NEW: There’s been a lot of discussion lately about rising graduate unemployment. I dug a little closer and a striking story emerged: Unemployment is climbing among young graduate *men*, but college-educated young women are generally doing okay.

In fact, young men with a college degree now have the same unemployment rate as young men who didn’t go to college, completely erasing the graduate employment premium. Whereas a healthy premium remains for young women.

What’s going on? At first glance, this looks like a case of the growing masses of male computer science graduates being uniquely exposed to the rapid adoption of generative AI in the tech sector, and finding jobs harder to come by than earlier cohorts.

But, plot twist: The much-discussed contraction in entry-level tech hiring appears to have *reversed* in recent months. In fact, relative to the pre-generative AI era, recent grads have secured coding jobs at the same rate as they’ve found any job, if not slightly higher.

This suggests tech’s hiring contraction of 2023-24 may not have been primarily a story of AI job displacement, but rather the downslope of the sector’s meteoric post-pandemic hiring boom, with recruitment now rebounding from that trough.

To be clear, this doesn’t necessarily mean AI is not taking any coding jobs, but at the very least it may be creating as many new openings in tech as it is erasing old ones.

So if an AI “job-pocalypse” for computer science graduates doesn’t seem to explain the graduate male malaise, what does?

It’s a fuzzy picture, but one of the key dynamics seems to be women opting in much greater numbers for healthcare jobs, where employment keeps trending upwards, seemingly immune to the cyclical bumps that afflict most male-dominated sectors even at the graduate level.

Almost 50,000 of the 135,000 additional jobs filled by young women graduates in the past year were in the healthcare sector — more than double the *total* number of additional jobs going to graduate men *across all sectors* over the same period.

Rising demand from an ageing population, coupled with relative resilience to automation, appears thus far to be making healthcare a steady ship in choppy water. Perhaps “learn to care” could replace “learn to code” as the go-to career advice for the next generation.

But while young women seem to be doing better at navigating the current ructions in graduate labour markets, there’s no reason to think this will continue to be the case.

Partners at law and consulting firms still skew male, but the junior ranks of the same firms are mostly staffed by women. If AI does start to displace junior white-collar roles on a large scale, those are the roles that could go.

What else would people be interested in seeing me dig into on this topic? DM or email in bio 🙏