Women are overtaking men in education and in the workplace, a senior Government minister said yesterday – creating a new generation of stay-at-home fathers.

Universities minister David Willetts predicted relationships and traditional household structures will be transformed as the fairer sex powers ahead, and women earn more than their male partners.

Successful women will have to ‘marry down’ by choosing partners less qualified than them – and may increasingly select men based on how supportive they might be to their careers, rather than whether they can support them financially.

And experts say women will often become the main breadwinners, with more men staying at home to look after children.

Mr Willetts said there was clear evidence from schools that boys are ‘lagging behind’, and are being overtaken by female students at university.

He said: ‘I am not against women having those advantages but there is now a rather striking gap, if you look at the statistics, where it looks as if approximately 50 percent of women are graduating from university by the time they’re 30 and perhaps about 40 percent of men.’

He added: ‘It may lead to changes in the patterns of household living. So there are some deep questions here.’

The Philadelphia-based Pew Research Centre study, published in The Atlantic magazine, suggests female graduates are being put in similar situation to that faced for some time by black women.

In America, 70 percent of black women have no husband and there are twice as many black women as black men with university degrees.

Many educated British women believe there is already a dearth of traditional husbands.

Claire Davis, 33, who works in financial services and lives in south London, told The Times: 'I have a good job, my own flat and I can pretty much do what I want, but a lot of the men I meet aren't really of the right calibre.

'If I look at the friends I went to university with, the men don't tend to be doing as well as the women.'

英国一位政府官员昨日透露，英国女性在受教育程度和职场上正在赶超男性，这将早就新一代“全职爸爸”。

大学事务大臣戴维•威利茨预言，随着女性快速前进，加之收入超过男性伴侣，婚恋关系和传统的家庭结构将发生转变。

成功女性将不得不选择不如自己的男性“下嫁”， 而且将可能越来越多地根据男性是否能支持自己发展事业，而不是根据男性能否提供经济后盾来选择伴侣。

导师称女性将更多地成为家庭的主要经济支柱，同时会有更多男性待在家中照看小孩。

威利茨说，有来自学校的明显证据表明，男孩们正在“落后”，在大学里他们也同样被女生赶超。

他说：“我不反对女性有这些优势，但现在两性间的差距相当显著，从数据来看，约有50%的女性在30岁前从大学毕业，而大学毕业的男性大概只有40%。

他补充说：“这可能会导致家庭生活的模式发生变化。所以这里存在着一些深层次的问题。”

费城的皮尤调查中心的这一研究指出，女大学毕业生的处境与一段时期以来黑人女性所遭遇的困境相似。该研究发表在《大西洋月刊》上。

在美国，70%的黑人女性没有丈夫，而拥有大学学位的黑人女性的人数是黑人男性的两倍。

许多受过教育的英国女性认为，传统型的丈夫已经很稀缺。

在金融服务业工作、住在伦敦南部的33岁的克莱尔•戴维斯告诉《泰晤士报》说：“我拥有一份好工作，拥有自己的公寓，我基本上可以做自己想做的事情，但是我遇到的许多男性却和我不是同一水平的人。”

“回想一下那些一起上大学的同学，男生的成绩一般都没有女生好。”

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