Distilled Knowledge

Source contribution

Reeves frames male disadvantage as a structural problem compatible with gender equality. Education, labor-market change, and fatherhood interact, with the heaviest burdens often falling on working-class and Black boys and men rather than on men uniformly.

• Average developmental timing can interact with age-graded schooling to widen educational gaps; institutional response should remain sensitive to individual variation.
• The loss of male-dominated employment ladders was not matched by equally accessible routes into growing health, education, administration, and literacy-intensive work.
• A provider-only model of fatherhood became less stable as economics and gender roles changed; fathers need a positive caregiving and social role not contingent solely on marriage or earnings.
• Solutions can target boys and men without treating women’s gains as the cause or accepting a zero-sum gender politics.

Routes into permanent notes

• Graduated Independence Builds Capability links developmental support to education, work, and responsibility.
• Childhood argument map places the boy-specific case in the wider institutional question.
• Boy Crisis position is the debate-ready position layer.

Evidence boundary

Aggregate sex gaps vary by class, race, geography, age, and measure. Biological timing does not dictate individual ability or a single school policy. Refresh headline statistics and distinguish Reeves’s proposals from causal findings before public use.

DESCRIPTION

The Book that Sparked a National Conversation A Barack Obama 2024 Summer Reading Selection An Economist Best Book of 2022 A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even worsened. In this widely praised book, Richard Reeves, father of three sons, a journalist, and now the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, tackles the complex and urgent crisis of boyhood and manhood. He argues that our attitudes, our institutions, and our laws have failed to keep up. Conservative and progressive politicians, mired in their own ideological warfare, fail to provide thoughtful solutions. Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions that turn the page on the corrosive narrative that plagues this issue. Of Boys and Men argues that helping the other half of society does not mean giving up on the ideal of gender equality.

Summary

---

📘 Of Boys and Men — Summary of Highlights

🧠 Overview

• Reeves joins authors like Warren Farrell (The Boy Crisis) and Hanna Rosin (The End of Men) in examining the structural challenges facing boys and men today.
• The crisis is not just psychological but deeply structural, involving education, the labor market, family dynamics, and culture.

---

🎓 Education: Boys Falling Behind

• Since the 1970s, girls have surged ahead academically:
  • Girls now earn the majority of college degrees.
  • Boys lag significantly in reading, writing, GPA, and graduation rates.
• Boys develop neurologically slower, particularly in the prefrontal cortex, impacting impulse control and planning.
• The education system is ill-suited to male developmental timing and heavily staffed by female teachers.

---

💼 Work: Economic Displacement

• Male wages (especially for working-class men) have stagnated or declined since 1979.
• Automation and globalization disproportionately hurt male-dominated jobs (e.g., construction, manufacturing).
• Economic transformation favors “HEAL” fields (Health, Education, Administration, Literacy)—which are female-dominated.
• Despite discussions about the gender pay gap, within-group gaps (e.g., class) are often greater than between men and women.

---

👨‍👧‍👦 Family: The Fatherhood Crisis

• The provider role is culturally outdated but still socially expected.
• Men without steady incomes or jobs are more likely to be excluded from family life, especially in lower-income brackets.
• A significant portion of children (especially in minority communities) are growing up without active fathers.
• The author argues for a reimagined role for fathers that centers on direct involvement with children, not just financial provision.

---

👨🏿‍🦱 Race and Class: Double Disadvantage

• Black men face compounded disadvantages:
  • Lower upward mobility compared to Black women.
  • Higher incarceration rates, lower wages, and greater social distrust.
  • Black boys are more negatively affected by poverty and father absence than any other group.
• Poor boys, regardless of race, are disproportionately affected by:
  • “Deaths of despair” (suicide, overdose).
  • School failure, social isolation, and fragile identities.

---

🧬 Biology and Masculinity

• Reeves acknowledges sex differences in brain development, risk-taking, aggression, and impulsivity.
• But these are dimorphic (overlapping), not binary.
• Culture and biology interact: marriage and fatherhood can reduce testosterone and aggression.
• Masculinity is socially constructed and fragile—it must be “earned” and affirmed through social roles.

---

🧑‍🎓 Policy and Cultural Blind Spots

• Policy gaps: Programs to boost college enrollment or employment often fail to address male-specific challenges.
• Progressive blind spots:
  • Pathologizing masculinity as inherently toxic.
  • Reluctance to acknowledge biological sex differences.
  • Framing male suffering as individual rather than structural.
• Conservative blind spots:
  • Nostalgia for traditional roles that are no longer viable.
  • Resistance to new models of fatherhood or caregiving.

---

📊 Key Data Points

• Men account for 70% of opioid deaths and three-quarters of suicides.
• Male labor force participation has fallen significantly, especially among men without college degrees.
• Women now outnumber men in almost all levels of higher education, including law, business, and medicine.
• In the U.S., 40% of women out-earn the typical man.
• A third of young men now live with their parents—more than with partners.

---

🧭 Solutions Proposed

• Rebuild fatherhood around relationships, not paychecks.
• Encourage men into HEAL professions, not just push women into STEM.
• Revise education to reflect boys’ developmental timelines.
• Establish Office of Men’s Health and gender-informed policy design.
• Promote cultural narratives of positive masculinity, avoiding extremes on both Left and Right.

---

If you’d like this as a formatted Obsidian note or blog post, just let me know. I can also generate flashcards for key points or create a one-pager visual summary.

Preface: Worried Dad to Worried Wonk

I follow in the footsteps of Hanna Rosin (The End of Men), Andrew Yarrow (Man Out), Kay Hymowitz (Manning Up), Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Coulombe (Man, Interrupted), and Warren Farrell and John Gray (The Boy Crisis), among many others. (Page 12)

The gender gap in college degrees awarded is wider today than it was in the early 1970s, but in the opposite direction.3 The wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while (Page 12)

women’s wages have risen across the board.4 One in five fathers are not living with their children.5 Men account for almost three out of four “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide or an overdose.6 (Page 13)

Second, the boys and men struggling most are those at the sharp end of other inequalities, especially of class and race. The boys and men I am most worried about are the ones lower down the economic and social ladder. Most men are not part of the elite, and even fewer boys are destined to take their place. In 1979, the weekly earnings of the typical American man who completed his education with a high school diploma, was, in today’s dollars, $1,017. Today it is 14% lower, at $881. (Page 13)

Black men face not only institutional racism but gendered racism, including discrimination in the labor market and criminal justice system. (Page 13)

The problem with men is typically framed as a problem of men. It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time. This individualist approach is wrong. Boys are falling behind at school and college because the educational system is structured in ways that put them at a disadvantage. Men are struggling in the labor market because of an economic shift away from traditionally male jobs. And fathers are dislocated because the cultural (Page 13)

role of family provider has been hollowed out. The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges. (Page 14)

Making college completely free had no impact on men. (Page 14)

dozens of programs that benefit girls and women, but not boys and men: (Page 14)

So not only are many boys and men struggling, they are less likely to be helped by policy interventions. (Page 14)

Fifth, there is a political stalemate on issues of sex and gender. Both sides have dug into an ideological position that inhibits real change. (Page 14)

quickly label male problems as symptoms of “toxic (Page 14)

masculinity.” (Page 15)

The Left tells men, “Be more like your sister.” The Right says, “Be more like your father.” Neither invocation is helpful. (Page 15)

What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. (Page 15)

Sixth (Page 15)

evidence-based solutions (Page 15)

PART I THE MALE MALAISE (Page 17)

CHAPTER 1 GIRLS RULE Boys Are Behind in Education (Page 18)

In the space of just a few decades, girls and women have not just caught up with boys and men in the classroom—they have blown right past them. (Page 18)

In 1972, the U.S. government passed the landmark Title IX law to promote gender equality in higher education. At the time, there was a gap of 13 percentage points in the proportion of bachelor’s degrees going to men compared to women.4 By 1982 the gap had closed. By 2019, the gender gap in bachelor awards was 15 points, wider than in 1972—but the other way around.5 (Page 18)

In the U.S., for example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students.6 Male students also struggle more with online learning (Page 19)

The first challenge is to persuade policymakers that in education, it is now boys who are at a disadvantage. (Page 19)

education system favoring girls and a labor market favoring men. (Page 19)

It is also worth noting that while women are catching up with men in the labor market, boys and men are falling further behind in the classroom. One gap is narrowing, the other is widening. (Page 19)

GIRLS GETTING THE GRADES (Page 20)

The bottom line is that Finland’s internationally acclaimed educational performance is entirely explained by the stunning performance of Finnish girls. (In fact, American boys do just as well as Finnish boys do on the PISA reading test.) (Page 20)

Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in (Page 20)

contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in math. 10 Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science (Page 21)

Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be “school ready” at age 5, for example, controlling for parental characteristics. This is a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor children, or Black and white children, or between those who attend preschool and those who do not. (Page 21)

A 6percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to a 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade. (Page 21)

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. (Page 22)

By now it should not be a surprise to learn that boys are less likely than girls to graduate high school. In 2018, 88% of girls graduated from high school on time (i.e., 4 years after enrolling), compared to 82% of boys.21 The male graduation rate is only a little higher than the 80% among poor students. (Page 23)

States are required by federal law to report high school graduation rates by race and ethnicity, proficiency in English, economic disadvantage, homelessness, and foster status. These kinds of data are invaluable for assessing trends for the groups at greatest risk of dropping out. But oddly, states do not have to report their results by sex. Getting the numbers cited above required scouring the data for each state. (Page 24)

