcomes.
Over the past year, politicians have grappled with men’s changing status. A group of Labour MPs is exploring ways to connect with boys as Gen Z support for Reform grows. In November, Streeting unveiled the first-ever men’s health strategy and noted that the leading cause of death for men under 50 is suicide—“a fact so shocking that I nearly fell off my chair,” he commented (though it’s been the case for men aged 20 to 34 since 2001). The Netflix drama Adolescence, which questioned whether disenfranchised schoolboys could be radicalised toward femicide, even caught the prime minister’s attention; he recommended it be screened in schools.
“Adolescence has been very helpful in one respect,” says Brooks. “We’ve seen this political mainstreaming of the need to actually start looking at the challenges and barriers that men and boys face.”
One key finding from Lost Boys is the reversal of the gender pay gap among 16–24-year-olds in full-time work. For much of Gen Z, including recent graduates, women now slightly out-earn men. Later in life, the gap is expected to shift back toward men, driven by male dominance in high-paying sectors and the “motherhood penalty.” But as Luke Taylor from the CSJ notes: “In some ways the gender pay gap is fascinating, but not really the point. It’s kind of a symptom of a wider change.”
Taylor explains much of this larger trend stems from the decline of working-class male jobs and boys’ underperformance in education relative to girls. “There has been a long-term hollowing out of work in the industrial sector for men with lower education levels. And the expectation of that kind of work has very much changed, because there are fewer of these jobs, and now you might need a degree,” he says. Women aged 20–24 in the UK are now slightly more likely to be employed than men, while the number of young men who are neither working nor studying is rising.
In education, women have pulled ahead across virtually every metric: outperforming boys at GCSEs and A-levels, comprising a majority at universities, and earning more first-class degrees. Although they now slightly dominate Oxbridge admissions, men still claim more first-class degrees.
Women continue to dominate areas like education, nursing, psychology, and social work but have also surged into high-paying fields. Law school applications from women now double those of men, and female graduates in medicine and dentistry have nearly twice the number of males—earning salaries between £25K–50K, alongside longer training periods. Taylor says he found this surprising: “…they’re actually now far, far more likely to be doing things like medicine and dentistry or things like law as well. And then you get quite a significant number [of] men doing things like PE and political sciences, which are not the most highly paid occupations.”
Meanwhile, boys face higher exclusion rates, almost twice that of girls, with white British boys on free school meals performing the worst, according to parliamentary research. Taylor stresses the need to acknowledge whether boys’ struggles stem from inherent ability or systemic failure, urging increased support.
Brooks recommends cultural change in schools. After visiting schools with no gender gap, he identified a “boy-positive environment” where boys were visibly valued, disciplines were fair, bullying was tackled, and the purpose of learning made clear. A headteacher shared that her corridors celebrated female students exclusively, leading boys to feel invisible—a cultural shift that needs reversing.
Notably, boys still lead in UK STEM Olympiads—elite, high-stress academic contests. Despite the voluntary nature and concentration in grammar or independent schools, girls are underrepresented. For example, only 4 of 60 in Maths Olympiad teams over 2016–2025 were female, and between 2015–24, no girls were on the Physics Olympiad international team. Chemistry saw at least one female competitor in the past decade, and the 2024 Biology Olympiad team was exclusively female. Brooks emphasizes that boosting boys doesn’t mean disadvantaging girls—and that the next step is rigorous, evidence-based research into interventions that level the playing field for both genders.
“The next phase around boys’ education is far more evidence-based research – looking in depth about what works best for boys in school in a way that doesn’t negatively impact women and young girls’ education performance,” he says. “Tweaking how you view and support boys in school does not need to have a negative impact on the educational performance of girls.”
Note to our readers: This article draws on verified expert insights from the Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys and the Centre for Social Justice. Reports, parliamentary findings, and trusted sources have been carefully checked to ensure accuracy and credibility.
