Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

by Richard V. Reeves

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.

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

For men who are in work, pay levels are typically lower than in the past. The median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since.

Only men at the top have seen strong earnings growth. Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less, in real terms, across their working life than those who started out in 1967. For women, by contrast, life-time earnings have risen by 33% over the same period (these numbers are at the median).23 In the dry words of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The long-term trend in men’s earnings has been quite different than that for women.”24

Women are now the main breadwinner in 41% of U.S. households.

Some of those are single mothers, but by no means all; three in ten wives now out-earn their husbands, twice as many as in 1981.17

Social norms about maternal employment have shifted so fast that the term working mother already sounds antiquated. According to the General Social Survey, three quarters (74%) of U.S. adults now agree that working mothers can establish as “warm and secure” a relationship with their children as a stay-at-home mother, compared to 48% in 1977.23

A few years back, I was delighted to see my godson wearing glasses. It makes me feel better to know others are aging too. Judge me if you like. “Don’t feel too bad, Dwight,” I said with faux sympathy. “It happens to all of us in the end.” Dwight laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “these are clear lenses. I just do more business when I’m wearing them.” Dwight sells cars for a living. I was confused. How does wearing unnecessary glasses help him sell more cars? “White people especially are just more relaxed around me when I wear them,” he explained. Dwight is six foot five. He is also Black. It turns out that this is a common tactic for defusing white fear of Black masculinity. When I mentioned Dwight’s story in a focus group of Black men, two of them took off their glasses, explaining, “Yeah, me too.” In fact, I have yet to find a Black American who is unaware of it,

Glasses A few years back, I was delighted to see my godson wearing glasses. It makes me feel better to know others are aging too. Judge me if you like. “Don’t feel too bad, Dwight,” I said with faux sympathy. “It happens to all of us in the end.” Dwight laughed. “Oh no,” he said, “these are clear lenses. I just do more business when I’m wearing them.” Dwight sells cars for a living. I was confused. How does wearing unnecessary glasses help him sell more cars? “White people especially are just more relaxed around me when I wear them,” he explained. Dwight is six foot five. He is also Black. It turns out that this is a common tactic for defusing white fear of Black masculinity. When I mentioned Dwight’s story in a focus group of Black men, two of them took off their glasses, explaining, “Yeah, me too.” In fact, I have yet to find a Black American who is unaware of it, but very few white people who are. Defense attorneys certainly know about it, often asking their Black clients to put on glasses. They call it the “nerd defense.”1 One study found that glasses generated a more favorable perception of Black male defendants but made no difference for white defendants.2

but very few white people who are. Defense attorneys certainly know about it, often asking their Black clients to put on glasses. They call it the “nerd defense.”1 One study found that glasses generated a more favorable perception of Black male defendants but made no difference for white defendants.2

Raj Chetty and his team at Opportunity Insights have crunched the numbers on 20 million Americans born around 1980, to look closely at intergenerational patterns of poverty and mobility. They find that Black men are much less likely than white men to rise up the income ladder, while Black and white women raised by poor parents have similar rates of upward intergenerational mobility. Chetty and his team conclude that the overall Black–white intergenerational mobility gap “is entirely driven by differences in men’s, not women’s, outcomes.”13

Black women are seizing educational opportunities long denied to them, and on some fronts they have overtaken white men. Black girls are more likely than white boys to have graduated from high school; young Black women aged 18 to 24 are more likely than young white men to be enrolled in college; and a higher proportion of Black women aged 25 to 29 hold postgraduate degrees than white men of the same age.19 The gaps here are modest, but they illustrate the important educational gains made by Black women in recent years. The gender gap in education between Black women and Black men is much wider than the one between white women and white men, as figure 4-1 shows. For every Black man getting a college degree, at all levels, there are two Black women.20

(It is worth noting here, however, that the group

doing worst at British schools are white boys from lower-income backgrounds.)

Chetty reports, Black men raised in relatively affluent families have lower employment rates than white men raised in poverty.24

President Barack Obama describes the “hole” in his heart left by the absence of his father.43 Many Black men suffer from “post-traumatic missing daddy disorder,” according to Jawanza Kunjufu, author of Raising Black Boys.44

At the extreme are the young men who retreat from society altogether. The trend is most pronounced in Japan, where the rising number of hikikomori (shut-ins)

ins) has prompted widespread national concern, and even some government action in the form of online support.51 Some hikikomori have been living in one room for years. This is not a formal medical condition, and many are not obviously mentally ill, but the term “severe social withdrawal” is often used. There are now more than half a million of these modern-day hermits, according to a survey from the Japanese Cabinet Office.52

Some desperate parents are paying “rental sisters,” to write notes to and talk on the phone with their hikikomori sons, in the hope that this wil...