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE TIMING (OF BRAIN DEVELOPMENT) (Page 24)

relative underperformance of boys in school to their lower expectations of postsecondary education (Page 24)

strong skew toward female teachers (Page 24)

Boys’ brains develop more slowly, especially during the most critical years of secondary education. (Page 24)

When almost one in four boys (23%) is categorized as having a “developmental disability,” it is fair (Page 24)

to wonder if it is educational institutions, rather than the boys, that are not functioning properly.25 (Page 25)

Steinberg shows how adolescence is essentially a battle between the sensation-seeking part of our brain (Go to the party! Forget school!) and the impulse-controlling part (I really need to study tonight). (Page 25)

It helps to think of these as the psychological equivalent of the accelerator and brake pedals in a car. 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.”27 There are obvious implications here for parenting, and the importance of helping adolescents develop self-regulation strategies. (Page 25)

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. (Page 25)

The cerebellum, for (Page 25)

example, reaches full size at the age of 11 for girls, but not until age 15 for boys. Among other things, the cerebellum “has a modulating effect on emotional, cognitive, and regulatory capacities,” according to neuroscientist Gokcen Akyurek. (Page 26)

In adolescence, on average girls are more developed by about 2 to 3 years in terms of the peak of their synapses and in their connectivity processes,” says Frances Jensen (Page 26)

“This fact is no surprise to most people if we think of 15-year-old boys and girls.”33 I don’t have any daughters, but I can report that when my sons brought female friends home during the middle and high school years, the difference in maturity was often startling. (Page 27)

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. (Page 27)

biggest difference is not in how female and male brains develop, but when. The key point is that the relationship between chronological age and developmental age is very different for girls and boys. From a neuro-scientific perspective, the education system is tilted in favor of girls. (Page 27)

PINK CAMPUSES (Page 28)

The gender gap widens further in higher education. In the U.S., 57% of in bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to women, and not just stereotypically “female” subjects: women now account for almost half (47%) of undergraduate business degrees, for example, compared to fewer than one in ten in 1970.37 Women also receive the majority of law degrees, up from about one in twenty in 1970.38 (Page 28)

Women are earning three out of five master’s degrees and associate’s degrees, and the rise has been even more dramatic for professional degrees.40 The share of doctoral degrees in dentistry (DDS or DMD), medicine (MD), or law ( JD or LLB) being awarded to women has jumped from 7% in 1972 to 50% in 2019.41 The dominance of women on campus shows up in nonacademic areas too. In 2020, the law review at every one of the top sixteen law schools had a woman as editor-in-chief. (Page 28)

As Rosin noted, this is a global trend. In 1970, the year after I was born, just 31% of undergraduate degrees went to British women. When I left college two decades later, it was 44%. Now it is 58%.43 Today, 40% of young British women head off to college at the age of 18, compared to 29% of their male peers. (Page 29)

Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, rector of the University of Akureyri in Iceland, where 77% of the undergraduates are women.45 Iceland is an interesting case study, since it is the most gender egalitarian country in the world, according to the World economic Forum (Page 29)

FIGURE 1-3 Women more educated, around the world (Page 30)

It is true that some subjects, such as engineering, computer sciences and math, still skew male. Considerable efforts and investments are being made by colleges, nonprofit organizations, and policymakers to close these gaps in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). But even here the news is generally encouraging. Women now account for 36% of the (Page 30)

undergraduate degrees awarded in STEM subjects, including 41% of those in the physical sciences and 42% in mathematics and statistics.49 But there have been no equivalent gains for men in traditionally female subjects, such as teaching or nursing, and these are occupational fields likely to see significant job growth. (Page 31)

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BY STEALTH (Page 31)

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. (Page 31)

admissions officers. “once you become decidedly female in enrollment,” writes Jennifer Delahunty, Kenyon College’s former dean of admissions, “fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.” In a provocative New York Times opinion piece, plaintively headlined “To All The Girls I’ve Rejected,” she said publicly what everyone knows privately: “Standards for admission to today’s most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men.”52 (Page 31)

“Acknowledging the larger dynamic that would give rise to such discrimination was a whole other kind of threat,” she writes. “It meant admitting that in these realms it was in fact men who needed the help.”57 (Page 32)

STOP OUTS AND DROPOUTS (Page 33)

But getting more men to college is just the first step. They also need help getting through college. With most students now going to some kind of college at some point, the big challenge is completion. Here, too, there is a gender gap. Male students are more likely to “stop out,” that is, to take a detour away from their studies, and they are also more likely to “drop out” and fail to graduate at all. The differences are not trivial: 46% percent of female students enrolling in a public 4-year college have graduated 4 years later; for male students, the proportion is 35%. (The gap shrinks somewhat for 6-year graduation rates.)61 (Page 33)

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. (Page 34)

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. (Page 34)

One factor that gets too little attention in these debates is the developmental gap, with the male prefrontal cortex struggling to catch up with the female one well into the early twenties. To me, it seems clear that girls and women were always better equipped to succeed at college, just as in high school, and that this has become apparent as gendered assumptions about college education have fallen away.67 (Page 34)

Boys and men are now struggling for motivation within. (Page 35)

“massive policy blind spot.” (Page 35)

CHAPTER 2 WORKING MAN BLUES Men Are Losing Ground in the Labor Market (Page 36)

I asked Melissa Kearney, a top-notch economist, whether she was more worried about women or men. She took a moment. I’d sprung the question on her in front of a highly influential audience. “I am really worried about the extent to which men in the U.S. are being pushed to the side of economic, social and family life,” she responded. “For 20, 30 or 40 years … scholars focused on women and children. Now we really need to think about men.”1 (Page 36)

Growing numbers of men are detaching from paid work. (Page 36)

The deepest fissures in the labor market are not those between men and women. They are between white and Black workers and between the upper middle class and the middle class and working class (Page 37)

Many in the women’s movement and in the mass media complain that men just ‘don’t want to give up the reins of power,’” writes Susan Faludi. “But that would seem to have little applicability to the situations of most men, who individually feel not the reins of power in their hands but its bit in their mouths.”2 (Page 37)

MISSING MEN (Page 37)

Over the last three decades,” write economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, “the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.” (Page 37)

Labor force participation among men in the U.S. has dropped by 7 percentage points over the last half century, from 96 to 89%. (Page 37)

One in three men with only a high school education are now out of the labor (Page 37)

force.5 That is 5 million men, a reserve army of labor twice the size of the People’s Liberation Army of China.6 (Page 38)

ROBOTS AND TRADE (Page 40)

Male employment has not fallen because men have suddenly become feckless or work-shy, but because of shifts in the structure of the economy. Simply put, male jobs have been hit by a one-two punch, of automation and free trade. Machines pose a greater threat to working men than to women for two reasons. First, 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,” he writes.14 And these are “all occupational groups with current that have above-average projected automation exposure.” By contrast, women make up most of the workforce in relatively automation-safe occupations, such as health care, personal services, and education. loads task (Page 40)

Second, men often lack the skills required in an automating world. According to Andy Haldane, chief economist at the Bank of England, “the high-skill, high-pay jobs of the future may involve skills better measured by EQ (a measure of emotional intelligence) than IQ.” (Page 40)

The long-run shift away from jobs requiring physical strength is going to continue. Fewer than one in ten jobs now require what the Bureau of Labor Statistics describes as “heavy work,” which requires “occasionally lifting or carrying 51–100 pounds or frequently lifting or carrying 26–50 pounds.” (Page 41)

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. (Page 41)

Most of the occupations set to grow the most in coming years are female dominated.20 There has been a commendable and largely successful push to get more girls and women into jobs that require STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) skills. But it is now even more important to encourage men into what I call HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) jobs, which are dominated by women. (Page 41)

Male workers are challenged on one side by robots, and on the other by workers in other countries. (Page 41)

Chinese imports caused declines in U.S. manufacturing employment, of around 2 to 3 million jobs (Page 42)

I will say that the political elite spent decades complacently arguing that on net, and in the long run, free trade is good. And so it is. By definition, however, this means that some people, in some places, are being hurt right now. Not much was done to help these people, even by center-left politicians who claimed to be on the side of the working class. The assumption in policy circles that some of the winnings from free trade would be redistributed to the losers proved mostly false. The victims were basically left behind, told to buck up their ideas, engage in some “lifelong learning,” and get with the program. Up until 2017, for every dollar the U.S. government was spending on Trade Adjustment Assistance for workers, $25 were being spent on tax subsidies toward the endowments of elite colleges. (Page 42)

The median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since. (Page 42)

While women’s wages have risen across the board (Page 42)

over the last four decades, wages for men on most rungs of the earnings ladder have stagnated. Only men at the top have seen strong earnings growth. (Page 43)

BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT GENDER PAY GAP? (Page 43)

The gap instinct leads to two errors of perception. First, we fail to see how much overlap there is between two groups. Second, we fail to see the bigger gaps that typically exist within groups, rather than between them. (Page 43)

40% of women now earn more than the typical man, up from just 13% in 1979. That two in five women are earning more than what 50% of men earn seems counterintuitive to many people. (Page 44)

The gap between high-wage women and lowwage women, and to a lesser extent between high-wage and low-wage men, has widened dramatically. (Page 44)

typical (i.e., median) full-time female worker earns about 82% as much as the typical man (Page 47)

