The gender pay gap is narrowing for millennials – ‘but for the wrong reasons’

“The Foundation’s analysis highlights a shift towards lower-skilled jobs, often done part-time, as the key reasons for the stunted pay progress of young men. Both men and women have been affected by a reduction in some traditional mid-skilled occupations over the last two decades, with a 40% fall in young men (aged 22-35) doing routine manufacturing jobs and a 66% reduction in the number of young women working in secretarial roles,” it added.

The roles that women usually took up when finding a job were generally lower-skilled and lower-paid in the past. Now more men are moving into that sector, while “employment growth amongst women has been overwhelmingly transferred into higher-skilled jobs,” it has seen men earn on a par with women in the last generation.

Here are some key points from the report:

• Between 1993 and 2015/16, the proportion of low paid work done by young men rose by 45%.
• There was a doubling of young men going into retail jobs — from 85,000 to 165,000 — while the number of millennial women doing these jobs has fallen at the same time.
• The number of millennial men working in bars and restaurants trebled to 130,000, from 45,000.

“The long-held belief that each generation should do better than the last is under threat,” said Torsten Bell, Executive Director at the Resolution Foundation.

“Millennials today are the first to earn less than their predecessors. While that in part reflects their misfortune to come of age in the midst of a huge financial crisis, there are wider economic forces that have seen young men in particular slide back.”