Kitabı oku: «Of Boys and Men»

SWIFT PRESS

First published in the United States of America by Brookings Institution Press 2022

First published in Great Britain by Swift Press 2022

Copyright © Richard V. Reeves 2022

The right of Richard V. Reeves to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Typset in Janson Text LT Std

Composition by Westchester Publishing Services

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9781800750548

eISBN: 9781800750555

For George, Bryce, and Cameron

PREFACE
Worried Dad to Worried Wonk

I have been worrying about boys and men for 25 years. That comes with the territory when you raise three boys, all now grown men. George, Bryce, Cameron: I love you beyond measure. That’s why, even now, I sometimes worry about you. But my anxiety has spilled over into my day job. I work as a scholar at the Brookings Institution, focusing mostly on equality of opportunity, or the lack thereof. Until now, I have paid most attention to the divisions of social class and race. But I am increasingly worried about gender gaps, and perhaps not in the way you might expect. It has become clear to me that there are growing numbers of boys and men who are struggling in school, at work, and in the family. I used to fret about three boys and young men. Now I am worried about millions.

Even so, I have been reluctant to write this book. I have lost count of the number of people who advised against it. In the current political climate, highlighting the problems of boys and men is seen as a perilous undertaking. One friend, a newspaper columnist, said, “I never go near these issues if I can avoid it. There’s nothing but pain there.” Some argue that it is a distraction from the challenges still faced by girls and women. I think this is a false choice. As an advocate for gender equality, I think a lot about how to close the pay gap between women and men. (For every $100 earned by men, women earn $82.)¹ As you will see, I think the solutions here include a more equal allocation of childcare, helped by generous paid leave for both mothers and fathers. But I am just as worried about the college degree attainment gap in the other direction, which is just one symptom of a large and growing gender gap in education. (For every 100 bachelor’s degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men.)² Here I propose a simple but radical reform: start boys in school a year later than girls.

In other words, redesign jobs to be fairer to women, and reform schools to be fairer to boys.

We can hold two thoughts in our head at once. We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.

I am of course hardly the first to write about boys and men. 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. So why this book, and why now? I wish I could say that there was a single, simple motivation. But there are six main reasons.

First, things are worse than I thought. I knew some of the headlines about boys struggling at school and on campus, men losing ground in the labor market, and fathers losing touch with their children. I thought that perhaps some of these were exaggerated. But the closer I looked, the bleaker the picture became. 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 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

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 $881.⁷ As The Economist magazine puts it: “The fact that the highest rungs have male feet all over them is scant comfort for the men at the bottom.”⁸ Men at the top are still flourishing, but men in general are not. especially if they are Black: “To be male, poor, and African-American . . . is to confront, on a daily basis, a deeply held racism that exists in every social institution,” writes my colleague Camille Busette.⁹ “No other demographic group has fared as badly, so persistently and for so long.” Black men face not only institutional racism but gendered racism, including discrimination in the labor market and criminal justice system.¹⁰

Third, it became clear to me that the problems of boys and men are structural in nature, rather than individual; but are rarely treated as such. 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 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.

“The more I consider what men have lost—a useful role in public life, a way of earning a decent and reliable living, appreciation in the home, respectful treatment in the culture,” writes feminist author Susan Faludi in her 1999 book Stiffed, “the more it seems that men of the late twentieth century are falling into a status oddly similar to that of women at mid century.”¹¹

Fourth, I was shocked to discover that many social policy interventions, including some of the most touted, don’t help boys and men. The one that first caught my eye was a free college program in Kalamazoo, Michigan. According to the evaluation team, “women experience very large gains,” in terms of college completion (increasing by almost 50%), “while men seem to experience zero benefit.”¹² This is an astonishing finding. Making college completely free had no impact on men. But it turns out that there are dozens of programs that benefit girls and women, but not boys and men: a student mentoring scheme in Fort Worth, Texas; a school choice program in Charlotte, North Carolina; an income boost to low-wage earners in New York City, and many more. The striking failure of these interventions to help boys or men is often obscured by a positive average result, driven by the positive impact on girls or women. In isolation, this gender gap might be seen as a quirk of a specific initiative. But it is a repeated pattern. So not only are many boys and men struggling, they are less likely to be helped by policy interventions.

Fifth, there is a political stalemate on issues of sex and gender. Both sides have dug into an ideological position that inhibits real change. Progressives refuse to accept that important gender inequalities can run in both directions, and quickly label male problems as symptoms of “toxic masculinity.” Conservatives appear more sensitive to the struggles of boys and men, but only as a justification for turning back the clock and restoring traditional gender roles. The Left tells men, “Be more like your sister.” The Right says, “Be more like your father.” Neither invocation is helpful. What is needed is a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality. As a conscientious objector in the culture wars, I hope to have provided an assessment of the condition of boys and men that can attract broad support.

Sixth, as a policy wonk I feel equipped to offer some positive ideas to tackle these problems, rather than simply lamenting them. There has been enough handwringing. In each of the three areas of education, work, and family, I provide some practical, evidence-based solutions to help the boys and men who are struggling most. (It is probably worth saying upfront that my focus is on the challenges faced by cis heterosexual men, who account for around 95% of men.)¹³

In part 1, I present evidence on the male malaise, showing how many boys and men are struggling in school and college (chapter 1), in the labor market (chapter 2), and in family life (chapter 3). In part 2, I highlight the double disadvantages faced by Black boys and men, suffering from gendered racism (chapter 4), as well as for boys and men at the bottom of the economic ladder (chapter 5). I also present the growing evidence that many policy interventions don’t work well for boys and men (chapter 6). In part 3, I address the question of sex differences, arguing that both nature and nurture matter (chapter 7).