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. (Page 47)

THE PAY GAP IS A PARENTING GAP (Page 48)

The one-word explanation for the pay gap is: children. (Page 48)

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. (Page 49)

Take women who leave Harvard with a professional or postgraduate degree, arguably members of the most elite educational group in the world. Fifteen years after graduating, only half of these women are working full time. (Page 49)

THE $2 TRILLION WOMAN (Page 50)

In 2019, women accounted for 47% of all workers.42 The U.S. economy is $2 trillion larger than it would have been had women’s economic participation remained at 1970s levels, according to a 2015 report from the Council of Economic Advisers. (Page 50)

As the Council concluded, “Essentially all of the income gains that middle-class American families have experienced since 1970 are due to the rise in women’s earnings.”43 (Page 50)

In 1970, most mothers were not in paid work—today, almost three out of four are. (Page 51)

In 1968, only 33% of young women in their teens and early 20s said they expected to be in paid work at the age of 35. By 1980, the share was 80%. (Page 51)

There is plenty to worry about in terms of women’s opportunities, including in the higher reaches of the economy. Just one in five C-suite company directors is a woman, and just forty-one of the Fortune 500 firms have a female CEO.5 (Page 51)

The share of venture capital (Page 51)

money going to female founders is 3%. (Page 52)

CHAPTER 3 DISLOCATED DADS Fathers Have Lost Their Traditional Role in the Family (Page 53)

For Steinem, as for most feminists of her generation, marriage was a relationship of crippling dependency. Her message to the young women on the lawn at Smith was to make their own way in the world and to be able to pay their own bills. “Dependence represents a lack of alternatives,” wrote (Page 53)

Margaret Mead, a few years after Steinem’s speech. “A woman equipped to earn her own living need never feel trapped… . Independence begins with economic independence.” (Page 54)

turning marriage into a social choice rather than an economic necessity (Page 54)

Until the 1970s, the typical female college graduate had become a wife within a year of graduation.4 Among today’s Smith graduates, only about half are married by their mid-30s. (Page 54)

A man who knows he must provide for a wife and children has a clear sense of how to be “purposeful” and “whole.” (Page 54)

(1) the male role has long been culturally defined as that of a provider, and based on the economic dependence of mothers on men; (2) this traditional role has been dismantled by the securing of economic independence by women; (3) culture and policy are stuck on an obsolete model of fatherhood, lagging way behind economic reality; and (4) this is resulting in a “dad deficit,” with men increasingly unable to fulfill the traditional breadwinner role but yet to step into a new one. (Page 54)

DADS AS PROVIDERS (Page 54)

Concluding a sweeping survey of a number of cultures from the Mediterranean basin to Tahiti to South Asia, published in Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity, David Gilmore writes, “To be a man in most of the societies we have looked at, one must impregnate women, protect dependents from danger, and provision kith and kin… . We might call ‘Man-theImpregnator-Protector-Provider.’” this quasi-global personage something like (Page 55)

Men are expected to put others before themselves in a variety of ways, including by giving up resources to the group, as well as risking injury or even death in its defense. (Page 55)

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.”7 (Page 55)

This provider role successfully connected men to familial and social life, as the British sociologist Geoff Dench describes in Transforming Men: Changing Patterns of Dependency and Dominance in Gender Relations: “What it does is formally to incorporate men into the (Page 55)

interpersonal support structures, the chains of dependency, which lie at the core of any human society.” (Page 56)

Feminists by contrast see marriage as an oppressive institution, “the citadel of the enemy,” according to John Stuart Mill and a mechanism for “locking women up” in Gloria Steinem’s assessment.11 This critique is sustained by many contemporary feminist writers.12 (Page 56)

Certainly, the answer is not to try to roll back the gains of the women’s movement, as Dench and other conservatives suggest. A reinvention of fatherhood based on a more direct relationship to children is the answer, and I set out some ideas on this in chapter 12. (Page 57)

important to note, however, that life has not always been rosy for men in traditional families. (Page 57)

Witness the quiet desperation of Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, who has to “suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation” and who can only fulfill his role as breadwinner, in the end, by taking his own life.13 Men’s freedom has often been stifled by patriarchy too, with tightly prescribed roles and oppressive expectations. (Page 57)

BICYCLES IN A WORLD OF FISH (Page 57)

“Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence,” Steinem said in 2004.15 (Page 57)

Women are now the main breadwinner in 41% of U.S. households.16 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. (Page 58)

Mothers have also received growing support from the welfare system, allowing even those with low or no earnings to be freer of the need for a breadwinning husband (Page 58)

As the British politician and scholar David Willetts writes in his book The Pinch, “A welfare system that was originally designed to compensate men for loss of earnings is slowly and messily redesigned to compensate women for the loss of men.”19 (Page 58)

liberalization of divorce law (Page 58)

40% of births in the U.S. now take place outside marriage, up from just 11% in 1970. (Page 58)

decline in shotgun marriages (Page 58)

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. (Page 59)

In an influential 1980 essay, “Why Men Resist,” William Goode observed that “the underlying shift is toward the decreasing marginal utility of males.” (Page 59)

CULTURE LAGS ECONOMICS (Page 59)

The economic numbers have changed. The social norms have not. Four out of five American adults (81%) with a high school education or less still believe that “for a man to be (Page 59)

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 (Page 60)

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. (Page 60)

Husbands without jobs are at much higher risk of seeing their marriages end today than in the past, according to work from Alexandra Killewald. “expectations of wives’ homemaking may have eroded,” she concludes, “but the husband breadwinner norm persists.” (Page 60)

“Our estimates imply that aversion to having the wife earn more than the husband explains 29 percent of the decline in marriage rates over the last thirty years,” they write.29 (It is worth noting that the aversion was found among both men and women.) In other words, as women have earned more, relative to men, they have become less likely to marry. Sociologist Steve Ruggles estimates that 40% of the drop in marriage among Americans aged 25 to 29 from 1960 to 2013 can be explained by the fall in male earnings relative to men of the previous generation.30 Notably, this dampening effect on marriage was strongest among those with less education. (Page 60)

Dench worried that without the traditional provider role, men would “struggle to get full acceptance and risk anomie and short-termism.”31 Given the difficulties of many men today, this fear cannot be dismissed as scaremongering. The success of the women’s movement has not caused the precariousness of male social identity, but it has exposed it. The question is where we go from here. (Page 61)

For many couples, marriage now serves primarily as a “capstone” to a series of educational, social, and economic achievements, as Andrew Cherlin puts it.33 Fewer than one in five American adults think that marriage is essential to living a fulfilling life, and of those who are married, just one in seven say that financial reasons were a major factor in the decision to tie the knot. (Page 61)

Men who are not providers, or at least do not see themselves as such, work less. After an in-depth study of working class men in New Jersey, published as The Dignity of Working Men in 2000, Michèle Lamont concluded that “being hardworking is a mode of expressing manliness.” Work signaled the fulfillment of the central male role of “providing for and protecting the family” and was part of the “disciplined self” that constitutes mature masculinity.36 (Page 62)

Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married (Page 62)

men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker. (Page 63)

Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010. (Page 63)

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. (Page 63)

In 2017, the Pew Research Center asked Americans a difficult question: What is the meaning of life? Specifically, they asked respondents an openended question, “What about your life do you currently find meaningful, fulfilling, or satisfying? What keeps you going, and why?” one of their most striking discoveries was that women find more meaning in their lives, and from more sources, than men. Women and men are equally likely to say that their job or career provides “a great deal of meaning and fulfillment” (33% and 34%).42 But in almost every other domain, there was a marked gender gap: 43% of women across all age groups mentioned children or grandchildren as a source of current meaning, for example, compared to just 24% of men. (Page 63)

As well as being good for children, a stronger role for fathers would provide many men with a powerful extra source of meaning and purpose in their lives. (Page 64)

A DAD DEFICIT (Page 64)

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. (Page 64)

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%). (Page 65)

Eighty-two percent of women aged 25–34 say that “it is okay for an unmarried female to have and raise a child,” and 74% of their male peers agree. (Page 65)

Most children in the U.S. will not spend their whole childhood with both biological parents. (Page 65)

The result is that the separation of men from women too often means the separation of fathers from children. This is bad for men, bad for women, and bad for children. Just as women have largely broken free of the old, narrow model of motherhood, so men need to escape the confines of the breadwinner model of fatherhood. Fathers matter to children even if— perhaps especially if—they are not married to their mother. The social institution of fatherhood urgently needs an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children. Along with the obvious challenges there is a big opportunity here too, for an expansion in men’s roles. (Page 65)

“A man who is (Page 65)

integrated into a community through a role in a family, spanning generations into the past and future, will be more consistently and durably tied to the social order than a man responding chiefly to a charismatic leader, a demagogue, or a grandiose ideology of patriotism.” That’s George Gilder writing in 1973. (Page 66)

PART II DOUBLE DISADVANTAGE (Page 67)

CHAPTER 4 DWIGHT’S GLASSES Black Boys and Men Face Acute Challenges (Page 68)

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. (Page 68)

Defense attorneys certainly know about it, often asking their Black clients to put on glasses. They call it the “nerd defense.” (Page 68)

REVERSE SEXISM (Page 70)

HARD FACTS ON BLACK MEN (Page 72)

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.” (Page 73)

“Black women continue to have substantially lower levels of household income than white women, both because they are less likely to be married and because Black men earn less than white men,” write Chetty and his team. (Page 73)

