People’s early interactions with the labour market are so critically important for shaping their futures that in the 1990s British researchers came up with the acronym “NEET” — standing for young people who are Not in Education, Employment or Training — to capture the group of adolescents and twenty-somethings struggling to make the transition from compulsory schooling to the world of skills and work.

The concept rightly went on to become a staple of international economic statistics, with research consistently finding that NEETs are at risk of life-long socio-economic scarring, remaining at significantly elevated risk for worklessness and health problems for decades.

But the way NEETs are defined no longer makes sense in modern societies, and risks downplaying the situation that is unfolding across much of the developed world. Look at conventional NEET rates today and you will generally see flat or slightly descending lines over the past decade. Split by sex and you find that those flat lines are the result of combining rising rates of economic dislocation for men, with falling rates for women. Here lies a clue to the problem.