Are global communities keeping pace with change? This session explores rising inequalities, barriers, and what it takes to ensure no one is left behind.
At Davos, the panel argued that “falling behind” is not uniform: inequality is widening within genders and across life stages. Alice Evans described a bifurcation among men, with high-earning “AI, Stem, finance” winners and less-educated men clustered in construction, manufacturing, or inactivity where pay and status are eroding. For women, the dominant fault line is motherhood: many “select into occupations that are more flexible,” reopening pay gaps after age 30 even where early-career gaps have narrowed.
Scott Galloway framed three vectors—educational, economic, and mental health—noting women “are blowing away men” in graduation rates, while girls face rising depression and self-harm. He linked male decline to political volatility: “Donald Trump is president because of failing young men,” amplified by loneliness, weakened “mating market” prospects tied to earnings, and intergenerational transfers that favor older voters.
Union leader Christy Hoffman traced male displacement to the collapse of well-paid union manufacturing jobs, while women’s progress remains stalled: “It’s $0.80 now… that’s how much we’ve progressed.” Executive search chair Michael Ensser emphasized culture and leadership: creating workplaces where talent can “bring your full self to work,” while acknowledging career penalties from caregiving breaks. Proposed remedies included later school starts for boys, more male teachers and mentorship, expanded college capacity and vocational pathways, elevating pay and dignity in care work, and even mandatory national service to de-gender leadership and caregiving.
Welcome to Davos. Now is everyone falling behind? I would like to introduce you to our esteemed panel with Michael Enzor, Christy Hoffman and Scott Galloway. Now, I apologize with deep regret. I am not the former advisor to the British Prime Minister. Instead, I am Doctor Alice Evans. I will be both asking and answering questions on our topic. Now, if I may begin our session. What does the data show us on the gender gaps? Is it the case that both men are falling behind and also women? I will briefly suggest something and then I'll invite others. So I would suggest that one we see two key vectors. One is that we need to look at the stratification of men. So on the one hand we have the most innovative, talented entrepreneurial men going into the heights of earning the highest salaries in AI, Stem, finance, Wall Street, while simultaneously the least educated men are struggling in education, lagging behind in education almost universally, and then tend to cluster in three sectors that is construction, manufacturing or economically inactive. And it's those sectors that see declining terms, declining wages, women. Meanwhile, the major point of variation in Western societies is about motherhood. So women tend to select into occupations that are more flexible, more compatible with motherhood. And that is the major point of the gender pay gap in most Western societies. So that's my brief overview, but I would very much welcome other panelists. Scott, would you like to chip in on that?
So I think first off, thanks. I thought that was a great introduction. It's nuanced. So I would look at three vectors educational, economic and then call it emotional and mental well-being. On the educational side, women are blowing away men. It was 4060 female to male 40 years ago in the US. Now it's flipped. There's even some states where they'll probably be 2 to 1, female to male graduates, because men drop out at a higher rate. And as we move into more of a service innovation economy that creates more of a slipstream into better paying jobs for young women, I would argue K through 12 is biased against boys. Boys are twice as likely to be suspended for the same behavior as a girl, a black boy five times as likely. If you're talking about economic, it's more nuanced. Young women under the age of 30, I apologize. Most of my data is us, but I think a lot of the trends are in Western Europe. The pay gap has mostly been closed under the age of 30 amongst men and women. The bad news is, once women have kids, the pay gap pops up again. Because of some of the reasons that you've suggested. There are now more women globally, though, going back to education, seeking tertiary education than men. And if you're talking about emotional or mental wellbeing, girls are struggling and young women are struggling. There's data showing that actually emotional well-being and depression is more prevalent and self-harm among girls. By the way, I would suggest you go to the meta coffeehouse because if you order a latte, there's a 1 in 6 chance. By the end of the day, you'll start self-harming. That's a joke for the nine people here. So girls under serious mental strain. Mostly, I would argue, through social media, but also some evidence around overparenting, men, as they get older, more, quite frankly, just more suicide. If you go into a morgue and there's five people who died by suicide, four are men. So there's and and quite frankly, young men are probably falling further, faster than any cohort in America. Only 1 in 3 is in a relationship. 1 in 3 under the age of 25 are living at home. 1 in 5 at age 30 are living alone. Long winded way of saying it's a nuanced argument. We're talking about education. What age are we talking about? And then, generally speaking, the overlay that's hurt all young people, but especially young men, because they're disproportionately evaluated on their economics, is that in every government across the OECD, we have this one central theme, and that is old people who vote, electing even older people who vote themselves more money. And we've had this consistent economic transfer.
