Are young women earning more than young men in the US?

You may have heard that they are. Take this headline, for example: “Young women earn more than young men”.

As it turns out, however, the headline is very misleading. You might have thought it meant that young women earn more than young men for the same work. Not true– they still earn less. Or you might have thought the claim was about average income for all young women. Again untrue– it’s actually a claim about young childless single women. As Broadsheet reports, what the study has done is to “isolate the segment where women have caught up with and exceeded men,” and that is young, single, childless women.” Broadsheet continues:

The study found three commonalities among nearly every city where young women clearly out-earn young men. First, there is “a heavy dependence on knowledge-based jobs, which in turn serves as a magnet for well-educated women.” Second, minorities make up the majority of the local population (the researchers note that “Hispanic and African-American women [are] almost twice as likely as their male peers to earn bachelor and graduate degrees”). And, finally, “the community has seen a decimation of the manufacturing employment base, making it more difficult for men without similarly high levels of education to earn solid incomes.”

The truth is complicated, as is so often the case. Sadly but unsurprisingly, it’s not actually time for US feminists to declare victory and go home.