Of Boys and Men E-Book

Richard V. Reeves

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 404

Beschreibung

A Book of the Year 2022 in The Economist and Daily Mail 'One of the most important non-fiction books of the year' - Sunday Times Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, reading and science In the US, the wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women's wages have risen across the board In the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 Boys are falling behind at school and college because the educational system is structed in ways that put them at a disadvantage. Men are struggling in the labour market because of an economic shift away from traditionally male jobs. And fathers are dislocated because the cultural role of family provider has been hollowed out. The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges. Structural challenges require structural solutions, and this is what Richard V. Reeves proposes in Of Boys and Men – starting boys at school a year later than girls; getting more men into caring professions; rethinking the role of fatherhood outside of a nuclear family context. Feminism has done a huge amount of good in the world. We now need its corollary – a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.

Leseprobe

OF BOYS AND MEN

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by Brookings Institution Press 2022

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Richard V. Reeves 2022

The right of Richard V. Reeves to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typset in Janson Text LT Std

Composition by Westchester Publishing Services

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800750548

eISBN: 9781800750555

For George, Bryce, and Cameron

CONTENTS

Preface: Worried Dad to Worried Wonk

PART I The Male Malaise

1 Girls Rule

Boys Are Behind in Education

2 Working Man Blues

Men Are Losing Ground in the Labor Market

3 Dislocated Dads

Fathers Have Lost Their Traditional Role in the Family

PART II Double Disadvantage

4 Dwight’s Glasses

Black Boys and Men Face Acute Challenges

5 Class Ceiling

Poor Boys and Men Are Suffering

6 Non-Responders

Policies Aren’t Helping Boys and Men

PART III Biology and Culture

7 Making Men

Nature and Nurture Both Matter

PART IV Political Stalemate

8 Progressive Blindness

The Political Left Is in Denial

9 Seeing Red

The Political Right Wants to Turn Back the Clock

PART V What to Do

10 Redshirt the Boys

Boys Need an Extra Year in the Classroom

11 Men Can HEAL

Getting Men into the Jobs of the Future

12 New Dads

Fatherhood as an Independent Social Institution

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

PREFACE

Worried Dad to Worried Wonk

I have been worrying about boys and men for 25 years. That comes with the territory when you raise three boys, all now grown men. George, Bryce, Cameron: I love you beyond measure. That’s why, even now, I sometimes worry about you. But my anxiety has spilled over into my day job. I work as a scholar at the Brookings Institution, focusing mostly on equality of opportunity, or the lack thereof. Until now, I have paid most attention to the divisions of social class and race. But I am increasingly worried about gender gaps, and perhaps not in the way you might expect. It has become clear to me that there are growing numbers of boys and men who are struggling in school, at work, and in the family. I used to fret about three boys and young men. Now I am worried about millions.

Even so, I have been reluctant to write this book. I have lost count of the number of people who advised against it. In the current political climate, highlighting the problems of boys and men is seen as a perilous undertaking. One friend, a newspaper columnist, said, “I never go near these issues if I can avoid it. There’s nothing but pain there.” Some argue that it is a distraction from the challenges still faced by girls and women. I think this is a false choice. As an advocate for gender equality, I think a lot about how to close the pay gap between women and men. (For every $100 earned by men, women earn $82.)1 As you will see, I think the solutions here include a more equal allocation of childcare, helped by generous paid leave for both mothers and fathers. But I am just as worried about the college degree attainment gap in the other direction, which is just one symptom of a large and growing gender gap in education. (For every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men.)2 Here I propose a simple but radical reform: start boys in school a year later than girls.

In other words, redesign jobs to be fairer to women, and reform schools to be fairer to boys.

We can hold two thoughts in our head at once. We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.

I am of course hardly the first to write about boys and men. I follow in the footsteps of Hanna Rosin (The End of Men), Andrew Yarrow (Man Out), Kay Hymowitz (Manning Up), Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Coulombe (Man, Interrupted), and Warren Farrell and John Gray (The Boy Crisis), among many others. So why this book, and why now? I wish I could say that there was a single, simple motivation. But there are six main reasons.