Scott Winship, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and I find that marriage rates are a small part of the story.15 The main problem is the low incomes of Black men, especially of those raised in poverty. This means that despite some impressive progress made by Black women, their children are still much more likely to grow up poor, reinforcing intergenerational inequality. Breaking the cycle of poverty for Black Americans will require a transformation in the economic outcomes for Black men. (Page 73)

quality schools and colleges remain less accessible to Black Americans. (Page 73)

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 (Page 74)

In the UK, for example, the gender gap in education is most pronounced among Black students, with Black boys lagging Black girls in all subjects at all ages.21 (It is worth noting here, however, that the group doing worst at British schools are white boys from lower-income backgrounds.) (Page 74)

Black men raised in relatively affluent families have lower employment rates than white men raised in poverty. (Page 74)

Those Black men who are in work receive some of the lowest wages; the weekly wage of the typical Black male worker in 1979 was $757 (in today’s dollars). Today it is $830. That is a gain of just 10%. Again, it is important to look at race and gender together here. White women have seen the most dramatic economic gains in recent decades, as figure 4-2 shows. In 1979, white and Black women earned the same. Now Black women earn 21% less. White women caught up with Black men by the 1990s and have had faster-rising earnings ever since. Black men now earn 14% less than white women (and 33% less than white men). (Page 75)

The overall gender pay disparity is closing because the wages of women, especially white women, are rising rapidly. Meanwhile the Black–white pay gap is widening, as Black workers, especially Black men, see painfully slow growth in wages. Given these trends, it should not be a surprise to learn that Black women are more likely than Black men to be the main family breadwinner, again in contrast to every other racial group. (Page 76)

Black women face a different combination of disadvantages than Black men; there is some evidence, for example, that Black women experience greater discrimination when they become mothers. (Page 76)

FIGURE 4-2 White women now earn more than Black men (Page 76)

A summary of Chetty’s research in the New York Times concludes that “there is something unique about the obstacles black males face.” (Page 77)

We need, she says, nothing less than a “New Deal for Black Men.” (Page 77)

THE THREAT STEREOTYPE (Page 77)

One in four Black men born since the late 1970s have been in prison by their mid-30s.31 Among those who dropped out of high school, it is seven out of ten. These men hit young adulthood just as the imprisonment boom began in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the bipartisan war on drugs. (Page 77)

One in three white Americans rank “many or almost all” Black men as “violent,” compared to just one in ten who say the same of white men.32 According to McConnaughy and White, “The gender modifier does unique work in accessing negative notions of black men. (Page 78)

My colleague Rashawn Ray, a sociologist, shows for example that middle-class Black men are less likely to be physically active in neighborhoods that are mostly white. Why? Because Black men are trying to avoid being seen as a threat. (Page 78)

For Black men, even more than for men in general, masculinity is a doubleedged sword. Black masculinity was seen as “toxic” long before the term was applied more broadly, as shown by the use of terms like superpredator and wolf pack to describe Black male offenders. (Page 79)

employers are more likely to view Black men as criminals anyway. (Page 80)

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. (Page 80)

Before their 14th birthday, one in four Black children see a parent go to jail or prison, usually their father. (Page 80)

I will note that Black boys seem to benefit even more than others from engaged fatherhood, and that on many measures, Black fathers are more engaged than fathers of other races, especially when they are not married to or living with the mother. (Page 81)

THE BLACK FAMILY UNDER STRESS (Page 81)

Half of Black women raising children are doing so without a husband or cohabiting partner, in stark contrast to women of other racial groups, especially whites. (Page 81)

Black mothers are three times as likely as white mothers to be single parents (52% v. 16%), and half as likely to be living with a spouse (41% v. 78%).48 Most births to Black women take place outside marriage (around 70%), compared to about half the births to Hispanic women, and 28% of those to white women. (Page 81)

Black women in their early 40s are five times as likely as white women of the same age to have never married (34% v. 7%). (Page 81)

William Julius Wilson argued that dire economic conditions create a smaller pool of “marriageable men,” so fewer couples tie the knot. (Page 82)

To be marriageable, a man has to be a breadwinner. How outdated and sexist! The trouble is that most people, including most Black people, agree with Wilson. Breadwinning potential is highly prized in a potential mate: 84% of Black Americans say that in order to be a good husband or partner, it is “very important” for a man to be “able to provide for their family financially,” compared to 67% of white respondents.52 But the gap is even wider when it comes to female providers: 52% of Black Americans say it is very important for women to be able to financially support their family, compared to just 27% of white Americans. Given the economic challenges facing Black women and men, this is not surprising. But while Black women are seeing some improvement in their educational and economic positions, and therefore their ability to fill the breadwinning role, Black men are falling way behind. (Page 82)

Raising men up does not mean holding women down, or “displacing” them. It means rising together. (Page 83)

FREE MEN (Page 83)

CHAPTER 5 CLASS CEILING Poor Boys and Men Are Suffering (Page 85)

“deaths of despair.” (Page 85)

rise in deaths of despair among middle-aged, lesseducated whites. (Page 85)

deaths of despair are almost three times higher among men than women (Page 85)

vitally important to examine gender through the lens of race, and vice versa. (Page 85)

At the top of the economic ladder, especially in the top 20% of the income distribution, both women and men are flourishing on almost all (Page 85)

measures, from their growing wealth to the lengthening spans of their lives. (Page 86)

gap between highly paid workers and everyone else has widened. In 1979, the earnings of the typical woman were 63% those of the typical man. By 2019, this had risen to 82%. By contrast the wages of the typical worker (i.e., at the median) fell from 54% of the wages of a high earner (i.e., at the 90th percentile) to 42% by 2019.4 By these measures, then, the gender pay gap narrowed by 19 percentage points, while the class pay gap widened by 12 percentage points. (Page 86)

Class warriors downplay gender concerns, focused only on the oligarchy. Gender warriors downplay class concerns, focused only on the patriarchy. But inequalities of class and gender have to be considered together, especially when they pull in different directions. (Page 86)

It might seem odd to put so much stress on economic inequality in a book about boys and men. But I have come to see the two problems as inseparable. There is simply no way to reduce economic inequality without improving the fortunes of less advantaged boys and men. (Page 87)

DEATHS OF DESPAIR (Page 87)

“Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job,” write Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, authors of Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, a study of communities hit hardest by recent economic trends. “Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed.” (Page 87)

men account for almost 70% of the opioid overdose deaths in the U.S. (Page 87)

Almost half the prime-age men out of the labor force in 2016 said they had taken pain medication the previous day, mostly at (Page 87)

prescription strength, according to a survey analyzed by Princeton economist Alan Krueger. (Page 88)

I think opioids are just as much a barometer of social problems as they are a cause. (Page 88)

They are not drugs of inspiration or rebellion, but of isolation and retreat. One reason that so many people die from opioid overdoses is that users are typically indoors, and very often alone. (Page 88)

FIGURE 5-1 Male suicide: high and rising (Page 88)

In a study of suicides, Australian researcher Fiona Shand and her colleagues looked at the words or phrases that men who have attempted suicide most often used to describe themselves.17 At the top of the list were useless and worthless. The true cause of the male malaise, I believe, is not lack of labor force participation but cultural redundancy. (Page 89)

FAMILY MISFORTUNES (Page 89)

When men struggle, families become poorer. One of the most striking facts about recent economic history is that it is only women who have kept American families financially afloat in the last few decades. And even then, just barely. except for the richest families (i.e., the top fifth), all the growth in household income since 1979 resulted from the increased working hours and earnings of women. As Heather Boushey, appointed in 2021 to the Council of economic Advisers, and Kavya Vaghul write, “Women’s contributions saved low-income and middle-class families from steep drops in their income.” (Page 90)

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. (Page 90)

As Edin’s and Kefalas’s ethnographic work illustrates, many women decide that “I can do bad by myself.”22 In the bottom fifth of the income distribution, seven out of ten mothers are now the main breadwinner— usually because they are the only one.23 This growing class gap in family life shows how economic factors, especially the position of men, both in absolute terms and relative to women, influences family formation.24 The falling earnings power of noncollege males is one reason for their falling marriage rates, according to David Autor and Melanie Wasserman. (Page 91)

In 1979, there was almost no difference in marriage rates by social class. Today there is a wide gap.29 The marriage rate of men aged 40–44 with a high school education or less has dropped by more than 20 percentage points over the past 40 years, compared to 6 percentage points for those with college education.30 As my colleague Isabel Sawhill has written, “Family formation is a new fault line in the American class structure.” (Page 91)

Most births to women with only a high school diploma now occur outside marriage (59%), but the same is true for just one in ten births to women with a 4-year college degree. (Page 91)

I think 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 highinvestment parenting, or HIP, marriages.35 Affluent, highly educated parents have more flexibility at work, more money to outsource domestic labor, and more wealth or credit to buy time at home if they choose. If one of them takes time out of the labor market, the family finances will survive. That study of MBA graduates I cited in chapter 2, showing how time taken to care for children caused the gender pay gap, also found that women with the highest-earning husbands were the most likely to take time out of the labor market.36 This underscores the differences in the position of men of different classes. College-educated men have been largely insulated from the labor market shocks that have derailed so many others. With high and rising earnings, they have remained attractive marital prospects, even for women who are themselves flourishing in the labor market. These men have not, by and large, become stay-at-home dads, however. (Page 92)