Of money and power from the young to the old, which is, creates a lot of anxiety in young households.
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Michael. Did you want to chip in there?
And I would call me an expert for executives and for the leadership level where we have seen, over the last ten, 12 years that the gender gap is there, but it is closed and closing. The numbers of female board members, for example, in the last 12 years have doubled. We speak about 30% representation of females in boards. We would speak about 96% of, relevant global companies having at least one female board member. And one is not enough. To be totally clear, for a number of reasons. But that has changed drastically. And, for us, it's, it's a challenge, but it's also our own, will and our own, conviction that we try to bring as much female candidates to a search, present them to clients that we do with man. While it is asked less for in recent times. And we can come back to the political ecosystem and the, let's say, geopolitical climate, that has been maybe a reason for that. It doesn't change that, our clients, top leaders would look in a neutral way on it or would even ask for female leadership to further, contribute to closing that gap. And by the way, convinced that we are in a war of talent now, while we have been talking about a war of talent 25 years ago and everyone qualified, everyone bringing the right skills, the right potential, promising to contribute in the most important way to the success or transformation of a company counts. It's no longer a matter of taste. I guess it's a matter of going after the rare, the rare source at the rare talent that you have out there.
Thank you so much. Now what? Scott, what do you think are the political consequences of some men being left behind, both in terms of mental, emotional and economics?
Donald Trump.
Yeah, I would, if I may interject as Alice Evans, I would entirely agree. I think and I think it's twofold, if I may add, I think that on the one hand, if you have huge feminist campaigns to push for gender equality across the Western societies and tackle pejorative stereotypes, tackle old boys clubs and support women's equal competence and equal place in the workplace, and also at the higher levels, then that perhaps can give. And if you have institutions that rally for women's advance, then men who are struggling economically may see that and very much feel excluded. And if I may add to your point, Scott, that I would actually add a fourth way in which some men are falling behind, that across the US and also Western Europe, the men who tend to least well economically also tend to struggle with dating. So currently in the US, 55% of Americans under the age of 35 are single, and the decline in marriage in coupling is falling fastest among the least educated. And if we think of people of having a package of goods and as you said, about also about the phones, right. So it's not just that men are struggling economically, but many are being sucked in by their hyper engaging devices. I myself struggle, but you know, if you are someone who struggles with phone addiction, hyper engaging apps, spending more time on your phone than maybe less time developing social skills that you need for coupling simultaneously as women are, as advancing, as women are more economically independent as they have exit options with cultural liberalization, women are raising the bar. So women are increasingly expecting better, no longer wanting to settle for less. And then guys are not necessarily meeting that bar. And so then you have the rise of loneliness. So across the OECD there's some nice Gallup data. 29% of young American men say they feel lonely. So the rise of solitude, I think in the US and also in Europe, about young men in their 20s are spending as much time alone as men in their 70s. So that solitude means that people are not necessarily building cross-gender empathy, not necessarily having female friends to learn about their different struggles. Right. And so if you have these people in their different echo chambers on the manosphere, for example, then you can hear all these grievance narratives that women are doing so well and everything is favoring women. Well, you may may feel both culturally ostracized, shamed, and also women not giving you the time of day.
But just on the Donald Trump. I literally think Donald Trump is president because of failing young men.
Yeah.