In other words, the differences are dimorphic—different but overlapping—rather than binary. (Watch for that gap instinct I mentioned in chapter 2.) The typical male has a greater willingness to take risks, for example, than the typical female (especially in adolescence). But some women are more risk-taking than some men. Most studies find the biggest differences are at the tails of these distributions, rather than for the majority of people. A large majority of the most aggressive people are male, but the differences in aggressiveness in the general population are much smaller.

Given the scale of the cultural shifts of recent decades, simply lecturing boys and men to get with the program is not a good approach. “There’s a contradiction in a discourse that on the one hand claims that male privilege, entitlement and the patriarchy are the most powerful forces of oppression humanity has ever created,” writes the Guardian commentator Luke Turner, “and on the other would (understandably) like men to process this quickly, and without fuss.”37

This is about as good a description of the identity of the Trump Army as you will find, a pure expression of what Pankaj Mishra described as a form of “rear-guard machismo.”10 But this is not just found in the U.S. It is an international phenomenon. Across the world, men have been more likely than women to support right-wing or protest parties.11 In Sweden, for example, one in four men supported the far-right Sweden Democrats in a 2015 poll, twice the level of support among women.12 In Germany, especially in the east, men have swung sharply to the political right. In 2017, a third of Saxon men voted for the far-right Alternative for Germany Party. “We have a crisis of masculinity in the East and it is feeding the far right,” says Petra Köpping, minister for integration in Saxony.13 In South Korea, young men are also swinging hard right, fueled by antifeminist sentiment. In the Seoul mayoral election of April 2021, 73% of men in their 20s voted for the conservative candidate, compared to 41% of women in the same age group.14 The overwhelming support of young men also helped to propel conservative presidential candidate Yoon Suk-yeol to a narrow victory in March 2022.15 Yoon has promised to abolish the Department of Gender Equality and Family. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, boasts of his 56-inch chest. There was alpha male Imran Khan in Pakistan (“feminism has completely degraded the role of a mother”), antifeminist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (“women are not equal to men”)...

MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way). This

There is a helpful hierarchy of MGTOWs, eerily similar to the levels you might find in a computer game. Once a man has taken the red pill and chosen the MGTOW route, the steps are to reject long-term relationships (level 1); disavow any sexual relationship or “go monk” (level 2); disconnect from the economy, making only enough to support themselves (level 3); and finally, completely disengage from society, or “go ghost” (level 4). Many young men dip their toes into

In a fascinating study conducted before the 2016 election, Dan Cassino, a professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University, added an unusual question to a survey of voting intentions: “Do you earn more, less, or about the same as your spouse?” Half the respondents got the question early in the survey, before being asked about voting, and the other half got it after declaring their voting intention. The question was intended to prime men “to think about potential threats to their gender roles,” Cassino writes.36 The results were striking. Men asked the question about spousal earnings early in the survey were much more likely to say they would vote for Donald Trump than Hillary Clinton. This was a small poll of around seven hundred registered voters. But Cassino’s experiment hints at the potential for politicians to activate and exploit male anxiety about the loss of status.

Writing along similar lines, Geoff Dench identified the “fundamental weakness of feminist analysis” as a failure “to see that men may need the status of the main provider role to give them a sufficient reason to become fully involved, and stay involved, in the longer-term draggy business of family life.”40

“The key to the recovery of masculinity does not lie in any wistful hope of humiliating the aggressive female and restoring the old masculine supremacy,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in a 1958 essay titled “The Crisis of American Masculinity.” “Masculine supremacy, like white supremacy, was the neurosis of an immature society. It is good for men as well as for women that women have been set free. In any case, the process is irreversible; that particular genie can never be put back into the bottle.”42

“Roles are changing for both men and women. Women are being pressured … to believe that their past status was brought about by male oppression,” writes one astute cultural observer. “At the same time men … are being accused of being oppressors—and angry oppressors at that. The whole process of change is taking place in an atmosphere of the greatest bad temper, and a tremendous amount of secondary hostility is being generated that in itself poses a threat to a good outcome.” That was Margaret Mead—in 1975.43 The hostility remains,

“True equality between groups that are different in any way can be attained only by providing for the differences.” That’s Margaret Mead again, in 1974.1 Mead’s idea of true equality might now be labeled equity. When there are differences in starting conditions, treating people the same (i.e., equally) is not the same as treating them equitably. A common visual illustration is of three children of different heights, who want to look over a fence. To get them to the same level, you need to give taller boxes to the shorter children. The switch from a mindset of equality to one of equity has been powerful in considerations of racial justice, especially in the U.S. But there are gender implications here too. An equitable education system, for example, will be one that recognizes natural sex differences, especially the fact that boys are at a developmental disadvantage to girls at critical points in their schooling.