First, things are worse than I thought. I knew some of the headlines about boys struggling at school and on campus, men losing ground in the labor market, and fathers losing touch with their children. I thought that perhaps some of these were exaggerated. But the closer I looked, the bleaker the picture became. The gender gap in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, but in the opposite direction.3 The wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women’s wages have risen across the board.4 One in five fathers are not living with their children.5 Men account for almost three out of four “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide or an overdose.6

Second, the boys and men struggling most are those at the sharp end of other inequalities, especially of class and race. The boys and men I am most worried about are the ones lower down the economic and social ladder. Most men are not part of the elite, and even fewer boys are destined to take their place. In 1979, the weekly earnings of the typical American man who completed his education with a high school diploma, was, in today’s dollars, $1,017. Today it is 14% lower, at $881.7 As The Economist magazine puts it: “The fact that the highest rungs have male feet all over them is scant comfort for the men at the bottom.”8 Men at the top are still flourishing, but men in general are not. especially if they are Black: “To be male, poor, and African-American . . . is to confront, on a daily basis, a deeply held racism that exists in every social institution,” writes my colleague Camille Busette.9 “No other demographic group has fared as badly, so persistently and for so long.” Black men face not only institutional racism but gendered racism, including discrimination in the labor market and criminal justice system.10

Third, it became clear to me that the problems of boys and men are structural in nature, rather than individual; but are rarely treated as such. The problem with men is typically framed as a problem of men. It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time. This individualist approach is wrong. Boys are falling behind at school and college because the educational system is structured in ways that put them at a disadvantage. Men are struggling in the labor market because of an economic shift away from traditionally male jobs. And fathers are dislocated because the cultural role of family provider has been hollowed out. The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges.

“The more I consider what men have lost—a useful role in public life, a way of earning a decent and reliable living, appreciation in the home, respectful treatment in the culture,” writes feminist author Susan Faludi in her 1999 book Stiffed, “the more it seems that men of the late twentieth century are falling into a status oddly similar to that of women at mid century.”11

Fourth, I was shocked to discover that many social policy interventions, including some of the most touted, don’t help boys and men. The one that first caught my eye was a free college program in Kalamazoo, Michigan. According to the evaluation team, “women experience very large gains,” in terms of college completion (increasing by almost 50%), “while men seem to experience zero benefit.”12 This is an astonishing finding. Making college completely free had no impact on men. But it turns out that there are dozens of programs that benefit girls and women, but not boys and men: a student mentoring scheme in Fort Worth, Texas; a school choice program in Charlotte, North Carolina; an income boost to low-wage earners in New York City, and many more. The striking failure of these interventions to help boys or men is often obscured by a positive average result, driven by the positive impact on girls or women. In isolation, this gender gap might be seen as a quirk of a specific initiative. But it is a repeated pattern. So not only are many boys and men struggling, they are less likely to be helped by policy interventions.

Fifth, there is a political stalemate on issues of sex and gender. Both sides have dug into an ideological position that inhibits real change. Progressives refuse to accept that important gender inequalities can run in both directions, and quickly label male problems as symptoms of “toxic masculinity.” Conservatives appear more sensitive to the struggles of boys and men, but only as a justification for turning back the clock and restoring traditional gender roles. The Left tells men, “Be more like your sister.” The Right says, “Be more like your father.” Neither invocation is helpful. What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. As a conscientious objector in the culture wars, I hope to have provided an assessment of the condition of boys and men that can attract broad support.

Sixth, as a policy wonk I feel equipped to offer some positive ideas to tackle these problems, rather than simply lamenting them. There has been enough handwringing. In each of the three areas of education, work, and family, I provide some practical, evidence-based solutions to help the boys and men who are struggling most. (It is probably worth saying upfront that my focus is on the challenges faced by cis heterosexual men, who account for around 95% of men.)13

In part 1, I present evidence on the male malaise, showing how many boys and men are struggling in school and college (chapter 1), in the labor market (chapter 2), and in family life (chapter 3). In part 2, I highlight the double disadvantages faced by Black boys and men, suffering from gendered racism (chapter 4), as well as for boys and men at the bottom of the economic ladder (chapter 5). I also present the growing evidence that many policy interventions don’t work well for boys and men (chapter 6). In part 3, I address the question of sex differences, arguing that both nature and nurture matter (chapter 7).

In part 4, I describe our political stalemate, showing how instead of rising to this challenge, politicians are making matters worse. The progressive Left dismisses legitimate concerns about boys and men and pathologizes masculinity (chapter 8). The populist Right weaponizes male dislocation and offers false promises (chapter 9). For the partisans, there is either a war on women or a war on men. Finally, in part 5, I offer some solutions. Specifically, I make proposals for a male-friendly education system (chapter 10); for helping men to move into jobs in the growing fields of health, education, administration, and literacy, or HEAL (chapter 11); and for bolstering fatherhood as an independent social institution (chapter 12).