“When considering all households,” write economist Shoshana Grossbard and coauthors, “the factor accounting most for the increased inequality during this period [1973–2013] is an increased tendency for individual men and women to remain single.” (Page 93)

Affluent couples are also able to invest much more heavily in their children. The result is diverging destinies among children, greater economic responsibility and independence for women, and a growing number of men who are “unburdened and unmoored,” according to Shelly Lundberg and her coauthors.38 (Page 93)

THE HAPHAZARD SELF (Page 93)

Over the course of 13 years, a team of qualitative researchers led by Kathryn Edin conducted in-depth interviews with men in four American cities. In the resulting 2019 paper, “The Tenuous Attachments of WorkingClass Men,” they chart the erosion of key institutional frameworks for mature masculinity, especially work, family, and religion. These core institutions, Edin and her coauthors write, “created the attachments, investments, involvements, and beliefs that guided and gave meaning to human activity in specific social domains.” They also “organized social activity into common patterns of behavior, [and] supplied norms, beliefs, and rituals that legitimated such patterns.”40 (Page 94)

The result is an increased number of men with what the team labels “a haphazard self,” oscillating between different plans and priorities, struggling to stay on any particular track, and often slipping backward. (Page 94)

ALL THE LONELY MEN (Page 95)

Men have fewer friends than women and are at greater risk of isolation. The gap has widened in recent years. A 2021 report from the Survey Center on American Life identified a male “friendship recession,” with 15% of men saying they have no close friends, up from 3% in 1990.43 Unsurprisingly, these are also the men who are most likely to report feeling lonely. (Page 95)

Daniel Cox a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who conducted the survey, writes, “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.”44 This may in part be because the men are more likely to be living under the same roof as Mom and Dad. In 2014, one in three young adult men (35%) were living with their parents, more than were living with a wife or partner.45 For women, it is the other way around. (Page 95)

Men on their own tend to be men alone. (Page 96)

Japan, where the rising number of hikikomori (shut-ins) has prompted widespread national concern (Page 96)

half a million of these modern-day hermits, according to a survey from the Japanese Cabinet Office.52 (Page 96)

Even if relatively few men will totally withdraw, there are many more who are some way along the hikikomori spectrum, (Page 97)

MALE ORCHIDS (Page 97)

social scientists are piling up the evidence that boys suffer worse consequences from childhood adversity. (Page 97)

Boys raised in families in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, for example, are less likely to escape poverty as an adult than girls from similarly poor homes. (Page 98)

Gender gaps in adulthood have roots in childhood,” write Raj Chetty and his coauthors, who conducted the U.S. study, “perhaps because poverty and exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood are particularly harmful for boys.” (Page 98)

Boys do badly, for example, if they are raised in neighborhoods with high levels of crime, and a large share of single-parent-households seem to be particularly detrimental to boys. This is why boys seem to fare particularly poorly in certain cities, including Baltimore, as well as places like Detroit and Fresno, while outcomes for girls are less influenced by their zip code. on the plus side, Black boys raised in neighborhoods with a high proportion of fathers have better prospects as adults. The bottom line, according to Chetty, is that “neighborhoods matter more for boys than girls.” (Page 98)

The bigger impact of class position on boys and men is also clear in postsecondary education: girls raised in the poorest families (i.e., the bottom fifth of the distribution) are 57% more likely to get a 4-year college degree than boys from similar backgrounds, compared to a difference of just 8% among those from affluent (top fifth) families. (Page 99)

boys suffer more from family instability, especially from the exit of biological fathers.65 Boys raised by single parents, especially single mothers, have worse outcomes than girls (including their own sisters) at school and lower rates of college enrollment, in part because of bigger differences in behavioral problems in the classroom.66 “Boys do especially poorly in broken families,” write Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan.67 (Page 99)

Looked at from every angle, then, the pattern is clear. Economic and social disadvantage hurts boys more than girls. This is an extremely important fact, and one that has yet to receive nearly enough attention. The problems of men are not only fueling social and economic inequality but also being caused by it. “A vicious cycle may ensue,” write David Autor and Melanie Wasserman, “with the poor economic prospects of lesseducated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.” (Page 99)

NEW GENDER ECONOMICS (Page 99)

Any serious effort to improve rates of upward mobility or reduce economic inequality must take into account the specific challenges being faced by boys and men. Otherwise, patterns of male disadvantage will repeat across generations. (Page 100)

Conservatives worried about boys and men need to be concerned about economic inequality. But liberals worried about inequality must pay more attention to boys and men. (Page 100)

CHAPTER 6 NON-RESPONDERS Policies Aren’t Helping Boys and Men (Page 101)

IMMUNE TO INITIATIVES: EDUCATION (Page 102)

IF YOU CAN MAKE IT HERE: WORK (Page 106)

Given the evidence that many programs simply do not work for half the population, it is irresponsible for policymakers not to question whether this money is being well spent. There is certainly enough evidence here to challenge any presumption in favor of gender-blind programs and services. It is no good to note these “disappointing” findings, shrug our shoulders, and keep on spending. (Page 108)

ASPIRATION GAPS (Page 108)

First, motivation: “The women are so driven. They know they have to provide for their family.” Second, independence: “They [the women] don’t really need a relationship, they can do it on their own.” Third, persistence: “When stuff gets hard, the guys tend to run away, the girls don’t.” Fourth, planning: “Women tend to live in the future, men tend to live in the present.” Put these together—motivation, independence, persistence, and planning—and it is no wonder (Page 109)

Young women are seizing opportunities with much greater zeal than young men. (Page 109)

Men appear to motivate each other to stay put, rather than hit the road. (Page 110)

PART III BIOLOGY AND CULTURE (Page 112)

CHAPTER 7 MAKING MEN Nature and Nurture Both Matter (Page 113)

After using MRI scans to examine sex differences in a sample of over 5,000 people in the UK—the largest study of its kind to date—psychologist Stuart Ritchie and his coauthors conclude that “for every brain measure that showed even large sex differences, there was always overlap between males and females: even in the case of the large difference in total brain volume there was 48.1% sample overlap.”3 In other words, the differences are dimorphic—different but overlapping—rather than binary. (Page 114)

A large majority of the most aggressive people are male, but the differences in aggressiveness in the general population are much smaller. (Page 115)

Second, these sex differences can be magnified or muted by culture. Some cultures valorize violence, while others do not. (Page 115)

“Biology does represent the foundation of our personalities and behavioral tendencies,” writes Louann Brizendine in her book, The Female Brain. “If in the name of free will—and political correctness—we try to deny the influence of biology on the brain, we begin fighting our own nature. If we acknowledge that our biology is influenced by other factors … we can prevent it from creating a fixed reality by which we are ruled.”4 (Page 115)

Third, these sex differences typically have a rather modest impact on day-to-day lives in the twenty-first century. (Page 115)

Fourth, average sex differences do not justify the institutionalization of gender inequality. (Page 116)

Fifth, average differences between groups should not influence how we view individuals. (Page 116)

There is always a danger of succumbing to the “naturalistic fallacy,” presuming that everything that is natural must necessarily be good. But nor is it helpful to deny or dismiss the reality of natural sex differences. (Page 116)

TESTOSTERONE: AGGRESSION (Page 117)

testosterone does not directly trigger aggression but amplifies it.16 How far this amplification takes place depends a lot on the circumstances. As Carole Hooven shows in her book Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us, the innate tendency toward aggression in boys and men is real but not necessarily expressed. We are not slaves to our cells. (Page 118)

DAREDEVILS: RISK (Page 119)

Men, for example, have a greater appetite for risk. This is not a social construct. (Page 119)

Like aggression, risk-taking is one of the differences between male and female psychology that has clear roots in our evolutionary history. Taking risks must then make more sense for men. But why? Bluntly, because men are much less likely than women to reproduce at all. In fact, we have twice as many female ancestors as male ones. (Page 119)

Genghis Khan, a direct ancestor of 1 in 200 people today, is perhaps the most famous example. The polite way to put this is that “males have higher variance in reproductive success than females.”2 (Page 120)

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.”23 (Page 120)

Men who are in danger of becoming evolutionary duds will be willing to take serious risks in order to gain access to a mate, perhaps by committing a crime to get more resources, or fighting in a potentially lucrative war. even a 50/50 chance of success looks pretty good to a man who is otherwise unlikely to have any children at all. As a result, Henrich writes, “Men’s psychology shifts in ways that spark fiercer male–male competition.” (Page 120)

SEX ON THE MALE BRAIN (Page 121)

As a matter of biological fact, men are just lustier—or have labels more “driven sexuality”—than women.28 A what Konner comprehensive review of 150 studies found overwhelming evidence that men have a higher sex drive, “reflected in spontaneous thoughts about sex frequency and variety of sexual fantasies, desired frequency of intercourse, desired number of partners, masturbation, liking for various sexual practices, willingness to forego sex, initiating versus refusing sex, making sacrifices for sex, and other measures.”29 As Billy Crystal’s character says in the movie City Slickers, “Women need a reason to have sex. Men just need a place.” (Page 122)

A study in New York found that opening a strip club or escort agency reduced sex crime in the surrounding neighborhood by 13%. (Page 122)

In 2021, PornHub and Xvideos, the two largest online porn sites, had an average of 694 million and 640 million visitors each month, respectively, in the U.S. alone. For context, that is more than Netflix (541 million) or Zoom (630 million). (Page 123)

CULTURAL ANIMALS (Page 124)

