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

by Richard V. Reeves

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.

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.)

“sex differences in associations between brain development and puberty are relevant for understanding … prominent gender disparities during adolescence.”

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.

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.

the occupations most susceptible to automation are just more likely to employ men, as my colleague Mark Muro shows. “Men … make up over 70 percent of production occupations, over 80 percent of transportation occupations, and over 90 percent of construction and installation occupations,”

For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite. For most men, it barely makes a dent. The question arises as to whether these different roles are freely chosen or not.

Mature men generate more resources than they need for their own survival, and these are shared with the clan, tribe, or family. “The idea of the provider is a major element in the construction of a masculine identity,” writes sociologist David Morgan. “It is a moral as well as an economic category.”

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.

In an influential 1980 essay, “Why Men Resist,” William Goode observed that “the underlying shift is toward the decreasing marginal utility of males.”24 True. But, ouch.

Four out of five American adults (81%) with a high school education or less still believe that “for a man to be a good husband or partner, being able to support a family financially is very important” (compared to 62% of those with a bachelor’s degree).26 So the very men who are least able to be traditional breadwinners are the most likely to be judged by their breadwinning potential. What this means is that men who fare poorly in the labor market are also likely to suffer in the marriage market, especially in the working class.27

Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women.

Psychologist Roy Baumeister makes the point more bluntly: “To maximize reproduction, a culture needs all the wombs it can get, but a few penises can do the job. There is usually a penile surplus.”

Womanhood is defined more by biology, manhood more by social construction. This is why masculinity tends to be more fragile than femininity. When was the last “crisis of femininity”? That’s right: never.

Culture has played a particularly important role in channeling the energy of men toward positive social ends, especially by teaching them to care for others. But “this behavior, being learned, is fragile,” warned Margaret Mead, “and can disappear rather easily under social conditions that no longer teach it effectively.”55 This is a warning we should heed.

an average difference between groups on any given characteristic typically offers limited information about any particular individual.

“a more egalitarian distribution of material and social resources enables women and men to independently express gender-specific preferences.”

It’s not that gender equality discourages girls from pursuing science. It’s that it allows them not to if they’re not interested.”

Maturity means, among many other things, an ability to calibrate your behavior in a way that renders it appropriate to the circumstances.

Our politics are now so poisoned that it has become almost impossible for people on the Left to even discuss the problems of boys and men, let alone devise solutions.

“The Left want to define traditional masculinity as toxic. They want to define the traditional masculine virtues … as a danger to society.… Can we be surprised that after years of being told they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games?”

This is one of the most unfortunate dynamics in the culture wars over sex and biology. The more fervently the Left denies any innate sex differences, the more strongly many on the Right feel the need to insist on their importance, and vice versa. The room for nuance becomes smaller.

“Unlike a woman, a man has no civilized role or agenda inscribed in his body,” he wrote. “The man’s role in the family is thus reversible; the woman’s is unimpeachable and continues even if the man departs.… A man without a woman has a deep inner sense of dispensability.”

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 Left dismisses biology, the Right leans too heavily on it. The Left see a war on girls and women; the Right see a war on boys and men. The Left pathologizes masculinity; the Right pathologizes feminism.

It ought to be a source of national shame that only 3% of pre-K and kindergarten teachers are men.

I would like to see more countries, or U.S. states, following the lead of Scotland, which as part of its Gender Action Plan has set the goal of reducing the gender gap in undergraduate enrollment to 5 percentage points. This will be a challenge, given that the difference is currently 17 percentage points.71 But the Scottish government stands out for clearly stating that gender inequalities in both directions matter, and for setting specific targets to address them.

The gender desegregation of the labor market has been almost entirely one way.1 In particular, the share of men in HEAL occupations—health, education, administration, and literacy—remains stubbornly low. “Women are always saying, ‘We can do anything that men can do,’ ” observed Gloria Steinem. “But men are not saying, ‘We can do anything that women can do.’ ”2

We face labor shortages in two of the largest and most important sectors of our economy—health care and education. But we are trying to solve them with only half the workforce.

But I’ll go out on a limb here and simply state that 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%).25 I’m not saying we need to aim for perfect gender parity in these occupations. But it is reasonable to aim for a closer match between clients and providers.

As things stand, 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.

We need to break the cycle of professions taught by women for women.

women now account for a large share of the bachelor’s degrees awarded nationally in the subjects covered by the Marie Curie Scholarship: biology (64%), chemistry (50%), and mathematics (43%).

Role models are crucial here. You can’t be what you can’t see.

The old model of fatherhood, narrowly based on economic provision, is unfit for a world of gender equality.

These policies are intended to support the development of a new model of fatherhood, suited to a world where mothers don’t need men, but children still need their dads.

Anna Machin, anthropologist and author of The Life of Dad, “Fathers are not mere adjuncts to mothers, occasional babysitters or bag-carriers. They are the consequence of half a million years of evolution and they remain a vital part of the human story.”6 Machin observes that while fathers and mothers can do many of the same things, Dads are wired to make two distinct contributions, “protection and teaching.

There is no getting around it: if we want equality at work, we need equality at home.

“Virtually every legal and institutional arrangement governing these fathers’ lives tells them that they are a paycheck and nothing more,”

“If we truly believe in gender equity,” write Edin and Nelson, “we must find a way to honor fathers’ attempts to build relationships with their children just as we do mothers’—to assign fathers rights along with their responsibilities.”