- A number of people warned
me against writing a book about boys and men because
it's such a fraught subject, particularly in politics right now, and because so many people were afraid that merely drawing attention
to the problems of boys and men was implying somehow
less effort being paid to girls and women; that
it's framed as zero-sum. And it's sort of a who's
side are you on question: and you have to be on
one side or the other, rather than just being on the
side of human flourishing. One of the real challenges
here is that if there are men missing from certain
crucial areas of our society and our economy, that makes it
harder for other men and boys to flourish in those areas. We have an education
system that has a dearth of male teachers. We have a labor market where the jobs that are growing fastest
are ones where we have the fewest men- and in families there's the
growth in what you might call the 'dad deficit' or 'father listeners.' As men are struggling
in each of those areas, what you'll see is it'll
be harder for other men to follow in their footsteps. It's harder for boys to flourish if their fathers aren't engaged. It's harder for men to enter occupations where there aren't men. It's harder for boys to do well at school where there are no male
teachers to be seen. And so, there's a very real danger that unless we act quite soon,
that we will set in train something of a vicious cycle. I'm Richard Reeves. I'm a Senior Fellow at
the Brookings Institution, and my latest book is "Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is struggling, Why That Matters, and
What to Do about It." The overall picture is, that
on almost every measure, at almost every age, and in
almost every advanced economy in the world, the girls are
leaving the boys way behind, and the women leaving the men. What nobody expected
was that girls and women wouldn't just catch up to
boys and men in education, but would blow right
past them and keep going. Everyone was very focused, quite rightly, on getting to gender equality,
getting to gender parity. It's not that long ago where
there was a huge gender gap the other way, and there
was huge focus, correctly, in the 70s and 80s to really promote women and girls in education. But the line just kept
going-and nobody predicted that. Nobody was saying, "What if
gender inequality reemerges in just as big a way as
now, in some cases bigger, but the other way around?" And to some extent,
everyone's still trying to get their head around this new world where, at least in education, when you talk about gender inequality, you are pretty much always
talking about the ways in which girls and women
are ahead of boys and men. And that's happened in a
very, very short period of human history. So if you look at the U.S., for example, in the average school
district in the U.S., girls are almost a grade
level ahead of boys in English, and have caught up in math. If we look at those with
the highest GPA scores, the top 10%, two-thirds
of those are girls. If we look at those at the bottom, two-thirds of those are boys. When it comes to going to college, there's a 10 percentage
gap in college enrollment; a similar size gap in completing college, conditional on enrolling. And the result of those
trends is that the gender gap in getting a college degree is now wider than it was in 1972, but
the other way around. So in 1972, when Title
IX was passed to promote more gender equality in education, there was a 13 percentage point gap in favor of men getting college degrees. Now there's a 15 percentage point gap in favor of women getting college degrees. So the gender inequality
we see in college today is wider than it was 50 years ago- it's just the other way around. There's quite a fierce
debate about the differences between male and female brains. And in adulthood, I think
there's not much evidence that the brains are that different in ways that we should worry about, or that are particularly consequential. But where there's no real debate is in the timing of brain development. It is quite clear that
girls brains develop more quickly than boys brains do, and that the biggest difference seems to occur in adolescence. So what happens, is in adolescence, we develop what neuroscientists
call the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex of
our brain is sometimes known as the "CEO of the brain." It's the bit of your brain that says, "You should do your chemistry homework rather than going out to party." It's the bit of your brain
that says it is worth maintaining a high GPA 'cause
it'll help you get to college, which might help you in the future. And that bit of the brain
develops considerably earlier in girls than in boys, between
one and two years earlier. Partly because girls go into
puberty a bit earlier than boys and that seems to trigger
some of this development. What that means is that if
you have an education system that rewards the ability
to turn in homework, stay on task, worry about
your GPA, prepare for college, and so on, then, just
structurally, that's going to put at an advantage the group whose brains have developed earlier in
those particular areas- and that turns out on average to be girls. I think it's a great
irony of women's progress that by taking the breaks off women's educational
opportunities and aspirations, we've revealed the fact
that the education system is slightly structured
against boys and men, because of these differences in the timing of brain development. But it took the women's
movement to show that, because the natural advantages
of women in education were impossible to see
when women's aspirations were being capped by a sexist society. Now that those caps have
been largely removed, we can see that it's boys and
men who are at disadvantage in the education system. At the risk of sounding boring,
let's collect the data first so we know what we are dealing with here. I do think that we should
be strongly encouraging boys to start school a year later than girls. I think that should become the default in many school districts
because of the developmental gap that there is between boys and girls. Because boys brains mature more slowly, then them starting school
a year later would mean that they were developmentally
closer to being peers with the girls in the classroom. We need a lot more male teachers. It's striking that the teaching profession has become steadily more female over time. Only 24% of K-12 teachers, now, are male- that's down from 33% in the 80s- and fewer men are applying to
teacher training year on year. And so, we've seen this steady shift towards a close to an
all-female environment; that has all kinds of
consequences for the ethos of the school, for the way
we deal with different kinds of behavior among boys
and girls, for example. And so we need a very serious
and intentional effort to get more men into teaching. The third thing I would do in this world where I have significant
power to dictate policies, would be significantly more investment in vocational education and training: That is an area where we do
seem to see better results for boys and men on average, and one that's woefully
underinvested in in the U.S. The U.S. has really
bet most of its dollars on a very academic, a very
narrow route towards success, and less emphasis on vocational training. And that has actually put boys
and men at a disadvantage- so apprenticeships,