If you look at the three groups that pivoted hardest from blue to red from 2020 to 2024, it was Latinos, which is very hard to categorize as one group. We probably should stop categorizing this one group. The second biggest pivot was people under the age of 40. There were 24% less wealthy than they were 40 years ago. The average 70 year old is 72% less wealthy, and also 45 to 64 year old women. And my thesis is that that is the mothers of young men who are struggling. And this is an uncomfortable statement. We don't want to acknowledge. There are still a lot of women in America who will vote for whoever they perceive as in the best interest of their husbands and their sons. And if you look at Donald Trump's campaign strategy, which was genius, it was testosterone. Joe Rogan, crypto rockets, coarseness, vulgarity. And he flew right into this group that had been ignored by the Democratic Party. I went to the Democratic National Convention, a parade of special interest groups talking about the very real struggles they all still face. Not one mention of the group that's fallen furthest faster than that is young men, young men and them failing is the reason that we have. And then they become very prone to nationalistic content, very prone to misogynistic, anti-immigrant content because they want someone else to blame. I think absolutely failing young men is the biggest reason that Donald Trump was, whether you like him or not. That's what got him elected, in my view.
Absolutely. Thank you so much. And I would add just to, to to make it into a more global context, we see parallels all over whether, you know, if men feel that any organization is not giving them status, respect, the time of day, they may gravitate to organizations that will, whether that's the Muslim Brotherhood or men of solidarity and anti-feminist presidents in South Korea. It's very much a global trend now to to globalize it more. Christy, tell me, how do you see like, patterns of economic volatility or global economic trends affecting these gender dynamics?
Well, first of all, I think the question of of why young men are being failed to some extent is because the disappearance of the jobs that were available to young men some years ago and, you know, really starting I mean, I started my I'm a trade unionist. I started working in a factory that made jet engines. Why was I there? Because we had an executive order forcing the federal government to hire women on their contracts. You know, mid skilled worker. We had a union, we had decent wages, we had pension, we had health insurance. And I did it translating of what my salary was in 1978 to today's dollars. I would be earning like $90,000 now. My coworkers were almost all men. They owned a house. They were a lot of them young. But, you know, they stayed there for most of their career, but they they could own a house. They could have a car. Some even had a little boat. And those jobs all disappeared in the 80s and 90s, for the most part, good union jobs where you could raise a family and they would brag, my wife doesn't have to work. That just disappeared. And so even though the low, lower educated men today and I'm speaking about the US, but this trend is also not uncommon in Western Europe, even though they, they, you know, could go into manufacturing, but the manufacturing jobs that are still around the US, very few of them have strong conditions. You know, they're non-union jobs and they're not you know, that industry has really dissipated. And I think that's one of the fundamentals are what are the options for what are the options for young men who don't who don't go to college? And I'm very sympathetic to all the arguments about what's happening to young men. I have a young son myself. He's reached to 30 and managed to be okay, but but I mean, a lot of the things you talk about and in your book, Scott, I think are spot on, but I do think we have to look, also at economic conditions and how we can recreate good, strong jobs for workers, for workers who are not college educated. Likewise, on the on the women's side, I could say, you know, in, in I do a lot of work with women all around the world. And, you know, it is so outrageous that women have not progressed more than they have in, in the past 50 years. When I and I say that 50 years, because, you know, I started working 50 years ago and we would say $0.75, we'd get paid for every dollar a man makes. It's $0.80 now in the US. I mean, and that's how much we've progressed now. Yeah. Like for like same judge job you're not going to see discrimination. But the work is so gendered and part time for women. As you say, they want flexible work staying at home. So many women dropped out of the labor market after Covid, because, you know, just not wanting to go back to that really, impossible, practice of women thinking we have to do if we just do the same as the men, we'll make it. And actually, you have to, majority of caregiving still relies with women. That hasn't shifted very much. There are the exceptions. Happy to see in the room. And, you know, I've had a lot of experience with the exceptions as well. But it's it's still an exception. And I think that burden has not really been addressed either in our structural in our economy. And we haven't, you know, we don't have enough access to care, whether it's child care or elder care, that has to be part of a solution to address some of the gender gap that exists as well.
Thank you. Now, Michael, I want to ask you about talent at the top. So there's a nice new economics paper that says a large part of the gender pay gap is that women are increasingly sorting into more flexible firms that are more compatible with motherhood. And so then we face a conundrum that brilliant, productive firms are missing out on all those brilliant mothers, right? The talented mothers. What do you think companies could do to attract and retain brilliant, talented mothers and close the gap right at the top? Or what else can we do to get more women into corporate leadership.
