56 Business The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020
2Bartleby Teenage picks
T
he worldof work is changing. Are
people ready for the new job outlook?
A survey of 15-year-olds across 41 coun-
tries by the oecd, a club of mostly rich
countries, found that teenagers may
have unrealistic expectations about the
kind of work that will be available.
Four of the five most popular choices
were traditional professional roles:
doctors, teachers, business managers
and lawyers. Teenagers clustered around
the most popular jobs, with the top ten
being chosen by 47% of boys and 53% of
girls. Those shares were significantly
higher than when the survey was con-
ducted back in 2000.
The rationale for this selection was
partly down to wishful thinking on the
part of those surveyed (designers, actors
and musical performers were three of the
top 15 jobs). Youth must be allowed a bit
of hope. When Bartleby was a teenager,
his ambitions were to play cricket for
England and become prime minister;
neither ambition was achieved (a lucky
escape for the country on both counts).
Furthermore, teenagers can hardly be
expected to have an in-depth knowledge
of the minutiae of labour-market trends.
They will have encountered doctors and
teachers in their daily lives. Other pop-
ular professions, such as lawyers and
police officers, will be familiar from
films and social media. But many people
end up in jobs they would not have heard
of in their school years. You settle for
what is available.
The oecdpoints out that some of the
fastest-growing occupations are rarely
mentioned by young people. But surely
the surprise is not that “user support
technician” is ranked only 158th out of
543 professions and “computer user
support specialist” appears in 229th
place. Rather, it is astonishing that youngpeople know that such jobs exist at all.
At least teenagers who want to tackle
climate change, as many profess to, are in
luck. America’s Bureau of Labour Statistics
(bls) predicts that the two fastest-growing
occupations over the next few years will be
solar-photovoltaic installers and wind-
turbine technicians.
Some parts of the oecdsurvey are
disturbing. Even though top performers in
maths or science are evenly matched
among males and females, a gender gap
persists in terms of aspiration. More boys
than girls expect to work in science or
engineering—the average gap across the
oecdis more than ten percentage points.
The problem continues in higher educa-
tion; with the exception of biological and
biomedical sciences, degrees in stem
subjects (science, technology, engineering
and maths) are male-dominated. In Amer-
ica women earn just 35.5% of undergradu-
ate stemdegrees and 33.7% of phds.
Things are even worse in technology. In
Britain only one in five computer-science
university students is a woman—a big
problem at a time when the World Eco-nomic Forum predicts that technology
will create more than a quarter of all jobs
in newly emerging professions. But
women are underrepresented in some
important fields of technology; they have
only 12% of jobs in cloud computing, for
example. Something about the tech
industry puts off female applicants.
Women play a much bigger role in the
health- and social-care sectors, which
are also poised for expansion. The bls
forecasts that eight of the 12 fastest-
growing jobs in America over the next
few years will be in those areas, with
roles ranging from occupational-therapy
assistants to genetic counsellors. The
snag is that some of these jobs are not
very well paid. Home-health and perso-
nal-care aides (with the third- and
fourth-fastest growth rates, respectively)
had median annual salaries in 2018 of
just over $24,000.
Some jobs in health care are extreme-
ly lucrative, of course. But another gen-
der imbalance emerges here: women
make up only one-third of American
health-care executives. In contrast, they
tend to dominate the poorly paid social-
care workforce. In Britain 83% of social-
care workers are female. That suggests
men shun the field, perhaps because
they do not perceive caring to be a mas-
culine trait.
The biggest problem in the labour
market, then, may not be that teenagers
are focusing on a few well-known jobs. It
could be a mismatch: not enough talent-
ed women move into technology and not
enough men take jobs in social care. Any
economist will recognise this as an
inefficient use of resources. Wherever
the root of the problem lies—be it the
education system, government policy or
corporate recruiting practices—it needs
to be identified and fixed.Some unfortunate mismatches in young people’s job preferences and prospectsowned by SoftBank, by t-Mobile, a compet-
itor. The merger would allow SoftBank to
shed about $40bn of Sprint debt. Soft-
Bank’s shares gained 12% the next day,
though reports later surfaced that t-mobile
might want to renegotiate the deal.
Even that leaves the firm’s market value,
at ¥11trn ($104bn), well below what its as-
sets would imply. It owns $270bn-worth of
stakes in big listed companies (Alibaba,
Sprint and its Japanese telecoms firm) and
unlisted firms like Arm, a British chip-de-
sign firm. SoftBank is trading at a discount
to fair value of around 60% after account-ing for debt. To close the gap Elliott’s boss,
Paul Singer, is urging the firm to buy back
as much as $20bn of its shares—and to im-
prove its corporate governance.
A buy-back is likely after the Sprint deal
is complete, says Chris Lane of Bernstein, a
broker. SoftBank will probably add inde-
pendent directors at its shareholder meet-
ing in June; it currently has two. Mr Son
may refrain from deploying a second,
$108bn Vision Fund, after it became clear
that the original’s troubles put off big insti-
tutional investors. SoftBank could instead
use a small bridge fund to carry on invest-ing, Mr Son said on February 12th.
Elliott wants SoftBank to create a new
board committee to guide Vision Fund in-
vestments, which Mr Son has sometimes
directed with little regard to opposition
from colleagues. Mr Singer could agitate
for the fund to be reduced in size over time.
If SoftBank’s shares keep gaining in val-
ue, Elliott might simply cash in and exit.
That would be easier than forcing the
strong-willed Mr Son, who owns roughly a
quarter of SoftBank, to reform. But Mr Sing-
er is unlikely to depart without trying some
of his signature psychological warfare. 7