“A man would never get the notion,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.”14 But that was in 1949. Now the peculiar situation of the human male requires urgent attention. We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world.15 And we need it soon.

PART I

THE MALE MALAISE

CHAPTER 1

GIRLS RULE

Boys Are Behind in Education

Carol Frances, the former chief economist at the American Council on Education, describes it as a “spectacular upsurge” and “phenomenal success.”1 Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, senior analyst at the organization for economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) Centre for educational Research and Innovation, says it is “astonishing . . . people can’t believe it.”2 For Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, it is “the strangest and most profound change of the century, even more so because it is unfolding in a similar way pretty much all over the world.”3

Frances, Vincent-Lancrin, and Rosin are all talking about the gender gap in education. In the space of just a few decades, girls and women have not just caught up with boys and men in the classroom—they have blown right past them. In 1972, the U.S. government passed the landmark Title IX law to promote gender equality in higher education. At the time, there was a gap of 13 percentage points in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees going to men compared to women.4 By 1982 the gap had closed. By 2019, the gender gap in bachelor awards was 15 points, wider than in 1972—but the other way around.5

The underperformance of boys in the classroom, especially Black boys and those from poorer families, badly damages their prospects for employment and upward economic mobility. Reducing this inequality will not be easy given current trends, many of which worsened during the pandemic. In the U.S., for example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students.6 Male students also struggle more with online learning, and as the extent of the learning loss becomes clearer in the months and years ahead, it seems almost certain that it will prove to be greater for boys and men.7

The first challenge is to persuade policymakers that in education, it is now boys who are at a disadvantage. Some argue that it is premature to worry about the gender gap in education, when the pay gap still runs the other way. I will have more to say about the pay gap in chapter 2; for now, suffice it to say that the labor market is still structured in favor of workers without major childcare and those workers are mostly men. But at the same time, the education system is structured in favor of girls and women, for the reasons I will set out in this chapter. So we have an education system favoring girls and a labor market favoring men. Two wrongs don’t make a right. We need to fix both. Inequalities matter, regardless of their direction. It is also worth noting that while women are catching up with men in the labor market, boys and men are falling further behind in the classroom. One gap is narrowing, the other is widening.

I first describe the gender gaps in K–12 schooling and then point to what I see as their main cause: the very different speeds at which boys and girls mature, especially in adolescence. I then trace some of the resulting inequalities in higher education. My main message here is that there are stark gender gaps at every stage, and all around the world, many of which continue to widen. But policymakers, like deer in headlights, have yet to respond.

GIRLS GETTING THE GRADES

What do you know about Finland? That it is the happiest nation on Earth? Correct.8 That the school system is superb? Well, half right. Finland does indeed always rank at or near the top of the international league table for educational outcomes—but that’s because of the girls. Every 3 years, the OECD conducts a survey of reading, mathematics, and science skills among 15-year-olds. It is called the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test, and it gets a lot of attention from policymakers. Finland is a good place to look at gender gaps in education because it is such a high-performing nation (indeed, one could say that other countries suffer from a bout of Finn envy every time the PISA results are published). But although Finnish students rank very high for overall performance on PISA, there is a massive gender gap: 20% of Finnish girls score at the highest reading levels in the test, compared to just 9% of boys.9 Among those with the lowest reading scores, the gender gap is reversed: 20% of boys versus 7% of girls. on most measures, Finnish girls also outperform the boys in science and in mathematics. The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls. (In fact, American boys do just as well as Finnish boys do on the PISA reading test.)

This may have some implications for the education reformers who flock to Finland to find ways to bottle the nation’s success, but it is just an especially vivid example of an international trend. In elementary and secondary schools across the world, girls are leaving boys behind. Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in math. 10 Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science.11 Sweden is starting to wrestle with what has been dubbed a pojkkrisen (boy crisis) in its schools. Australia has devised a reading program called Boys, Blokes, Books and Bytes.