As Joseph Henrich argues, it makes most sense to think of the coevolution of nature and nurture. “Culture rewires our brains and alters our biology” he says, “without altering the underlying genetic code.” (Page 125)

One striking example is the role of marriage, which Henrich describes, rather brutally, as “a testosterone suppression system.”45 (I’ve been almost continuously married for thirty years.) Testosterone levels are highest among young single men, and those with higher T are actually more likely to become fathers. But testosterone levels then fall among men who settle down with a wife and children, and the drops are sharpest among men who do more childcare. one group of scholars studying this evidence concludes that “human males have an evolved neuroendocrine architecture shaped to facilitate their role as fathers and caregivers as a key component of reproductive success.”46 There are broader social implications here too. As the institution of monogamous marriage spread, the number of men directly involved in raising families rose. The collective impact, via reduced testosterone levels, was to dramatically reduce overall levels of male violence. This is a good example of the complex interactions between biology, immediate environment, and broader culture.47 (Page 125)

FRAGILE MANHOOD (Page 126)

Manhood is fragile. Womanhood is more robust because it is more determined by women’s specific role in reproduc-tion. As the feminist anthropologist Sherry Ortner writes, “It is simply a fact that proportionately more of woman’s body space, for a greater percentage of her lifetime … is taken up with the natural processes surrounding the reproduction of the species.”48 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. (Page 126)

In many cultures, rites of initiation—often involving physical duress or risk—have marked the transition from boy to man. As the American poet Leonard Kriegel wrote, “In every age, not just our own, manhood was something that had to be won.”50 (Page 126)

“Manliness is a symbolic script, a cultural construct,” writes the anthropologist David Gilmore.51 “Real men do not simply emerge naturally over time like butterflies from boyish cocoons; they must be assiduously coaxed from their juvenescent shells, shaped and nurtured, counseled and prodded into manhood.” (Page 126)

Human behavior is driven by a combination of nature (our instincts based in biology), nurture (the instructions we get from our surrounding culture), and agency (our personal initiative). Much of the drama of human life stems from the tension between these three forces. (Page 127)

THE STEM PARADOX (Page 127)

In 2018, two researchers, Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary, showed that in more gender-equal countries, such as Finland and Norway, women were less likely to take university courses in STEM subjects. Stoet and Geary called this the “gender-equality paradox.” (Page 128)

They conclude that “a more egalitarian distribution of material and social resources enables women and men to (Page 128)

independently express gender-specific preferences.” (Page 129)

PSYCHED (Page 131)

The mission of the American Psychological Association is to “benefit society and improve lives.”64 But the association failed against this benchmark with its 2018 guidelines on working with boys and men. The summary of the guidelines states that “traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful.”65 The APA report also describes the related problem of a “masculinity ideology,” defined as “a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: antifemininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.”66 (Page 131)

DANCES AND SHIPWRECKS (Page 132)

One of the primary functions of human culture is to help young people to become responsible, self-aware adults. Maturity means, among many other things, an ability to calibrate your behavior in a way that renders it appropriate to the circumstances. To be a grown-up means learning how to temper our own natures. We learn to go to the bathroom. We learn not to hit each other when we are upset. We learn not to act on impulse. We learn empathy, restraint, reflection. It takes time, at least a couple of decades. It takes boys a little longer than girls. But most of us manage it in the end. Boys become men, even gentlemen. The boy is still with us, he is just not in charge anymore. (Page 133)

PART IV POLITICAL STALEMATE (Page 134)

CHAPTER 8 PROGRESSIVE BLINDNESS The Political Left Is in Denial (Page 135)

It is one thing to point out that there are aspects of masculinity that in an immature or extreme expression can be deeply harmful, quite another to suggest that a naturally occurring trait in boys and men is intrinsically bad. Indiscriminately slapping the label of “toxic masculinity” onto this kind of behavior is a mistake. Rather than drawing boys into a dialogue about what lessons can be learned, it is much more likely to send them to the online manosphere where they will be reassured that they did nothing wrong, and that liberals are out to get them. Adolescent girls are after all capable of similar kinds of bullying and disrespect, often toward other girls, but it is not instantly cast as “toxic femininity.” (Page 136)

tendency to pathologize naturally occurring aspects of masculine identity, usually under the banner of toxic masculinity (Page 137)

individualism; male problems are seen as the result of individual failings of one kind or another, rather than of structural challenges. (Page 137)

unwillingness to acknowledge any biological basis for sex differences. (Page 137)

fixed conviction that gender inequality can only run one way, that is, to the disadvantage of women. (Page 137)

INVENTING TOXIC MASCULINITY (Page 137)

Harrington points out that the term is almost never defined, even by academics, and is instead used to simply “signal disapproval.” (Page 137)

Nine in ten men and women describe themselves as either “completely” or “mostly” masculine or feminine. (Page 138)

Given the survey results just described, it may not be great politics either. Half of American men and almost a third of women (30%) now think that society “punishes men just for acting like men,” according to a survey by the Public Religion Research Institute.23 There is a partisan split, as you might expect. (Page 138)

Pathologizing masculinity may even undermine support for feminism. Fewer than a third of American women now describe themselves as a feminist.25 In 2018, YouGov polled those women who did not identify as feminist for their views on feminism. Almost half (48%) said that “feminists are too extreme” and that “the current wave of feminism does not represent true feminism” (47%). one in four (24%) said that “feminists are anti-men.” (Page 139)

BLAMING THE VICTIM (Page 139)

too easy to blame individuals for structural challenges. But there is one group that progressives do seem willing to blame for their plight: men. (Page 139)

If men are depressed, it is because they won’t express their feelings. If they get sick, it is because they won’t go to the doctor. If they fail at school, it is because they lack commitment. If they die early, it is because they drink and smoke too much and eat the wrong things. For those on the political Left, then, victim-blaming is permitted when it comes to men. (Page 140)

The pandemic illustrated this individualistic tendency well. Men are considerably more vulnerable to COVID-19. Globally, men were around 50% more likely than women to die after contracting the virus.28 In the U.S., about 85,000 more men than women had died from COVID by the end of 2021. For every 100 deaths among women aged 45–64, there were 184 male deaths.29 The result was to cut 2 years off the average predicted life spans for American men, the largest drop since World War II, compared to a decline of 1 year for women. (Page 140)

The higher male death rate also received almost no attention from health institutions or media. When it was acknowledged, the main explanations provided were that men were either more vulnerable because of preexisting conditions related to “lifestyle” factors, such as smoking or alcohol, or to a lack of responsibility with regard to safety measures, for example, mask wearing.33 In short, if men were dying, it was their own fault. But this was not true. The gap in mortality is not explained by sex differences in rates of infection, or in preexisting conditions.34 The difference is biological. (Page 140)

The sex differences in Covid mortality make it clear that we need more of what feminist health care advocates have been urging for decades: more gender-specific medicine, including clinical trials that break down the results and side effects by gender. “over the past two decades, we’ve radically revised how we conduct medical research and take care of our female patients,” writes Marianne J. Legato. “I now believe that … it’s time to focus on the unique problems of men just the way we have learned to do with women.” (Page 141)

establish an office of Men’s Health in the Department of Health and Human Services, to mirror the excellent one that already exists for women, and with equivalent funding of $35 million. (Page 141)

The Affordable Care Act should also be expanded to provide men with the same coverage that allows women to get a free annual health checkup. (Page 141)

SCIENCE IS REAL (Page 142)

The genetic psychologist Kathryn Paige Harden writes, “Genetic differences in human life are a scientific fact, like climate change… . That genetic and environmental factors are braided together is simply a description of reality.” (Page 142)

some evidence that people in general are more comfortable with the idea of natural differences if women come out ahead in the comparison. (Page 143)

most dangerous message of all: men are naturally different than women, but only in ways that are bad. (Page 143)

ONE-WAY INEQUALITY (Page 144)

In October 2021, the Council published a National Strategy on Gender Equity and Equality, the first in U.S. history.46 The strategy is entirely asymmetric. No gender inequalities related to boys or men are addressed. (Page 144)

if you are skeptical about the impact of White House strategy papers. But this one will drive policy. The strategy directs all government departments and agencies to “establish and prioritize at least three goals that will serve to advance the objectives identified in this strategy, and detail the plans and resources needed to (Page 144)

achieve them in an implementation plan.” Flawed thinking makes for bad policy. (Page 145)

Every 2 years, the World economic Forum (WEF) produces its Global Gender Gap Report. It is the most influential international study of progress toward gender equality, but like the White (Page 145)

House strategy, it is distorted by asymmetric thinking. (Page 146)

The idea that gender inequality only counts in one direction is baked into WEF’s methodology. (Page 146)

My colleague Fariha Haque and I have recalculated the WEF rankings, taking into account gender inequalities in both directions.54 We also removed one of the fourteen variables, a subjective survey of the pay gap of dubious quality, and weighted all the domains equally (WEF gives more weight to variables with the widest gaps). Our two-way approach pushed the U.S. score up to 0.84 and Iceland’s up to 0.97. As our paper shows, it also changed the country rankings, in some cases quite significantly. (Page 146)

But given the huge progress made by women in recent decades and the significant challenges now faced by many boys and men, it makes no sense to treat gender inequality as a one-way street. on a practical level, it leads to a lack of policy attention to the problems of boys and men. (Page 147)

CHAPTER 9 SEEING RED The Political Right Wants to Turn Back the Clock (Page 149)

