The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

by Jonathan Haidt

For example, in 1972, women earned only 42% of bachelor’s degrees. By 1982, women were just as likely as men to graduate from college. But for the next 20 years, women’s enrollment rose rapidly while men’s did not, so that by 2019 the gap had reversed: Women earned 59% of bachelor’s degrees, while men earned just 41%.[9] It’s not just college completion. Reeves shows that at every level of education, from kindergarten through PhD, girls are leaving boys in the dust. Boys get lower grades, they have higher rates of ADHD, they are more likely to be unable to read, and they are less likely to graduate from high school, in part because they are three times as likely as girls to be expelled or suspended along the way.[10] The gender disparities are often small at the upper end, among the wealthiest families, but they grow much larger as we move down the socioeconomic ladder. Is this a victory for girls and women? Only if you see life as a zero-sum battle between the sexes. In contrast, as Reeves puts it, “a world of floundering men is unlikely to be a world of flourishing women.”[11]