In the U.S., girls have been the stronger sex in school for decades. But they are now pulling even further ahead, especially in terms of literacy and verbal skills. The differences open up early. Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be “school ready” at age 5, for example, controlling for parental characteristics. This is a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor children, or Black and white children, or between those who attend preschool and those who do not.12 A 6-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to a 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade.13 In math, a 6-point gap favoring boys in fourth grade has shrunk to a 1-point gap by eighth grade.14 In a study drawing on scores from the whole country, Stanford scholar Sean Reardon finds no overall gap in math from grades three through eight, but a big one in English. “In virtually every school district in the United States, female students outperformed male students on ELA [English Language Arts] tests,” he writes. “In the average district, the gap is . . . roughly two thirds of a grade level and is larger than the effects of most large-scale educational interventions.”15

FIGURE 1-1 Girls getting the grades

Gender composition of high school GPA (grade point average) rank (deciles)

Note: Figure shows total high school GPA for students who were freshmen in 2009. Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, High School Longitudinal Study 2009.

By high school, the female lead has solidified. Girls have always had an edge over boys in terms of high school grade point average (GPA), even half a century ago, when they surely had less incentive than boys given the differences in rates of college attendance and career expectations. But the gap has widened in recent decades. The most common high school grade for girls is now an A; for boys, it is a B.16 As figure 1-1 shows, girls now account for two-thirds of high schoolers in the top 10%, ranked by GPA, while the proportions are reversed on the bottom rung.

Girls are also much more likely to be taking Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes.17 of course national trends disguise huge variations by geography, so it is useful to zoom in and look at specific places. Take Chicago, where students from the most affluent neighborhoods are much more likely to have an A or B average in ninth grade (47%), compared to those from the poorest (32%).18 That is a big class gap, which, given that Chicago is the most segregated big city in the country, means a big race gap too. But strikingly, the difference in the proportion of girls versus boys getting high grades is the same: 47% to 32%. If you’re wondering whether grades in the first year of high school matter much, they do, strongly predicting later educational outcomes. As the Chicago researchers who analyzed these data insist, “Grades reflect multiple factors valued by teachers, and it is this multidimensional quality that makes grades good predictors of important outcomes.”

It is true that boys still perform a little better than girls do on most standardized tests. But this gap has narrowed sharply, down to a thirteen-point difference in the SAT, and it has disappeared for the ACT.19 It is also probably worth noting here that SAT and ACT scores matter a lot less in any case, as colleges move away from their use in admissions, which, whatever other merits this has, seems likely to further widen the gender gap in postsecondary education. Here is a more anecdotal example of the gender gap: Every year the New York Times runs an editorial contest among middle and high school students, and it publishes the opinions of the winners. The organizers tell me that among the applicants, there is a “2–1, probably closer to 3–1” ratio of girls to boys.20

By now it should not be a surprise to learn that boys are less likely than girls to graduate high school. In 2018, 88% of girls graduated from high school on time (i.e., 4 years after enrolling), compared to 82% of boys.21 The male graduation rate is only a little higher than the 80% among poor students. You might think these were easy numbers to come by, a quick Google search away. I thought they would be when I started writing this paragraph. But in fact it took a small Brookings research project to figure it out, and for reasons that are instructive. States are required by federal law to report high school graduation rates by race and ethnicity, proficiency in English, economic disadvantage, homelessness, and foster status. These kinds of data are invaluable for assessing trends for the groups at greatest risk of dropping out. But oddly, states do not have to report their results by sex. Getting the numbers cited above required scouring the data for each state.

An energetic nonprofit alliance, Grad Nation, is seeking to raise the overall high school graduation rate in the U.S. to 90% (up from 85% in 2017).22 This is a great goal. The alliance points out that this will require improvements among “students of color, students with disabilities, and low-income students.” It definitely will. But they missed a big one—boys. After all, girls are only 2 percentage points from the target, while boys are 8 percentage points below it.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE TIMING (OF BRAIN DEVELOPMENT)

What is going on here? There are many potential explanations. Some scholars link the relative underperformance of boys in school to their lower expectations of postsecondary education, surely the very definition of a vicious circle.23 Others worry that the strong skew toward female teachers—three out of four and rising—could be putting boys at a disadvantage.24 This matters, for sure. But I think there is a bigger, simpler explanation staring us in the face. Boys’ brains develop more slowly, especially during the most critical years of secondary education. When almost one in four boys (23%) is categorized as having a “developmental disability,” it is fair to wonder if it is educational institutions, rather than the boys, that are not functioning properly.25

In Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Laurence Steinberg writes that “high-school aged adolescents make better decisions when they’re calm, well rested, and aware that they’ll be rewarded for making good choices.”26 To which most parents, or anybody recounting their own teen years, might respond: tell me something I don’t know, Larry. But adolescents are wired in a way that makes it hard to “make good choices.” When we are young, we sneak out of bed to go to parties; when we get old, we sneak out of parties to go to bed. Steinberg shows how adolescence is essentially a battle between the sensation-seeking part of our brain (Go to the party! Forget school!) and the impulse-controlling part (I really need to study tonight).

