Girls now outperform boys in school in much of the world. Yet men end up with a 21 percent advantage in expected earnings globally. The reason is almost entirely about what happens after school, not during it.
The Human Capital Index Plus (HCI+) measures human capital through working life, to age 65. Its latest update adds three new features that make the data more actionable than ever: a female employment deep dive that pinpoints exactly where women fall behind in the labor market, a NEET deep dive tracking the millions of young people — disproportionately women — who are neither working nor in school between the ages of 18 and 25 and a revamped simulation tool.
Here is what they reveal.
1. The gender gap in human capital is a jobs gap, not a school gap
Women score about 5 HCI+ points higher than men on health and education combined. Yet their total HCI+ score is 19 points lower. Employment accounts for essentially all of it. In South Asia, on-the-job learning alone explains 98 percent of the gender gap. More broadly, the pattern is widespread: in 101 of 145 countries with sex-disaggregated data, women outperform men on health and education but men have higher overall HCI+ scores once employment and work experience are taken into account.
The logic is straightforward. A worker with 30 years of experience in a wage job is roughly two and a half times as productive as someone just starting out, a gain roughly equivalent to completing 12 years of average quality schooling. Work is not only where human capital is put to use; it is where it continues to grow. But because women are less likely to participate in the labor force and often spend fewer years in paid employment, they miss out on years of learning, skill development, and productivity gains that work provides.