Creating a workplace and creating a culture in which it's attractive to work, whether you're a man or a woman, where you can bring your full self to work, where you can unfold your potential. We have a culture where you're helped to grow and where you are mentored in a good and, effective way. And, I think that's for men and for women. It's something I would want to mention because we're talking about pandemic and what what it changed, for the different groups. There are law firms. There are consulting firms to speak a bit of my own, peer group who are, who are helpless to get the right talent because there is a new generation perceived, you might have this that might have statistics, and there is a new time in which people ask for more work life balance, which is which is the old school world, I acknowledge. But look for more meaning. Look for more, self-development and, less working in a machine or in a hamster wheel. And I think companies can do a lot, which is something which is on the cultural side and has not so much to do with hard incentives. I guess if you're going for people who are looking more for meaning than they did in generations before.
May I ask a follow up? How much do you think the Covid shock and the rise of work from home has helped women get to the top? You know, it's, you know, more flexibility?
I don't see a correlation. I must admit. I see a lack of talent. And we are going to find the right candidates or the female or male with a focus on making it ourselves. Not too easy and go for male where it would be an easier catch. An example is the whole engineering field, or the whole technical field, where you statistically find less students at university translating to less, young people joining companies, translating into less leaders being available at the very end. So in an automotive company or in a steel company or in a manufacturing company, you would then rather find female talent working in the finance department, working for marketing, working in HR. And that's a kind of escape strategy because you have not enough engineers available. And that's also, of course, because some of them get lost on the way from leaving university to finally making a career because of motherhood. Because of being out for 2 or 3 years and, falling behind against, the Boys Network and the Boys Club, which is then maybe there and making it up the ranks. And that's difficult to compensate. It's a fact. And it needs leadership with a mindset that is acknowledging that fact and trying to actively, escape it instead of just, waving with your shoulders and saying, it is what it is. Good leadership makes a difference. Bad leadership makes not.
Okay. I would like to apologize to World Economic Forum and deviate from the assigned questions and pick up on two important points made by the panel. Apologies if this program gets cut, you know. So I want to pick up on two points you made. So Christi, you are highlighting that we've seen the decimation of manufacturing construction jobs with automation and global competition. US men have been hurt and those sectors see declining pay, declining status 100% with you. And I think many people will have gone to panels at Davos where it's been about the rise of AI and so many are talking about we need to develop AI complementary skills. And those might be social skills. Right. So as AI does, does the computational task, the coding task. We also need to make sure that our educational establishments, our schools prepare people with curiosity, problem solving and social skills. Scott, what do you think schools could do to help nurture young male talent? You mentioned the issue with K-12. I wonder what you think schools could do, both to helping the boys who struggle and thinking about, you know, the new generation of work?
So K through 12, I would redshirt boys. I would start them at six girls. At five boys. Prefrontal cortex is 18 months behind a girl, seven and ten valedictorians are girls. If you have two seniors applying to college, one boy, one girl. The girl is effectively competing against a 10th grade girl. I think we need more men in K through 12.
Do you mean male teachers?
Male teachers?
Yes.
