Conventional wisdom has depicted millennial men as the weaker sex of their generation—slower than millennial women to get their act together as financially independent adults. As they’ve gotten older and as the Great Recession has subsided, the men have at least partly outgrown that stereotype, to the extent it was ever accurate.
One anecdotal picture of millennial men has depicted them as too busy playing video games to get a job. Empirical data from the US Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), however, tells a different story. Among men ages 25 to 39 (i.e., past the typical college-student age), nearly nine in 10 were in the workforce last year. And millennial men make more money than millennial women: Other BLS data shows millennial men across the board out-earning their female counterparts by a significant margin in Q2 2018.