If boys are being 'left behind' at uni, then why do they grow up to spectacularly overtake women in the workplace?

By Josephine Fairley. As the university gender gap grows, with the number of girls applying to study outweighing boys, entrepreneur Josephine Fairley asks why, in the workplace, the reverse is happening: men are paid 16 per cent more than women doing the same jobs on average and fewer women are promoted into top jobs.
I don’t need any reminding how hard young women are working right now to get into university. I’m surrounded by them: 17- and 18-year-old god-daughters, stepgranddaughters, daughters of friends, all of them barely visible behind stacks of books, and accidentally leaving scarily clever essays on ‘The Meaning of John Donne’s Poetry’ open on my computer for me to read with open-mouthed awe. That’s when they’re not on trains to scope out courses at Edinburgh, the University of East Anglia, Cambridge, Bristol (oh, and a flight to the US to look at Brown) – each followed by soul-searching conversations weighing up the pros and cons of their possible choices. More...