It helps to think of these as the psychological equivalent of the accelerator and brake pedals in a car. In the teenage years, our brains go for the accelerator. We seek novel, exciting experiences. our impulse control—the braking mechanism—develops later. As Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist and neurologist, writes in his book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, “The immature frontal cortex hasn’t a prayer to counteract a dopamine system like this.”27 There are obvious implications here for parenting, and the importance of helping adolescents develop self-regulation strategies.

Adolescence, then, is a period when we find it harder to restrain ourselves. But the gap is much wider for boys than for girls, because they have both more acceleration and less braking power. The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the “CEO of the brain,” are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.28 The cerebellum, for example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. Among other things, the cerebellum “has a modulating effect on emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,” according to neuroscientist Gokcen Akyurek.29 I know; I have three sons. These findings are consistent with survey evidence on attention and self-regulation, where the biggest sex differences occur during middle adolescence, in part because of the effect of puberty on the hippocampus, a part of the brain linked to attention and social cognition.30 The correct answer to the question so many teenage boys hear, “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” is something like, “Because, Mom, there are sexually dimorphic trajectories for cortical and subcortical gray matter!” (Returns to video game.)

While parts of the brain need to grow, some brain fibers have to be pruned back to improve our neural functions. It is odd to think that parts of our brain need to get smaller to be more efficient, but it’s true. The brain basically tidies itself up; think of it like trimming a hedge to keep it looking good. This pruning process is especially important in adolescent development, and a study drawing on detailed brain imaging of 121 people aged between 4 and 40 shows that it occurs earlier in girls than in boys. The gap is largest at around the age of 16.31 Science journalist Krystnell Storr writes that these findings “add to the growing body of research that looks into gender differences when it comes to the brain . . . the science points to a difference in the way our brains develop. Who can argue with that?”32 (It turns out, quite a few people. But I’ll get to that later.)

It is important to note, as always, that we are talking averages here. But I don’t think this evidence will shock many parents. “In adolescence, on average girls are more developed by about 2 to 3 years in terms of the peak of their synapses and in their connectivity processes,” says Frances Jensen, chair of the department of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “This fact is no surprise to most people if we think of 15-year-old boys and girls.”33 I don’t have any daughters, but I can report that when my sons brought female friends home during the middle and high school years, the difference in maturity was often startling.

The gender gap in the development of skills and traits most important for academic success is widest at precisely the time when students need to be worrying about their GPA, getting ready for tests, and staying out of trouble.34 A 2019 report on the importance of the new science of adolescence from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine suggests that “sex differences in associations between brain development and puberty are relevant for understanding . . . prominent gender disparities during adolescence.”35 But this emerging science on sex differences in brain development, especially during adolescence, has so far had no impact on policy. The chapter on education in the National Academies report, for example, contains no specific proposals relating to the sex differences it identified.

The debate over the importance of neurological sex differences, which can be quite fierce, is wrongly framed as far as education is concerned. There are certainly some biologically based differences in male and female psychology that last beyond adolescence. But by far the biggest difference is not in how female and male brains develop, but when. The key point is that the relationship between chronological age and developmental age is very different for girls and boys. From a neuro-scientific perspective, the education system is tilted in favor of girls. It hardly needs saying that this was not the intention. After all, it was mostly men who created the education system; there is no century-old feminist conspiracy to disadvantage the boys. The gender bias in the education system was harder to see when girls were discouraged from pursuing higher education or careers and steered toward domestic roles instead.36 Now that the women’s movement has opened up these opportunities to girls and women, their natural advantages have become more apparent with every passing year.