There are three big weaknesses in their approach. First, many conservatives fuel male grievances for political gain, which simply creates more anger and discontent. Second, they overweight the importance of biological sex differences for gender roles (a mirror image of the progressive tendency to dismiss them altogether). Third, they see the solution to men’s problems as lying in the past rather than the future, in the form of a restoration of traditional economic relations between male providers and female carers. Rather than helping men adapt to the new world, conservatives beguile them with promises of the old. This may provide some temporary psychological relief. But we don’t need painkillers. We need a cure. (Page 150)

GRIEVANCE POLITICS (Page 150)

LOBSTERS AGAINST EQUALITY (Page 156)

I see Peterson as the latest incarnation of the “mytho-poetical” strand of the men’s movement, which uses allegory (in his case, of lobster societies) to evoke an older, deeper form of masculinity. (Page 157)

He points out that women are more agreeable and conscientious than men, more into people, and more nurturing. Men are more aggressive, status (Page 157)

conscious, driven by sex. This is all true. The real question is how far these differences can be relied on to explain gender inequalities in current societies. (Page 158)

While progressives make the mistake of denying any biological basis is quite for sex differences, conservatives representative in this regard—make the opposite error of explaining away like Peterson—and he current gender inequalities with an appeal to nature. They end up justifying disparities that are much too wide to be attributed to natural causes. (Page 158)

The more fervently the Left denies any innate (Page 159)

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. (Page 160)

FORWARD TO THE PAST (Page 160)

In his 1992 book, Men and Marriage (an update of his 1973 book Sexual Suicide), conservative intellectual George Gilder argued that feminism would render men redundant. (Page 161)

Once women were able to be “both provider and procreator,” he warned, the need for marriage to a man would decline, leaving them as either “outlaws” or “exiles.” (Page 161)

Gilder saw the fragility of the male role. “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.” (Page 161)

For all the hankering after an imagined past, fewer than one in five Americans (18%) (Page 161)

said in 2012 that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” down from 30% in 1987, according to Pew’s social values survey—and on this question there are, unusually, no major differences here by sex, age, political inclination, or race.41 (Page 162)

CENTRIFUGAL GENDER POLITICS (Page 162)

Daniel Schwammenthal, director of the American Jewish Committee’s Transatlantic Institute, says, “The iron rule of politics is that if there are real problems in society and responsible parties don’t deal with them, the irresponsible parties will jump on them.”44 (Page 163)

PART V WHAT TO DO (Page 164)

CHAPTER 10 REDSHIRT THE BOYS Boys Need an Extra Year in the Classroom (Page 165)

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. (Page 166)

Specifically, I argue for three main reforms: giving boys an extra year of pre-K before starting them in school; a recruitment drive of male teachers into classrooms; and significant investments in vocational education, including more technical high schools. I am aware that parts of this agenda may seem radical. (Page 166)

THE GIFT OF TIME (Page 166)

The idea got a burst of popular attention in 2008, when Malcolm Gladwell presented evidence in his book Outliers that children older than their classmates do better on academic tests, and in life generally. He argued that being either old or young within a class cohort leads “children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.” (Page 167)

The main reason for starting boys later is not so that they will be a year older in kindergarten. It is so they will be a year older when they get to middle and high school. (Page 168)

WILL REDSHIRTING WORK? (Page 168)

A raft of studies of redshirted boys have shown dramatic reductions in hyperactivity and inattention through the elementary school years, higher levels of life satisfaction, lower chances of being held back a grade later, and higher test scores. (Page 168)

OBJECTIONS TO REDSHIRTING (Page 170)

Third, a related objection is that boys will lose a year in the labor market once they become men, potentially reducing their lifetime earnings. This is one of the main concerns of Deming and Dynarski. “Holding constant retirement age, a person who starts school a year later spends one less year in the labor force,” they point out. (Page 171)

MORE MEN TEACHING BOYS (Page 173)

But one school reform would dwarf all of these: more men at the front of our classrooms. In the U.S, the proportion of male teachers is low, and falling. The male share of K–12 teachers is now 24%, down from 33% at the beginning of the 1980s.27 Male teachers are especially scarce in elementary and middle schools, as figure 10-1 shows. Similar trends can be observed in other nations, including the UK and South Korea.28 (Page 174)

Honestly, I don’t know how anyone could not see this trend as a problem. But it is important to spell out why. For one thing, if children grow up seeing care or education as women’s work, this reinforces gender stereotypes across generations. As Gloria Steinem said in 1995, “The way we get divided into our false notions of masculine and feminine is what we see as children.” (Page 175)

When the share of men teaching in Finnish primary schools was boosted by a 40% quota for training courses, both boys and girls did better in school.33 (Page 175)

While the evidence that male teachers matter is strong, the precise mechanisms are not well understood. Attitudes may be one factor. Female teachers are more likely than male teachers to see the boys in their class as disruptive, while male teachers tend to have a more positive view of boys and their capabilities.35 There may also be a role model effect. It is worth mentioning here that the race of teachers is important too, and that teaching skews even more white than it does female. But it seems that Black boys benefit most from having a Black teacher.36 “Having both male and female teachers is likely good for students for many of the same reasons that they benefit from a racially and ethnically diverse teacher workforce,” writes Lisette Partelow, an education scholar at the progressive Center for American Progress.37 (Page 176)

There are now twice as many women flying U.S. military planes as there are men teaching kindergarten (as a share of the professions). (Page 177)

LESS TALK, MORE SHOP (Page 179)

The third major policy reform I propose is a massive investment in male friendly vocational education and training. our educational system is tilted toward the standard academic track, up to and including a 4-year college degree. (Page 179)

High school curricula need more “hands-on” elements. This does not mean sending all the boys into shop class to learn a trade while the girls polish their college application essays. But it does mean incorporating more practical and more vocational elements (i.e., CTE) into the general curriculum, and especially creating more stand-alone technical schools. The broader goal here is more of what philosopher Joseph Fishkin calls “opportunity pluralism.”55 Rather than a single narrow path in what he calls a “unitary opportunity structure,” there should be many different routes to success. (Page 180)

expanding apprenticeships. (Page 182)

CHAPTER 11 MEN CAN HEAL Getting Men into the Jobs of the Future (Page 185)

HEAL occupations (Page 186)

First, given the decline in traditional male occupations, it is imperative that men look to these sectors for jobs. Second, diversifying these professions would also help to meet their growing demand for labor. Third, it would make it more likely that boys and men could find male providers of these services. (Page 186)

STEM AND HEAL (Page 187)

HEAL occupations can be seen as the opposite of STEM. They are more focused on people, rather than things, and they tend to require more literacy than numeracy skills; hence the L in place of the M. (Page 187)

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. (Page 188)

Women now account for almost half (45%) of the life scientists and physical scientists working in the U.S., for example, up from fewer than one in five in 1980.6 Among engineers, the proportion of women has risen from 4% to 15%. The tech industry has seen much smaller gains in recent decades, with women’s representation stuck at about 25%. Overall, women now account for 27% of STEM workers, up from 13% in 1980 (Page 188)

But the trend has been the other way in terms of male representation in HEAL jobs. In 2019, 26% were held by men, down from 35% in 1980. (I should note again here that all my figures are for full-time workers aged between 25 and 54.) (Page 188)

WHY WE NEED MORE MEN IN HEAL (Page 189)

equally absurd to think that the 18% male share of social workers is an authentic representation of the true level of interest in the job among men, especially since it has halved since 1980 (Page 189)

Harvard’s David Deming calculates that between 1980 and 2012, “jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew by nearly 12 percentage points as a share of the U.S. labor force.” Meanwhile “mathintensive but less social jobs … shrank by 3.3 percentage points over the same period.”8 It is true that STEM professions are more often described as the jobs of the future. The glossy photos of bright young people in lab coats certainly add to that sense. But in terms of raw job creation, HEAL is outpacing STEM; by my calculations, for every new STEM job created by 2030 there will be more than three new HEAL jobs.9 (Page 190)

Many HEAL jobs also offer a high degree of job security even in an economic downturn; we still need nurses and teachers in a recession. (Page 190)

number of nurses and nurse practitioners needed is expected to increase by about 400,000 by 2030.12 (Page 190)

In a survey conducted at the end of 2021 by the Chartis Center for Rural Health, 99% of rural hospitals reported staffing shortages, with 96% saying that recruiting and retaining nurses were their biggest challenges. (Page 191)

Two-thirds of school districts reported teacher shortages, in a survey of 1,200 school and district leaders conducted in 2021 by Frontline education.18 Again, rural areas are suffering most. The main sources of the problem, according to education leaders, are a lack of qualified teachers and low pay relative to other jobs. overall, it is a “grim picture” according to the survey authors. (Page 191)

Men account for the minority of social workers (18%) and psychologists (22%), for example, and the gender imbalance is growing, as figure 11-2 shows. Like teaching, these professions are ones where a big gender gap really matters. Seeking help can be difficult for many people, and it often seems to be even harder for men.22 We know that men are less likely, for example, to seek mental health counseling (Page 192)

FIGURE 11-2 Not enough men in caring professions (Page 192)

There might be something of a vicious circle at work here. Men might be more reluctant to open up to a female counselor or therapist, especially if they are struggling with issues related to aggression, risky behavior, addiction, or sex. (Page 193)

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%). (Page 193)

