I’m researching a piece on youth unemployment at the moment. But while there’s plenty for me to be getting on with regarding the UK’s situation, I thought I’d briefly blog about the issue in the wider EU.

In the first quarter of this year, we were pretty much average compared with our EU brethren, hovering around the 18 per cent unemployment rate for young people (aged 15-24). The Dutch were the best, at only 6 per cent, and the Spanish worst with a shocking – and surely not without long-term consequences – 33.6 per cent. In all 27 countries, the figure for youth unemployment was around double that of overall unemployment, which has, of course, gone up this year compared with last year.

But what really interested me in the figures was the gender discrepancy. In the UK, perhaps we’ve become so used to the fact that girls regularly outscore boys in academic attainment that we cease to question what is happening in employment terms. In the first quarter of this year, the unemployment rate for the boys was 20.3 per cent, compared with 15.2 per cent for the girls. On average across the EU, the trend is similar.

It wasn’t always so. Only in the past few years have young females been catching up with the boys, and even last year they were still worse off in employment terms. A 2007 European Commission ‘working staff document’ on youth unemployment attempted to explain the phenomenon:

“It appears that young women experience higher unemployment and lower employment rates than young men, even when they are highly qualified. Moreover, when employed, young women are, more than young men, particularly affected by low quality jobs.” It concludes, “Women have a lower return on education than men. There is consequently a risk to disincentivise women to be on the labour market if they cannot fully develop their skills and achieve their careers… this may lead in some countries to a high rate of women leaving the labour market for motherhood”.

This year, however, the boys have outnumbered the girls in the unemployment heap.Recessions often accelerate trends, and that return on education for females, which had to come good at some point, has been given a shot of adrenalin.

There are exceptions, though. For most of the former Eastern bloc countries, along with Italy, Greece and Portugal, the worm has refused to turn. Greece is the most divergent, with 18.3 per cent of unemployed boys versus 31.8 of girls in the first quarter of this year.

Shocking stuff, and it cuts both ways. Some labour markets still actively bar young women from quality employment to the point that many opt to have children instead. But in the UK, and increasingly the wider EU, it seems that although there is no doubt the girls are still having a tough time, we are beginning to fail the boys to such an extent that we are increasingly unwilling to employ them.