PINK CAMPUSES

The gender gap widens further in higher education. In the U.S., 57% of bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to women, and not just in stereotypically “female” subjects: women now account for almost half (47%) of undergraduate business degrees, for example, compared to fewer than one in ten in 1970.37 Women also receive the majority of law degrees, up from about one in twenty in 1970.38

Figure 1-2 shows the gender gap in the share of degrees awarded at associate’s, bachelor’s, and graduate degree levels from 1970 to 2019.39

Women are earning three out of five master’s degrees and associate’s degrees, and the rise has been even more dramatic for professional degrees.40 The share of doctoral degrees in dentistry (DDS or DMD), medicine (MD), or law ( JD or LLB) being awarded to women has jumped from 7% in 1972 to 50% in 2019.41 The dominance of women on campus shows up in nonacademic areas too. In 2020, the law review at every one of the top sixteen law schools had a woman as editor-in-chief.42

FIGURE 1-2 The great educational overtaking

Degrees awarded to women for every 100 awarded to men, 1971–2019

Note: Master’s, professional, Ph.D., and law degrees included in postgraduate degrees. Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “Degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by level of degree and sex of student” (2005 and 2020).

As Rosin noted, this is a global trend. In 1970, the year after I was born, just 31% of undergraduate degrees went to British women. When I left college two decades later, it was 44%. Now it is 58%.43 Today, 40% of young British women head off to college at the age of 18, compared to 29% of their male peers.44 “The world is waking up to . . . this problem,” says Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, rector of the University of Akureyri in Iceland, where 77% of the undergraduates are women.45 Iceland is an interesting case study, since it is the most gender egalitarian country in the world, according to the World economic Forum.46 But Icelandic universities are struggling to reverse a massive gender inequality in education. “It’s not being discussed in the media,” says Steinunn Gestsdottir, vice rector at the University of Iceland. “But policymakers are worried about this trend.”47 In Scotland, policymakers are past the worried stage and into the doing-something-about-it stage, setting a clear goal to increase male representation in all Scottish universities.48 Their approach is one that other countries should follow.

FIGURE 1-3 Women more educated, around the world

Share of 25–34-year-olds with tertiary educational attainment, by gender

Note: Select OECD countries. Year available varies slightly by country.Source: OECD, “Educational Attainment and Labour-Force Status: ELS—Population Who Attained Tertiary Education, by Sex and Age Group,” data accessed November 15, 2021.

It is true that some subjects, such as engineering, computer sciences and math, still skew male. Considerable efforts and investments are being made by colleges, nonprofit organizations, and policymakers to close these gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). But even here the news is generally encouraging. Women now account for 36% of the undergraduate degrees awarded in STEM subjects, including 41% of those in the physical sciences and 42% in mathematics and statistics.49 But there have been no equivalent gains for men in traditionally female subjects, such as teaching or nursing, and these are occupational fields likely to see significant job growth. (I will be saying more about how to get more men into these HEAL jobs in chapter 11.)

In every country in the OECD, there are now more young women than young men with a bachelor’s degree.50Figure 1-3 shows the gap in some selected nations. As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BY STEALTH

Almost every college in the U.S. now has mostly female students. The last bastions of male dominance to fall were the Ivy League colleges, but every one has now swung majority female.51 The steady feminization of college campuses may not trouble too many people, but there is at least one group whose members really worry about it: admissions officers. “once you become decidedly female in enrollment,” writes Jennifer Delahunty, Kenyon College’s former dean of admissions, “fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.” In a provocative New York Times opinion piece, plaintively headlined “To All The Girls I’ve Rejected,” she said publicly what everyone knows privately: “Standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.”52

The evidence for this stealthy affirmative action program in favor of men seems quite clear. At private colleges the acceptance rates for men are considerably higher than for women.53 At Vassar, for example, where 67% of matriculating students are female, the acceptance rate for male applicants in fall 2020 was 28%, compared to 23% for women.54 You might be wondering if this is because Vassar was a women’s college until 1969. But Kenyon, which was all-male until the same year, has a similar challenge.55 By contrast, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of students, are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex. This is one reason they skew even more female than private institutions.

You might think that this discrimination on the basis of sex by private colleges is illegal. But read the small print of Title IX, Section 1681 (a) (1), which contains a specific exemption from sex discrimination provisions for admissions to private undergraduate colleges. To be clear, this provision was made to protect the small number of single-sex colleges, rather than to allow discrimination in favor of men in the other institutions. The evidence for the gender bias was so strong that in 2009, an investigation was launched by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, despite the Section 1681 loophole. Gail Heriot, the commissioner who instigated the probe, says that there was “evidence of purposeful discrimination.”56 But two years later, the matter was dropped, ostensibly on the grounds of “inadequate data.” Nobody knows for sure what happened behind the scenes. But I think Hanna Rosin’s assessment is right. “Acknowledging the larger dynamic that would give rise to such discrimination was a whole other kind of threat,” she writes. “It meant admitting that in these realms it was in fact men who needed the help.”57