Yeah. Some males never grow up to be men. Acknowledge. But the single point of failure for when a boy comes off the tracks, if you reverse engineer it to one thing, it's when he loses a male role model through death, disease or abandonment. The moment a young boy loses a male role model at that moment, he becomes more likely to be incarcerated than graduate from college. What's interesting is that girls have similar outcomes in single parent homes. They're more promiscuous because they're looking for male attention in the wrong areas, but they have the same rates of college attendance, same income. So while boys are physically stronger, they're emotionally and neurologically much weaker than girls. And a big part of that, of closing that gap is getting male mentorship. So more males, it's now 3 to 1, female to male in K through 12. And you're just naturally going to champion the people who remind you of yourself and you're going to feminize, if you will, the education system. When you only have single sex boys schools within a few months, they have doubled the amount of recess time. They have more physical, rough and tumble play. So more male teachers start at six. And then in college, you know, I hear all these panels about AI and how colleges prepare kids for AI. I don't think that's the I'm not sure if it's learning Greek or storytelling or that's going to help them with AI more than programming. I think the biggest thing colleges need to do, we have this argument around who gets in. It's not. That's the wrong argument. It should be how many get in. There's so much anger around who we let in to undergraduate institutions. Because my industry has become drunk on exclusivity, and that is we create artificial scarcity. NYU will reject 91% of its applicants, Dartmouth will reject 96% of its applicants, and it's got an $8 billion endowment is in the middle of nowhere, and it's less than 100 freshmen kids. It could let in 11,000. So instead of having these terrible arguments around who we let in, the real question should be how many? So expand freshman class size. If you have an endowment over $1 billion, you're not growing your freshman class size faster than population. You lose your tax free status because you're no longer a public servant. You're a hedge fund. More vocational programming. And so I think there's I think the illusion of complexity creates a bunch of false arguments. There's absolutely ways of addressing the educational gap. I don't think we should have male affirmative action outside of K through 12. I think it's too politicized. And we cause too much trouble. I think we just need to expand freshman class size vocational programming opening for everyone, and then reengineer our tax policy to help lift up all young people because, the one of the most destructive things for young men, quite frankly, is women are disproportionately evaluated on their aesthetics. Full stop men are disproportionately evaluated in the mating market on their economic viability. And so when young people don't have the same economic viability as young people when we were growing up, it takes an especially rough toll on men who lose all currency in the mating market. And I'll just finish up here. Marriage is becoming a luxury item, and that is if you're in the lowest quintile of income earning men, there's only a 1 in 4 chance you'll ever be married. Whereas if you're in the upper quintile of income earning men or come from a household there, there's a 4 in 5 chance you'll get married. So even relationships, unfortunately, now have become for men have become a function of their economic viability in the workplace.
Let me just add to that. I would say that, you know, if we look back at the past 50 years of of women's progress in many Western societies, I think that we address two of the binding constraints for young women. So for young women, it was enabling women to control their fertility so they could pursue university, you know, contraceptives and the permissibility of that, and also shifting women's aspirations, like raising their aspirations to go for those big jobs at the top end of the ladder. But men might face two biological and cultural constraints that are not yet addressed. So many young men are dealing with surge in testosterone and excitement that, if not properly channeled, might take them down the right path. So just before we we had this session, I was mentioning to Scott, there's a very nice sturdy in England that where we had youth community clubs, young disadvantaged men could go there in a sort of safe environment with mentors to have a bit of rough and tumble, but also to have the guidance and support. And so that and when those clubs were cut due to austerity that actually led to a men's worsen economic outcomes, educational outcomes and also a higher rates of crime, though I wonder, Scott, and let me say one more thing that I think we might have a point of agreement on, Scott, is that there might also be cultural campaigns to move men into heel sectors. Something you've talked about, though, I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit. You know, with the rising aging population, with shifting demographics in many countries, both in high and low income, we will see rising demand for adult social care people to look after us when we all get a bit older. And so people might say, oh, well, you know, if only we can encourage men into those sectors. But I wonder, I have two concerns and everyone feel free to push back that one. There seems to be a lot of feminised occupations are often stigmatized for men, and they may be reluctant to move into their, like Sweden, one of the most progressive countries in the world, 88% of their nurses are female. And the other point is that cultural engineering now seems a lot harder. You know, the 1970s, the time of cultural liberalization and feminist revolution. We were all sort of watching the same TV channels. You know, we had about four or, you know, watched the BBC. But now in an age of smartphones, which you mentioned, everyone can choose their own ideological echo chamber. And so I wonder if cultural engineering is now a lot, lot harder. How do you get men to think beyond that traditional masculine straitjacket in an age where we can't necessarily change what people are watching and consuming?
Do you want to talk about the labour force? You have more background here than I do.
