(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- There’s a gender divide in how recent college graduates are responding to a cooling US job market.
While young college-educated women are sticking with their job search even as the number of vacancies shrinks, many of their male peers are choosing to take a break. The share of male college graduates participating in the workforce has declined in the past year, with 1 in 5 under the age of 25 neither employed nor actively looking for work, according to the latest 12-month average in a Bloomberg News analysis of government data.
That contrasts with the data for female graduates, which show their participation rate holding broadly steady over the past few years. One big reason is that they’re more likely than men to turn to part-time work or take jobs they’re overqualified for to support themselves. They have slightly lower rates of underemployment than their male colleagues, a Burning Glass Institute report found, possibly because they find creative ways to kickstart their careers.
“When faced with unemployment or with a tough job market, women are resourceful and practical about making money in the moment as opposed to just giving up,” says Natasha Quadlin, a sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles. “Perhaps men think that it’s not socially acceptable to get these types of piecemeal jobs, that they’re not meeting expectations.”
Recent college graduates are confronting a job market that’s shifting into a lower gear after a three-year run of historically strong hiring. The unemployment rate ticked up for a fourth month in July, while the ratio of openings to job seekers was at 1.2 in June—down from a peak of 2-to-1 in 2022. For entry-level positions in particular, the number of postings currently lags “significantly behind” the level seen two years before, according to Revelio Labs, a firm that collects and analyzes workforce data.
College-educated men, who have historically had the upper hand in the job market, are now finding themselves at a disadvantage. Male-dominated industries such as technology and finance have been at the forefront of the recent slowdown, eliminating positions and halting expansion plans as they cope with overhiring, higher borrowing costs and an uncertain economic outlook.
“It kind of feels delusional now, but I was thinking I could get a $100,000 job,” says Brandon Solon, a 23-year-old from Marietta, Georgia, who graduated in May from Kennesaw State University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He based his salary expectations on his experience in college, including an engineering co-op where he cycled between the classroom and working at Georgia Tech Research Institute. But after applying to about 500 jobs, he became discouraged. “When I was at the point where I didn’t even have one interview for anything, I was like, oh my god, I feel like a failure right now,” he says. “It definitely messed with my mental health.”
Young men are more likely to bide their time until they land a position with the kind of pay they expect, even if it means taking time off from their job search, says Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. With the labor market showing signs of softening, they may prefer to wait until they have the upper hand again, “whereas maybe young women feel more pressure to make good use of this time.”
Ali Imran has been searching for a job since he graduated from Texas A&M University last December. The 22-year-old finance major from Houston estimates he’s applied for more than 1,000 positions. While living with his parents, he began laying the groundwork for a career pivot. After securing a real estate license in May, he is now interviewing for jobs at brokerages.
“It’s kind of like applying is a full-time job on its own,” Imran says. “Not receiving a response, it kind of leads you to worry: What might the future look like?”
One reason some recent college graduates can afford to take their time finding the right job is because more are living with family. According to the Census Bureau, 73.2% of adult men under 25 were living with relatives last year. The comparable figure for women was 68%. Excluding the pandemic years, that’s a record high for both genders in data going back almost six decades.
“There’s more acceptance of bailing out right now, of not continuing to push forward,” says Marcie Merriman, a cultural insights leader at EY who studies Gen Z attitudes. “There’s increasingly less stigma of staying at home or letting Mom and Dad continue to support you.”
Young women face different hurdles. While for years they’ve outnumbered men on college campuses, female students tend to gravitate to less lucrative majors than their male peers. A Bankrate study published in September 2023 found that men accounted for almost 4 out of every 5 graduates with bachelor’s degrees in the 20 highest-paying fields.
Women are typically more open to taking jobs outside of their field of study than their male peers, and to picking up part-time work or jobs that don’t require a college degree.
“Over time the liberal arts majors, especially the ones from the more elite schools, do very well and often go to graduate school,” says Georgetown’s Holzer. They’re often supported, he says, by the critical-thinking abilities they honed in college, and they pick up other skills while in the workforce. “But that first year could be more challenging.”
Victoria Tobias, a 28-year-old mother of two in Fort Myers, Florida, went back to school after six years in the US Air Force to pursue a career in social work. She estimates she applied to 20 jobs a week since December before landing a position as teaching assistant, which she started last month. For most of her job search, however, she only received offers for internships or was invited to apply for jobs in law enforcement, given her military background.
“I don’t feel like anyone is willing to take on someone who has no experience in that field,” she says. “The whole reason I went back to school was because I wanted more opportunities.”
As for Solon, after applying to about 500 positions, he eventually landed a software engineering job in Austin. It pays less than what he had initially expected, and the company is less well-known than some of the ones he originally applied to, but he’s excited to get to work and build a life in a new town.
“I know basically one or two people who graduated my semester that ended up getting jobs right out of college,” he says. “It is bad. It’s gonna suck and it’s gonna take a minute for you to get a job, but I don’t want people to stress as hard as I did about it.”
--With assistance from Andre Tartar.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
