“What the researchers found was that the women in the group — all of them are among the generation called millennials — tended to be more educated by the time they were 27 than were the men.

The young people who did finish college worked an average of 4.5 jobs from when they were 18 through when they were 22 — the years they would typically have also been in college — and they were out of the labor force less than a third of the time.

‘I was surprised by the amount of work effort they all seem to be putting in,’ said Heidi Hartmann, the president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington, D.C., policy group.

Thirty-two percent of the women held bachelor’s degrees while 23.9 percent of men had finished college. Meanwhile, a slightly higher percentage of men (9.3 percent) were high school dropouts than women (8.1 percent).