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

by Richard V. Reeves

FIGURE 11-2 Not enough men in caring professions Male share, select HEAL occupations Note: Full-time, year-round, civilian, employed workers ages 25–54 with positive earnings. Occupations categorized using 1990 occupational codes. Source: Steven Ruggles and others, IPUMS USA: Version 11.0, 2021.

it is not ideal if most substance abuse counselors are women (76%) when most substance abusers are men (67%), or that most special education teachers are women (84%) when most students being referred to special education are male (64%).

men account for only 16% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded in health care fields, and 12% of those in registered nursing.34 They are also poorly represented in teaching, accounting for 18% of education degrees and just 8% of those in elementary school teaching.

It is inevitably tougher to persuade young men that nursing is a career for them when 94% of the professors are women.

Male nurses are also often stereotyped as effeminate or homosexual, or simply as failed doctors.54 Florence Nightingale set the tone right from the beginning, when she effectively founded modern nursing in the nineteenth century, opposing men in the profession on the grounds that with their “hard and horny hands” they were not suited to “touch, bathe and dress wounded limbs, however gentle their hearts may be.”

it took about 13 million calories to rear a human from birth to nutritional independence. “This is far more than a woman could provide by herself,” she says.5 If fathers wanted their children to survive, they had to stick around and provide for them. So they did. Fatherhood is a product of evolutionary selection.

Fathers have an especially important role to play in this period. In contrast to the early years, when nurture and attachment are key, adolescence is a time when children are finding their own feet, testing boundaries, and starting to go their own way.

Additive inputs were those where the contributions of each parent were positive, and identical: 42% fell into this category. Redundancies, with no additional benefit from the input of the second parent, accounted for 12%. The remaining 22% were unique, with positive contributions only from the father or the mother. Specifically, Eggebeen concluded that “fathers appear to especially make unique contributions to the well-being of their children through their human capital while mothers make unique contributions through their availability and closeness to their children.”22 Dads teach, moms tend.

In every U.S. state, an unmarried mother is the presumed sole custodial parent. Unmarried fathers must first prove paternity (in married couples this is assumed), and then petition for visitation and custody. For many fathers this can prove a difficult process. In the meantime, the mother can choose to bar all access. Regardless of visitation rights, however, unmarried fathers will typically be obliged to pay child support, often at levels that low-income fathers in particular struggle to meet.

the goal of public policy often seems to be to create work-friendly families, rather than family-friendly work.