ONE BILLION DOLLARS FOR MEN IN HEAL (Page 194)

As a nation, we should set the twin goals of reaching 30% female representation in STEM jobs, and 30% male representation in HEAL ones by 2030. Achieving this “30 by 30” goal means getting more than 3 million more men into HEAL jobs. This will take money, like the efforts to increase the number of women in STEM. (Page 194)

As a society, we recognized the need to get more women into STEM jobs, and invested accordingly. Now the same is true of men and HEAL. I propose at least a $1 billion national investment, over the next decade, in service of this goal. (Page 195)

A PIPELINE FULL OF MEN (Page 195)

We need to get more boys and young men thinking about HEAL careers early. one of the lessons of successful STEM initiatives is that the pipeline really matters. That is why there is a “She Can STEM” campaign aimed at middle-schoolers, with learning resources, online concerts, and active social media channels. How about a similar “He Can HEAL” campaign? I (Page 195)

It is inevitably tougher to persuade young men that nursing is a career for them when 94% of the professors are women.37 There is some evidence that women taking STEM classes by a female professor get better grades and are more likely to take more STEM courses in later years and to graduate with a STEM degree.38 I know of no similar studies on male professors in HEAL subjects, but there is no reason to imagine it wouldn’t work the other way around as well, especially given the research on male teachers in secondary schools. (Page 197)

MONEY TALKS (Page 197)

Despite the fact that women have overtaken men in post-secondary education, there are almost no scholarships for men, and virtually none aimed at encouraging them into HEAL. (Page 198)

There is also a strong case for increasing pay levels in some of these critical occupations, including social work, counseling, and teaching. Higher wages are likely to attract more men into these roles, but would also help the women working in them already. The pay of K–12 teachers is the same today as it was at the beginning of the century.48 Following a series of teacher strikes, President Joe Biden told teachers in 2021, “You deserve a raise, not just praise.”49 He wants to spend an extra $20 billion annually through the Title I program, which provides resources to schools serving poorer students. For $15 billion, we could give a $10,000 pay raise to every teacher in a high-poverty school.50 That just seems like a no-brainer to me. (Page 200)

PICTURE A NURSE (Page 200)

In 2000, Rachel Kranton and George Akerlof created a new scholarly field of “identity economics.” They showed that individual decisions are shaped not just by the hard numbers of a cost–benefit analysis but by the more personal aspects of human identity. “In a world of social difference, one of the most important economic decisions that an individual makes may be the type of person to be,” they wrote. “Limits on this choice would also be critical determinants of economic behavior, opportunity, and well-being.”51 Breaking prescribed gender identity norms, for example, comes at a cost to an individual. This acts as a deterrent. (Page 200)

A stronger representation of men in HEAL roles in shows and ads could help to reduce the identity loss for boys and men who might pursue these professions. (Page 202)

Jennifer Bosson, a University of South Florida psychologist who has studied men’s attitudes toward traditionally female jobs, told NPR’s Shankar Vedantam, “You could spin nursing as a very masculine occupation. It’s dangerous. It’s physically grueling. Our stereotype of the nurse—you know, you could modify that stereotype and turn nursing into a profession that does seem masculine or male appropriate.”67 I think “male appropriate” is the right way to think about it. The goal is not to make professions like nursing, social work, mental health, or teaching seem like masculine rather than feminine ones, but to emphasize a range of opportunities that they can provide for both men and women. We don’t need to make men feel like being a nurse will somehow bolster their masculinity, just that it will not diminish it.68 (Page 203)

CHAPTER 12 NEW DADS Fatherhood as an Independent Social Institution (Page 205)

Unfortunately, rather than being a subject of serious cultural attention, fatherhood has become another victim of the culture wars. Progressives resist the idea that fathers have a distinct role to play, afraid that this will somehow undermine mothers or belittle same-sex couples. So they recoil from any proposal that might smack of “fathers’ rights.” Conservatives meanwhile lament an epidemic of fatherlessness but simply want to restore traditional marriage, with clear and separate roles for men and women. (Page 206)

DADS MATTER (Page 207)

Fathers really came into their own about half a million years ago, when human brains had a growth spurt. The need for food, especially meat, to nourish new mothers and their babies increased dramatically. From this point on, as anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy points out, 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 (Page 207)

provide for them. So they did. Fatherhood is a product of evolutionary selection. (Page 208)

As such, writes 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.” Of course, their expression will vary by social context. To “protect” your child means something very different in twenty-first-century New York than on the savanna half a million years ago. (Page 208)

Fathers matter for their children’s welfare in ways that are different from, but equal to, those of mothers.7 Engaged fatherhood has been linked to a whole range of outcomes, from mental health, high school graduation, social skills, and literacy to lower risks of teen pregnancy, delinquency, and drug use.8 Three-year-olds with involved, supportive dads score more highly on tests of cognitive development.9 A study in the state of Georgia found that infant mortality rates were twice as high among children whose fathers were not listed on their birth certificate (a proxy for paternal involvement) after taking account of differences in health conditions and socioeconomic background.10 It is hard to pin down direct causal effects here: we can hardly remove or add fathers at random to children’s lives in the name of social science. But as Harvard scholars Marc Grau-Grau and Hannah Riley Bowles write, “The importance of engaged fatherhood is now undismissable in ways it was not in earlier decades.”11 (Page 208)

. . ESPECIALLY TO TEENS (Page 209)

growing recognition that the teen years are in fact a vitally important period of development. As the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine note in their 2019 report, “The adaptive plasticity of adolescence marks it as a window of opportunity for change through which mechanisms of resilience, recovery, and development are possible.” (Page 209)

fathers “play a particularly important role in stimulating children’s openness to the world … encouraging them to take risks and to stand up for themselves.” (Page 209)

Fathers who are engaged with their teenagers help to reduce harmful forms of risk-taking behavior, (Page 209)

Delinquency rates are lower (Page 209)

among the adolescent children of involved fathers. (Page 210)

Sixteen-year-old girls who are close to their fathers have better mental health at the age of 33. (Page 210)

Father involvement predicts stronger academic outcomes in adolescence too. (Page 210)

Machin writes that “many dads in the West really step into their role during late childhood and adolescence, particularly when the time comes to teach their children. It’s that allimportant role in preparing children to step into the big wide world.” (Page 210)

“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. (Page 210)

One study finds that adolescents close to their nonresident fathers do better than those with resident fathers with whom they are not close, as measured by higher selfesteem, delinquency rates, and mental health.25 There is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters. (Page 211)

DIRECT DADS (Page 211)

2013 book, Doing the Best I Can: (Page 211)

Fatherhood in the Inner City, they show that most fathers want involvement in their children’s lives but are stymied by their own problems—poverty, mental illness, crime—as well as legal and child support systems that seek primarily to extract money, and mothers who act as a “gatekeeper” to their children. (Page 212)

As one study concludes, “Black nonresident fathers … shared responsibilities more frequently and displayed more effective coparenting [nonresident] fathers.”29 than Hispanic and White (Page 212)

A policy agenda to support the new direct model of fatherhood will have three key elements. First, equal and independent paid leave eligibility. father-friendly reformed child support system. Third, Second, a employment opportunities. (Page 212)

PAID LEAVE FOR DADS (Page 212)

Fathers and mothers should be legally entitled to six months of paid leave for each child. (Page 213)

Even after the huge rise in women’s employment over recent decades, most mothers with children under the age of 3 are either out of the labor market or working part-time.39 By and large, this seems to be by choice; over half of mothers working part-time (54%) say that this is their preference at this point in their life, and 14% say they would prefer not to be in paid work at all.40 (The remaining 33% would rather be in a fulltime job.) (Page 216)

CHILD SUPPORT—CASH, CUSTODY, CARE (Page 216)

“Virtually every legal and institutional arrangement governing these fathers’ lives tells them that they are a paycheck and nothing more,” write Kathryn Edin and Timothy Nelson in Doing the Best I Can. “At every turn an unmarried man who seeks to be a father, not just a daddy, is rebuffed by a system that pushes him aside with one hand while reaching into his pocket with the other.”42 (Page 216)

Courts are now obliged to treat mothers and fathers fairly in determining custody, and the usual legal standard is now the best interests of the child or children. As a result, there has been a dramatic shift toward joint custody arrangements. (Page 217)

Nationally, fathers now get about a third of the time with children after separation or divorce.44 These trends are extremely positive. The legal default ought to be shared custody, with children wherever possible spending equal time with each of their parents. (Page 217)

The problem is that there are no similar laws for unmarried parents. In every U.S. state, an unmarried mother is the presumed sole custodial parent. (Page 217)

Married fathers are seen as three-dimensional beings. Unmarried fathers are seen as walking ATMs. In 2020, $38 billion was collected in child support, and an estimated $115 billion was owed in arrears. (Page 218)

Child support payments should be set with greater sensitivity to a father’s ability to pay, and considering their nonmonetary contributions, including the direct provision of care for their children. (Page 218)

FATHER-FRIENDLY JOBS (Page 219)

I support efforts to increase access to childcare and provide after-school clubs and so on.54 But I do worry that the goal of public policy often seems to be to create workfriendly families, rather than family-friendly work. (Page 219)

Twice as many fathers as mothers say they spend too little time with their children (46% v. 23%). (Page 220)

Major employers are finding that, especially among younger workers, expectations of a better work/life balance are rising rapidly, ranked second only to salary in many surveys (Page 222)

EPILOGUE (Page 224)