In 62 of the 97 countries reporting for 2024, a young woman was likelier than a young man to be neither working, studying nor training. The gap reaches 30.6 points in Mali and 28.7 in India.The overall youth rate hides it.

The gap the total hides#

For each country there are three published figures for 2024: the share of 15 to 24 year olds who were not in employment, education or training, then the same share for young women and for young men. The fourth column is the difference between the last two, in percentage points, computed here. Nothing else is added.

At the top of the gap column the two rates describe different countries. Mali is at 30.6 points: 44.4% of its young women and 13.8% of its young men were outside all three. India is at 28.7, with 39.0% against 10.3%. Honduras is at 26.9, Guatemala at 26.6 and Egypt at 20.0. Those five are the only countries of the 97 with a gap above twenty points, and they are also the five largest gaps in the whole set.

The overall rate says none of this. Guatemala, India and Iran print 24.0%, 24.2% and 24.3%, three figures a reader would call the same, over gaps of 26.6, 28.7 and 18.7 points. Colombia at 23.2% and Türkiye at 22.9% sit beside them on the total with gaps of 13.2 and 13.9. Six countries within 1.4 points of one another on the number usually quoted, and more than fifteen points apart on the number underneath it.

At the other end the sign turns. In France 11.4% of young women and 13.7% of young men were outside all three; in the United Kingdom 13.1% and 15.5%; in Montenegro 12.1% and 16.2%, the widest gap in that direction among the 97 at 4.1 points. Thirty-five countries have the rate for young men above the rate for young women, and none of them by more than that. South Africa carries the highest overall rate in this table, 34.6%, and one of its smallest gaps: 35.6% against 33.6%.

What the rate counts, and what it does not#

The measure is a share of everyone aged 15 to 24, and a person enters it when three things are true at once: no employment, no education, no training. It is broader than unemployment. The unemployment rate counts people who are without work, available for it and looking for it, as a share of those in the labour force; this rate counts people outside all three activities, as a share of their whole age group, whether or not they are looking for anything.

That difference is where the gap lives. A young woman who spends her days on unpaid domestic or care work is not in employment, not in education and not in training, so she is counted here. She is not counted as unemployed, because she is not looking for a job. A country can therefore show a small youth unemployment gap between the sexes and a very large gap on this measure, and the second is the one that describes what young women are doing with their time.

And it is not idleness. Unpaid work is work that the employment count does not see, and the rate says nothing about how a person outside all three spends the day. It says only that the day is not spent in a job, a classroom or a course. The table prints who is outside; it does not print why.

The ratio says Guatemala, the gap says Mali#

There are two ways to compare the rate for young women with the rate for young men, and they do not agree on the order. As a ratio, Guatemala leads: 3.89 young women outside all three for every young man, ahead of India at 3.78 and Mali at 3.22. As a gap in points, Mali leads at 30.6, then India, then Honduras, with Guatemala fourth. Eleven of the 97 countries have a ratio of two or more; three have a ratio of three or more; nineteen have a gap of ten points or more.

A ratio grows when the denominator is small. Guatemala’s rate for young men is 9.2%, the second lowest in this table after Mexico’s 8.2%, so almost any rate for young women makes a large multiple of it. Mali’s rate for young men is 13.8%, and its rate for young women is 44.4%, so the gap is wider in points and narrower as a multiple. Neither figure is wrong; the piece prints the gap because a point is the same size in every country and a multiple is not.

What none of this settles is why. Fourteen countries in one year can show that the overall rate conceals a split by sex, and how large the split is. They cannot say what produced it, whether schooling, marriage, care work, custom or the labour market, and this piece does not try. A small gap is not evidence of equal outcomes either: France’s young men are more often outside all three than its young women, and the rate says nothing about what either group is doing instead.