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

by Richard V. Reeves

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,”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

While parts of the brain need to grow, some brain fibers have to be pruned back to improve our neural functions.

it occurs earlier in girls than in boys. The gap is largest at around the age of 16.31

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.

the relationship between chronological age and developmental age is very different for girls and boys.

FIGURE 1-2 The great educational overtaking Degrees awarded to women for every 100 awarded to men, 1971–2019

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.

Reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, and these are areas where boys lag furthest behind girls.

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.

the occupations most susceptible to automation are just more likely to employ men,

By contrast, women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as health care, personal services, and education.

As the muscular demands of work decline, men are becoming physically weaker; one study of grip strength, a good marker of overall strength, shows a sharp decline among men.19 Meanwhile, and perhaps more surprisingly, women are getting physically stronger. In 1985, the average man in his early 30s could squeeze your hand with about 30 pounds more force than a similarly aged woman. Today, their grip strength is about the same.

The median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since. While women’s wages have risen across the board over the last four decades, wages for men on most rungs of the earnings ladder have stagnated.

FIGURE 2-2 The shrinking pay gap Male and female wage distributions 1979 and 2019

There is certainly very little evidence that women are paid less than men for doing the same work in the same way. Women are paid less because they do different work, or work differently, or both. But, of course, that is not the end of the story. Women may earn less because they occupy fewer senior positions, but that fact itself may be the result of institutional sexism. Similarly, it is true that women tend to be more clustered than men in lower-paying occupations and industries, which explains perhaps a third of the pay gap.

Among young adults, especially if they are childless, the pay gap has essentially disappeared.33 “There’s remarkable evidence that earnings for men and women move in sync up until the birth of a couple’s first child,” says economist Marianne Bertrand. “This is when women lose and they never recover.”

The earnings trajectory for women who do not have children looks similar to that for men. The one for mothers does not. The more children women have, the further behind they fall in terms of both employment and earnings.

Some of the best proof that the gender pay gap is mostly a parenting pay gap comes from innovative studies in Sweden and Norway comparing new mothers in same-sex relationships with those in heterosexual relationships. Ylva Moberg, from the Swedish Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, shows that the impact on earnings for the birth mother is almost identical in both family types.37 Meanwhile, the nonbirth mothers in the lesbian couples show a similar earnings pattern to fathers in the heterosexual ones. Over time, the inequality seems to balance out in the lesbian couple if they have more than one child, as each takes their turn at being the birth mother. For heterosexual couples, by contrast, the gap gets wider with each child.

the pay gap “can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices.”39 The men were twice as likely to work overtime (which pays extra), even at short notice. They also took fewer hours of unpaid leave, and so on. Among train drivers with children, the gaps were even wider. Fathers wanted even more overtime pay; mothers wanted more time off.

take University of Chicago MBAs. Straight out of the business school, women earned about 12% less than their male classmates, a gap largely explained by the kind of jobs chosen. Thirteen years later, the difference had widened dramatically, to about 38%.41 But one subgroup of the female MBAs had not fallen further behind. By now you don’t need me to tell you which: the ones without children.

In 1970, most mothers were not in paid work—today, almost three out of four are.44 Even among the mothers of preschoolers, paid work is now the norm rather than the exception.

the role of mothers has been expanded to include breadwinning as well as caring, but the role of fathers has not been expanded to include caring as well as breadwinning.

Mature men generate more resources than they need for their own survival, and these are shared with the clan, tribe, or family.

The traditional family was an effective social institution because it made both men and women necessary. But it also rested on a sharp division of labor. While mothers had a direct, primary caring relationship with their children, fathers had an indirect, secondary, providing one.

In 1977, 26 percent of pregnancies among women with low levels of education resulted in a marriage before the birth. By 2007 the figure was just 2%.22

“The family may be a myth,” writes Dench, “but it is a myth that works to make many men tolerably useful.”

Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.38 Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010.39 Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women.40 One of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men. Wives were economically dependent on their husbands, but men were emotionally dependent on their wives.

Within 6 years of their parents separating, one in three children never see their father, and a similar proportion see him once a month or less.

Among fathers who did not complete high school, 40% live apart from their children, compared to just 7% of fathers who graduated from college.47 In 2020, one in five children (21%) were living with a mother only, almost twice as many as in 1968 (11%).48

One study found that glasses generated a more favorable perception of Black male defendants but made no difference for white defendants.2

One striking study showed that a Black man without a criminal record is less likely to be hired than a similarly qualified white man with a criminal record.

Opioids are not like other drugs, which might be taken to artificially boost confidence, energy, or illumination. There is a reason people take MDMA in a dance club or psychedelics on a spiritual quest. Opioids are taken simply to numb pain—perhaps physical pain at first, then existential pain. They are not drugs of inspiration or rebellion, but of isolation and retreat.

many women in poor neighborhoods have come to see men, including the fathers of their children, as just another mouth to feed, an inversion of the men’s expected role.21 With the rise in female earning power, men need to clear a higher bar to be seen as husband material. Women are more likely to go it alone than partner with a man who is in a weak economic position.

educated Americans have transformed marriage from an institution of economic dependency into a joint venture for the purpose of parenting. Marriage here serves primarily as a commitment device for shared investments of time and money in children. I call these high-investment parenting, or HIP, marriages.

Silva shows how some of the men in Coal Brook are attempting, against the odds, to “sustain the masculine legacy of provision, protection, and courage that they inherited.”

“In 1990, nearly half (45%) of young men reported that when facing a personal problem, they would reach out first to their friends. Today, only 22% of young men lean on their friends in tough times. Thirty-six percent say their first call is to their parents.”

we have twice as many female ancestors as male ones.21 This can take a minute to get your head around. After all, genetically speaking, everyone must have a mother and a father. But of course one man can father many children with many women, while others father none at all.

Womanhood is defined more by biology, manhood more by social construction. This is why masculinity tends to be more fragile than femininity.

male separatists—MGTOWs (Men Going Their Own Way).

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).

It ought to be a source of national shame that only 3% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers are men.41 There are now twice as many women flying U.S. military planes as there are men teaching kindergarten (as a share of the professions).

Black men account for just 2% of teachers in the U.S.45 As I have already mentioned, Black boys in particular seem to benefit from having a Black teacher.

HEAL occupations—health, education, administration, and literacy—

In 2020, STEM jobs accounted for 9% of U.S. employment among prime-age workers, while HEAL jobs accounted for 23%. Health care and education are very large sectors, between them accounting for around 15% of all jobs.

Almost half of all registered nurses are now over the age of 50. This means many are likely to retire over the next 15 years, especially if they are under greater stress at work.