Yeah, well, you're talking about moving men into care jobs essentially, which has long been an effort. Right? I can even remember when coal mines were closing in West Virginia. Let's train you to work in a nursing home, you know, spend a year getting trained. And it was a complete failure. So there's a huge gap. There's a huge need for workers in care. For sure. It's going to be an expanding area in our economy. We put a lot of time into it. But it is challenging to get men to take those jobs. And until the until the work is better paid, they won't. I mean, they're really the some, some care jobs and there's a huge range obviously from doctor down to, you know, nurse assistant or home care worker would probably be the, the lowest paid. And I think that those workers, 99% women I mean very rare to find a man. And you need to really lift the whole sector. You need that those workers need to have more dignity and get the status that that they deserve. So massive effort during Covid to say these workers are essential. They're still in the nursing home, taking care of the older people. They're still having to go every day to the hospitals, and we should emerge from Covid and give them the status and respect they deserve. And frankly, no, that hasn't happened. So that's a big that's a that's a big lift. And I would even bringing the global perspective in, in South Asia, a lot of the health care work is done by community health workers who are volunteers. They are not in massive numbers. Millions not in its considered part of your obligation as a woman to be part of this volunteer force, this workforce who they occasionally get a stipend, you know, they're it's not just random people who walk out, they have assignments and so on, and they're not paid at all. So that's one of our big challenges in the global labour movement is how to lift, all workers in the care sector up. But it does tend to be, you know, it's feminized but also very difficult to get men. So that's my.
The one. So if I, someone asked me, I saw that Governor California outside and he asked me when I was on his pod if you could implement one program, social program or public policy, what would it be? And for me, it it addresses both sides of the equation. And that is how do we culturally get America more comfortable with female leadership? Because the if you look at we're still highly I don't want to say misogynist. It's not hate of women, but highly sexist at the highest levels. We're making progress in the boardroom, and the number of C-level executives gone from 19% to 27% that are female, we're making progress. I don't think it will ever be 5050. I think a lot of women opt out of the marketplace of their own volition. I think men get, quite frankly, more reward from ego and the affirmation of strangers, and women get more reward from relationships. That's a sexist thing to say. And I stand by it. That doesn't mean they shouldn't have the same opportunities. And when, as of two years ago, there are more CEOs named Bob than there are women, that means there's not a quality of opportunity we need to fix that. It's slowly getting fixed where we still have massive sexism is amongst our elected leaders because instinctually, especially among Americans, we conflate leadership with height and with depth of voice. So show me someone with 140 IQ who's five foot two and a high pitched voice. That's hello, deputy economic minister or school board president. Show me someone with 110 IQ who's six foot four, a big head of hair. Hello, Democratic nominee for president. So we're still very sexist when it comes to our elected leaders. We're all very, also very I know the term would be we feminine coded the growth industries. The healthcare industry is replacing manufacturing. We have this fetish for manufacturing in the US, including the president. 80% of Americans think we should have more manufacturing. 20% of Americans have any desire to work in manufacturing. People don't want to go and work in these jobs that you can't bring your dog to the factory floor. Health care is working, is booming. More women in medical school men seem to be reticent to get into health care. I think the biggest solve. The one thing I would want to see is mandatory national service amongst young people. And I think it kills a lot of birds with one stone. The lowest levels of young adult depression in the world are in Singapore and Israel. Both have mandatory national service and part of mandatory national service. You could pick the military, but you could also encourage and pick senior care, health care, and also expose both sexes to intense leadership. If you notice, Israel has in Singapore, have a greater proportion of female elected leaders because there's nothing about like, handling heavy equipment. And and depending on someone for your life where you stop thinking about their gender or who their father was or their sexual orientation. So from a young age, I think men and women would feel more comfortable thinking the health care industry and senior care and health care is not gender coded, and being elected to a leadership position is not gender coded. So for me, mandatory national service would be would address a lot of these issues without trying to directly create some sort of cultural engineering, if you will. Anyways, I'm a big fan of mandatory national service.
Wonderful. Well, with the. Thank you very much everyone for listening, thinking about how men and women are moving in different directions and at different levels. I'd like to thank our esteemed panelists for joining and this enriching conversation. And just to reiterate, I am not the former advisor to the British Prime Minister, and I thank you very, very much for joining us all. Thank you.
Thank you for coming.
Thanks for coming. Oh my gosh.
I agree with your point.