antonym of most

Few is the word you should use.

Few children were vaccinated.

If, out of 1000 children, 501 are vaccinated, it is correct to say most. But if 499 children are vaccinated, it doesn't seem right to say few.

Oh, I thought you wanted an alternative to least?

Half, or almost half (of the children), might be good for that scenario.

I agree with few. Thesarus.com went with "least".

I think if 501 out of 1000 children were vaccinated, "most" would be deceptive. "Most" to me would imply much more than 501.

most is comparative.

less would be comparative.

Context is important. Can you provide the entire paragraph?

I understand what you're trying to use "least" for, but it's just not usually used that way.

If you're looking for a true antonym, I suppose you could say "a minority of..." (less than half) as an opposite of "a majority of..." (more than half).

However, even then, native English speakers wouldn't say a "minority of the children were vaccinated." I think most of them would probably say "a majority of the children weren't vaccinated."

For now I used minority, but I could do as Perennialloner else suggested and change it to "majority were homemakers."

Even though the cohorts differed with respect to education level (p=0.003) and socioeconomic classification (p=0.011), both groups had a prevalence of women with 11 years or more of formal education (43.9% and 55.2%) and from socioeconomic class C (63.6% and 72.8%). The minority of women in the intervention cohort were employed (38.1%), unlike the control cohort (58.7%) (p<0.001).

Best so far Loner

If you are writing a paper, you should just use the exact number. 38.1% of the women in the intervention cohort were employed vs 58.7% in the control group.

It's a translation, and you can't start a sentence with figures. Writing that number out (thirty-eight point one percent) is too clumsy, but I could start the sentence with "some" instead of "a minority."

You are more familiar with your requirements than me, but the rules for technical papers are different. I can't see using words like most and some and then reporting values to three significant digits. I do agree you don't write out the number.