Some time ago a friend who had lost his City job confessed he had considered killing himself. I was appalled but not surprised: while men are being hit harder by the recession than women they are also seem to be showing less resilience in dealing with unemployment and economic insecurity.
The trend in male unemployment, particularly among graduates and high-skilled men, did not begin with the recession and will not end with it. Rising male unemployment has been a feature of the socioeconomic change that many western countries have experienced in the last 30 years. Forecasts predict that women will dominate the professions within 15 years. This trend alone is enough for some to claim that a "cr of masculinity(男子气)" is on the horizon.
The emerging knowledge economy demands a new, softer skill set—empathy, sociability, confidence, resourcefulness. Women are perceived as being better at soft skills, and now they count for more. In the course of just over a decade, Demos research found, these skills became central to life chances: for those who turned 30 in 2000, such character capabilities had become 33 times more important in determining earnings.
But character can’t be taught in the classroom. Girls outperform boys at all levels of education. Between 1990 and 2004, the proportion of young women gaining two or more A-levels more than doubled, while the proportion of young men gaining this result increased much more slowly. More women than men go to university, and when they’re there, they do better: 58% of women gained first class and upper second degrees in 2006, compared to 50% of men.
It is not exactly a leap to argue that these trends are a result of the changes to GCSEs and A-levels that—with their burgeoning emphasis on project work rather than exams, on working in teams and on critical skills rather than hard facts—have benefited female students. So much so that A-levels are now being skewed(倾斜) back to favor boys, with more emphasis being put on exams rather than coursework.
So what can be done Interestingly there may be a genuine solution. Demos research shows that boys and young men can substantially boost employability, income and wellbeing by doing apprenticeships from age 16 instead of, or as well as, A-levels.
In fact, boys who did apprenticeships earned on average 7% more by the age of 30 than those who did not— regardless of whether the non-apprentices had high academic qualifications. Boys who took apprenticeships were more confident, happy and skilled by the time they were 30 than their non-apprentice contemporaries.
Society needs to get over this obsession with A-levels as the gold standard if we want to give boys the chance to succeed in this new job environment. Rigging A-levels won’t help. They need training to help them operate in the workplace, not qualifications that prepare them to fail.
Why can young men with apprenticeships earn more than those without