As Kenyon’s Delahunty put it candidly in a September 2021 interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely. The question is, is that right or wrong?”58 My answer is that it is wrong. Even though I am deeply worried about the way boys and men are falling behind in education, affirmative action cannot be the solution. (Or perhaps I should say, not yet.) To a large extent, the gaps at the college level reflect the ones in high school. Differences in early attainment at college can be explained by differences in high school GPA, for example. Reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, and these are areas where boys lag furthest behind girls.59 Equalizing verbal skills at age 16 would close the gender gap in college enrollment in England, according to a study by Esteban Aucejo and Jonathan James.60 The most urgent task, then, is to improve outcomes for boys in the K–12 school system.

STOP OUTS AND DROPOUTS

But getting more men to college is just the first step. They also need help getting through college. With most students now going to some kind of college at some point, the big challenge is completion. Here, too, there is a gender gap. Male students are more likely to “stop out,” that is, to take a detour away from their studies, and they are also more likely to “drop out” and fail to graduate at all. The differences are not trivial: 46% percent of female students enrolling in a public 4-year college have graduated 4 years later; for male students, the proportion is 35%. (The gap shrinks somewhat for 6-year graduation rates.)61

In 2019, Matthew Chingos, director of the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, in collaboration with the New York Times, created a league table of colleges based on their dropout rates. To judge the performance of institutions fairly, Chingos took into account the kind of students they enrolled, since “on average, colleges have lower graduation rates when they enroll more lower-income students, more Black and Latino students, more men, more older students and more students with low SAT or ACT scores.”62 In other words, colleges should not be penalized for having higher dropout rates because they enroll more disadvantaged students. When I read that article, the addition of “more men” in that category jumped out. It shows that the educational underperformance of half the population is now a routine fact to social scientists, one to be added to the standard battery of statistical controls.

The numbers from Chingos suggest that all else equal, an all-female four-year school would have a graduation rate 14 percentage points higher than an all-male school.63 This is not a small difference. In fact, taking into account other factors, such as test scores, family income, and high school grades, male students are at a higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, Black students, or foreign-born students.

But the underperformance of males in college is shrouded in a good deal of mystery. World-class scholars have pored over the low rates of male college enrollment and completion, piling up data and running regressions. I have read these studies and spoken to many of the scholars. The short summary of their conclusions is: “We don’t know.” economic incentives do not provide an answer. The value of a college education is at least as high for men as for women.64 Even a scholar like MIT’s David Autor, who has dug deeply into the data, ends up describing male education trends as “puzzling.”65 Mary Curnock Cook, the former head of the UK’s university and college admissions service, says she is “baffled.”66 When I asked one of my sons for his thoughts, he looked up from his phone, shrugged, and said, “I dunno.” Which may in fact have been the perfect answer.

One factor that gets too little attention in these debates is the developmental gap, with the male prefrontal cortex struggling to catch up with the female one well into the early twenties. To me, it seems clear that girls and women were always better equipped to succeed at college, just as in high school, and that this has become apparent as gendered assumptions about college education have fallen away.67

But I think there is an aspiration gap here too. Most young women today have it drummed into them how much education matters, and most want to be financially independent. Compared to their male classmates, they see their future in sharper focus. In 1980, male high school seniors were much more likely than their female classmates to say they definitely expected to get a 4-year degree, but within just two decades, the gap had swung the other way.68 This may also be why many educational interventions, including free college, benefit women more than men; their appetite for success is just higher. Girls and women have had to fight misogyny without. Boys and men are now struggling for motivation within.

Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book had a gloomy title: The End of Men. But she remained hopeful, back then, that men would rise to the challenge, especially in education. “There’s nothing like being trounced year after year to make you reconsider your options,” she wrote.69 So far, however, there is little sign of any reconsideration. The trends she identified have worsened. There has also been no rethinking of educational policy or practice. Curnock Cook correctly describes this as a “massive policy blind spot.”70 With honorable exceptions—go Scotland!—policymakers have been painfully slow to adjust. Perhaps this is not surprising. The gender reversal in education has been astonishingly swift. It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity. Suddenly, north is south. Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls. Disorienting, to say the least. Small wonder our laws, institutions, even our attitudes, have not yet caught up. But catch up they must.