technical high schools, are actually a really good
way to help more boys and men. I think one of the
challenges with this debate is that if you're talking
to women and men who are, say, at the top of the economic ladder- four-year college degrees, decent incomes- they look around and they
don't see some of these issues. But that's not the same
for working-class men; that's not the same for men
lower down the economic ladder. So there's a danger that we're so busy, to borrow Sheryl Sandberg's phrase: "So busy leaning in that
we don't look down." The reality for men
further down the ladder is very different. The economic trends for
men have turned downwards along four dimensions. One is wages: Most men today earn less
than most men did in 1979. In employment, with a drop
in labor force participation of eight percentage points,
which means nine million men now of prime age are not working. We've seen a drop in occupational stature, and so, there are now more men
working in employment areas which are seen as lower status
than they were in the past. And we've also seen a drop
in the acquisition of skills, the kinds of skills and
education that boys and men need. If boys don't get educated
and men don't get skilled, they will struggle in the labor market. And across all of those domains,
we've seen a downwards turn for men in the last four or five decades. And so the way in which social
class divides have opened up, economic inequality has
widened, is really important to understand in the context
of gender inequality. If we only focus on gender
gaps, then we miss the fact that both men and women at the top have done increasingly well. But that's much less
true of everybody else, and especially it's less true of those from lower-income backgrounds, working-class boys and men,
and Black boys and men. You see many of those
trends are amplified, and so those boys and men are
really at the sharpest end of many of the social
and economic changes. On the one hand, we have
a huge and successful and laudable effort to get
more women into STEM jobs. So 'science, technology,
engineering, and math.' On the other side, we have
what I call "HEAL jobs." So that's 'health, education,
administration, and literacy.' Almost, if you like, the
opposite side of the coin to STEM jobs- and that's where a lot of
the jobs are coming from. Health and education alone
are huge and growing sectors in the U.S., and so by my estimates, for every one job we're
gonna create in STEM between now and 2030, we're
gonna create three in HEAL jobs. But those jobs are at
least as gender-segregated as STEM jobs, but in the other direction, and unlike STEM becoming
more so over time; so if you look at the HEAL
sector, only 24% of the workers in those sectors are male,
and that number is falling. And in particular sectors,
we are seeing a really precipitous drop in the number of men. We have a drop in the
number of male teachers. We have a very sharp drop in the number of male psychologists; that's dropped from 39% male to 29% male in the last decade alone. And among psychologists
under the age of 30, only 5% are male. So we roll that forward, and
we're going to see psychology becoming essentially almost
an all-female profession. So these jobs, which are
both crucial, I think, for society, and where
it'd be very useful to have more diversity, are actually becoming more gender-segregated, and so we have absolutely
no effort to get more men into HEAL jobs, which is
where I think the future lies, and where we should be
helping men to move. One of the problems that we
face is what I call in the book a 'dad deficit.' And that can be seen in
various different ways: So one in four fathers don't
live with their children. If parents split up,
they're much more likely to lose contact with their
fathers than with their mothers- and so one in three children,
if their parents split up, don't see their father at all after a few years post the separation. So this fatherlessness is something that's very, very specific. And when 4 in 10 children
are born outside marriage, and most children, to
less educated parents are born outside marriage, then we have to reinvent
what it means to be a father, because right now men are still being held to an old standard of what it meant to be a successful father in a
world where that is neither possible for many of
them, or even desirable, because what we've seen
is, as women have grown in economic power and
economic independence, then of course they're going
to choose to be with a man rather than being forced
to, as in the old days. This is probably the greatest
liberation in human history, honestly, that women can now choose whether to be with a man or not. More than 2 out of 5
households in the U.S. now, a woman is the main breadwinner. 40% of American women earn
more than the average man. These are huge economic
changes, and all for the good, but it does pose some
really sharp questions about what fathers are for. And until we escape the obsolete model of the breadwinner father,
then we will continue to see more and more men being
left out of family life. And the kicker is that boys in families that don't have a father presence suffer much more than girls. And so then what happens
is that male disadvantage can become intergenerational because if the fathers are struggling, and therefore not really
involved in their kids' lives, then the boys are the
ones who suffer most, who will then go on to struggle themselves in education, and in the labor market. It's clear by now that marriage
and social institutions and a sense of purpose matter to men. And so as we've seen these
real challenges faced by men in education, work, and the family, you're seeing some really difficult and troubling health consequences. And so, the so-called 'deaths of despair' from suicide, overdose, or alcohol, three times higher among
men than among women. Suicide itself, three times
higher among men than women, and rising very quickly, especially among middle-aged
men and younger men. So we can see these as symptoms, I think, of a broader malaise, which is what's troubling boys and men. And for men in particular, this sense of purpose is very important. I think it's a human universal
that we need to be needed. There's a wonderful piece
of work by an academic called Fiona Chan, who
looked at the last words that men had used to describe themselves before committing suicide,
or attempting suicide. And the top of the list were
"worthless" and "useless." I think if we create a
society in which so many men do feel like they're not needed, then it's no surprise that we
see these deaths of despair. We see problems with opioids- opioids are a much bigger problem for men than they are for women- and one of the great
tragedies of opioid deaths is the death rates are higher in part because the users are on their own. And so, in some ways, the opioid epidemic is a perfect illustration
of a whole series of things we are talking about: which is a loss of role in the family, a loss of status in the labor market, turning to drugs, and being
isolated and withdrawn. And so in that example, I
think you can see a symptom of this broader, male
malaise that we just need to take it more seriously. And we have a cultural
responsibility, as a society, men and women together,
to help men and boys to adjust to this new world- because, right now, many of
them are really struggling.
