Girls outperform boys in school. Then the gap reverses. The HCI+ explains why

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. Figure 1. Decomposition of the HCI+ gender gap by component The new female employment deep dive in the HCI+ App shows, country by country, which barrier matters most: whether women are outside the labor force entirely, unemployed, or in jobs where little learning takes place. That distinction drives very different policy responses. 2. Three in ten young people are neither studying nor working The HCI+ treats the seven years between ages 18 and 25 as a critical window: a young person is either studying, working, or neither. The third group, young people not in employment, education, or training (NEETs), pays a penalty. First, they lose out on the opportunity to accumulate skills during this period. In addition, skills can depreciate over time, so that each year outside work or school reduces skills at an estimated rate of 1.25 percent. The scale is large. Across 151 countries, roughly one in four young people is a NEET. In low- and middle-income countries, the share rises to one in three. In the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, it hits 41 percent. Figure 2. Share of youth aged 20 to 24 neither working nor in school, by region, split by sex The gap is also heavily gendered. Globally, 40 percent of young women aged 20–24 are neither working nor studying, compared to 17 percent of young men. In the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the figures are 63 versus 20 percent. In South Asia, 55 versus 15 percent. High NEET rates among young women and lower female employment rates later in life both reduce opportunities to build human capital through work. Together, these patterns help explain why women often outperform men in education yet still accumulate less human capital over their lifetimes. The HCI+ captures both effects: the years of learning and earnings potential lost during the school-to-work transition and the slower accumulation of experience and skills that comes from lower employment in adulthood. The new NEET deep dive in the HCI+ App examines how post-school pathways differ by country and what that means for human capital accumulation. 3. A revamped simulation tool: From diagnosis to action in a few clicks Knowing where the gap is large is only useful if you can ask what to do about it. The HCI+ App's simulation tool has been revamped to make that question answerable. The new simulation lets users isolate any single driver — health, education, or employment — and see its projected effect on future earnings and productivity. It tells you what moves the score, and by how much. A policymaker can now ask: what happens to our economy if we bring more young women into wage employment? Or reduce our NEET rate by ten percentage points? The app gives a data-grounded answer, country by country. Together with the two new deep dives, the simulation tool reflects what the HCI+ is ultimately for: not just measuring where human capital is being lost but giving governments the tools to do something about it. Explore the HCI+ App and country data.