Charting New Courses to Adulthood in the Global South

Growing up in an increasingly global world offers the youth of today unprecedented opportunities and novel challenges. This paper uses data from 47 countries to examine recent trends in how young men and women in the Global South navigate five key transitions to adulthood. Despite some similarities, we find little evidence of convergence across or within regions with respect to finishing school, becoming sexually active, forming a union, having a child, and working for pay. Further, although there have been impressive gains in education for both men and women over the past 20 years, labor force participation, particularly among women, has stalled or declined in most regions. Similarly, the steady increase in women's age of union formation was accompanied by relatively modest gains in their age of first childbirth and marriage continues to be incompatible with paid employment for many women. Overall, men and women follow strikingly different paths to adulthood and, with the exception of education, there are few signs of diminishing gender inequalities. Maximizing the economic and demographic potential of these better educated cohorts of youth will require increasing the availability of skilled jobs and helping women reconcile the competing demands of family and paid employment.