CHAPTER 2

WORKING MAN BLUES

Men Are Losing Ground in the Labor Market

In May 2019 I was moderating a panel discussion on inequality at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve. I asked Melissa Kearney, a top-notch economist, whether she was more worried about women or men. She took a moment. I’d sprung the question on her in front of a highly influential audience. “I am really worried about the extent to which men in the U.S. are being pushed to the side of economic, social and family life,” she responded. “For 20, 30 or 40 years . . . scholars focused on women and children. Now we really need to think about men.”1

Kearney was brave to say it, and she is right. If we want a more dynamic economy and a better future for our children, we need to help the men who are struggling. In chapter 1, I described the challenge they face in schools. Here I turn to jobs. Growing numbers of men are detaching from paid work. For most of those who are in a job, wages have stagnated. In fact, one reason that the gender pay gap has narrowed is that median male pay has fallen, surely a suboptimal way to achieve equality. But while women have been catching up with men, workers on the top rungs of the economic ladder—men as well as women—have been pulling away from everyone else. The deepest fissures in the labor market are not those between men and women. They are between white and Black workers and between the upper middle class and the middle class and working class, the subjects of chapters 4 and 5.

“Many in the women’s movement and in the mass media complain that men just ‘don’t want to give up the reins of power,’” writes Susan Faludi. “But that would seem to have little applicability to the situations of most men, who individually feel not the reins of power in their hands but its bit in their mouths.”2

I describe and explain here the declining economic fortunes of these men. It’s very important to see how these result from the fracturing of the labor market, rather than the frailties of the men themselves. It’s a structural problem, not a personal one.

MISSING MEN

“Over the last three decades,” write economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, “the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.”3 If that sounds bad, it is. Labor force participation among men in the U.S. has dropped by 7 percentage points over the last half century, from 96 to 89%.4 Even before COVID cratered the economy in 2020, there were 9 million men of prime working age who were not in employment. (Economists define the “prime” years as beginning at the age of 25 and ending, unnervingly, at 54.) A technical but important point is that most of the men who are not in work don’t count in official statistics as “unemployed,” because they aren’t looking for work. One in three men with only a high school education are now out of the labor force.5 That is 5 million men, a reserve army of labor twice the size of the People’s Liberation Army of China.6

If you think of a man hit by economic trends, chances are that you have a middle-aged man in mind. But the problem is not just one for older men. The biggest fall in male employment has in fact been among young men, aged between 25 and 34, as figure 2-1 shows.7 (Now that is prime age.) Scholars are not sure why. Standard economic models struggle to explain it. One popular explanation is the attraction of video games, and it is easy to see how Assassin’s Creed could seem like a better way to spend your day than in a poorly paid, unappealing job. But there isn’t really any good evidence for this. A careful analysis of time-use data by University of North Carolina economist Gray Kimbrough finds that hours spent gaming have increased the most among men in their 20s, but from just three hours a week in 2005, to six hours a week in 2015.8 Based on my own experience as a father of three sons, I honestly had to double-check that these numbers were really for hours per week rather than hours per day. The figure does not strike me as justification for a moral panic. Kimbrough also shows that men who leave employment do not increase the hours spent gaming, or at least not immediately.

Figure 2-1 Fewer men, more women at work

Change in employment to population ratio, 1979 to 2019

Note: Seasonally adjusted; ages 25–54; 1979 Q1 to 2019 Q4.Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment-Population Ratio series.

The economic downturn of 2020 obviously caused employment levels for both men and women to plummet, as lockdowns put the economy into a state of suspended animation. In the space of just a few weeks, female employment fell by 16%, and male employment dropped by 13%.9 The difference was partly the result of more women taking time away from employment to care for children, especially as schools and childcare providers closed, and the downturn was quickly dubbed a “she-cession.”10 Certainly the 2020 recession was a departure from recent economic downturns in which “women’s employment declines were barely perceptible,” as Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson observes.11 Most previous recessions have in fact been he-cessions, hitting male employment hardest.

But since the 2020 downturn was generated artificially by a pandemic, rather than by the usual economic cycle, the recovery was extremely rapid too. The CoVID-19 recession was very sharp but very short, lasting just two months, less than any previous downturn in U.S. history. The gender gap closed very quickly too. By october 2021, the 1.2 percentage point decline in labor force participation rates since the start of the pandemic was evenly divided between men and women.12 There was some good news too: the proportion of female senior executives rose to 24% in 2020, up from 21% in 2019.13

ROBOTS AND TRADE