In part 4, I describe our political stalemate, showing how instead of rising to this challenge, politicians are making matters worse. The progressive Left dismisses legitimate concerns about boys and men and pathologizes masculinity (chapter 8). The populist Right weaponizes male dislocation and offers false promises (chapter 9). For the partisans, there is either a war on women or a war on men. Finally, in part 5, I offer some solutions. Specifically, I make proposals for a male-friendly education system (chapter 10); for helping men to move into jobs in the growing fields of health, education, administration, and literacy, or HEAL (chapter 11); and for bolstering fatherhood as an independent social institution (chapter 12).

“A man would never get the notion,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “of writing a book on the peculiar situation of the human male.”¹⁴ But that was in 1949. Now the peculiar situation of the human male requires urgent attention. We must help men adapt to the dramatic changes of recent decades without asking them to stop being men. We need a prosocial masculinity for a postfeminist world.¹⁵ And we need it soon.

PART I
THE MALE MALAISE

CHAPTER 1
GIRLS RULE

Boys Are Behind in Education

Carol Frances, the former chief economist at the American Council on Education, describes it as a “spectacular upsurge” and “phenomenal success.”¹⁶ Stephan Vincent-Lancrin, senior analyst at the organization for economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD’s) Centre for educational Research and Innovation, says it is “astonishing . . . people can’t believe it.”¹⁷ For Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men, it is “the strangest and most profound change of the century, even more so because it is unfolding in a similar way pretty much all over the world.”¹⁸

Frances, Vincent-Lancrin, and Rosin are all talking about the gender gap in education. 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. 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.¹⁹ 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.²⁰

The underperformance of boys in the classroom, especially Black boys and those from poorer families, badly damages their prospects for employment and upward economic mobility. Reducing this inequality will not be easy given current trends, many of which worsened during the pandemic. In the U.S., for example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students.²¹ Male students also struggle more with online learning, and as the extent of the learning loss becomes clearer in the months and years ahead, it seems almost certain that it will prove to be greater for boys and men.²²

The first challenge is to persuade policymakers that in education, it is now boys who are at a disadvantage. Some argue that it is premature to worry about the gender gap in education, when the pay gap still runs the other way. I will have more to say about the pay gap in chapter 2; for now, suffice it to say that the labor market is still structured in favor of workers without major childcare and those workers are mostly men. But at the same time, the education system is structured in favor of girls and women, for the reasons I will set out in this chapter. So we have an education system favoring girls and a labor market favoring men. Two wrongs don’t make a right. We need to fix both. Inequalities matter, regardless of their direction. 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.

I first describe the gender gaps in K–12 schooling and then point to what I see as their main cause: the very different speeds at which boys and girls mature, especially in adolescence. I then trace some of the resulting inequalities in higher education. My main message here is that there are stark gender gaps at every stage, and all around the world, many of which continue to widen. But policymakers, like deer in headlights, have yet to respond.

GIRLS GETTING THE GRADES

What do you know about Finland? That it is the happiest nation on Earth? Correct.²³ That the school system is superb? Well, half right. Finland does indeed always rank at or near the top of the international league table for educational outcomes—but that’s because of the girls. Every 3 years, the OECD conducts a survey of reading, mathematics, and science skills among 15-year-olds. It is called the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test, and it gets a lot of attention from policymakers. Finland is a good place to look at gender gaps in education because it is such a high-performing nation (indeed, one could say that other countries suffer from a bout of Finn envy every time the PISA results are published). But although Finnish students rank very high for overall performance on PISA, there is a massive gender gap: 20% of Finnish girls score at the highest reading levels in the test, compared to just 9% of boys.²⁴ Among those with the lowest reading scores, the gender gap is reversed: 20% of boys versus 7% of girls. on most measures, Finnish girls also outperform the boys in science and in mathematics. 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.)

This may have some implications for the education reformers who flock to Finland to find ways to bottle the nation’s success, but it is just an especially vivid example of an international trend. In elementary and secondary schools across the world, girls are leaving boys behind. Girls are about a year ahead of boys in terms of reading ability in OECD nations, in contrast to a wafer-thin and shrinking advantage for boys in math. ²⁵ Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: math, reading, and science.²⁶ Sweden is starting to wrestle with what has been dubbed a pojkkrisen (boy crisis) in its schools. Australia has devised a reading program called Boys, Blokes, Books and Bytes.

In the U.S., girls have been the stronger sex in school for decades. But they are now pulling even further ahead, especially in terms of literacy and verbal skills. The differences open up early. 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.²⁷ A 6-percentage-point gender gap in reading proficiency in fourth grade widens to a 11-percentage-point gap by the end of eighth grade.²⁸ In math, a 6-point gap favoring boys in fourth grade has shrunk to a 1-point gap by eighth grade.²⁹ In a study drawing on scores from the whole country, Stanford scholar Sean Reardon finds no overall gap in math from grades three through eight, but a big one in English. “In virtually every school district in the United States, female students outperformed male students on ELA [English Language Arts] tests,” he writes. “In the average district, the gap is . . . roughly two thirds of a grade level and is larger than the effects of most large-scale educational interventions.”³⁰

FIGURE 1-1 Girls getting the grades

Gender composition of high school GPA (grade point average) rank (deciles)

Note: Figure shows total high school GPA for students who were freshmen in 2009. Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, High School Longitudinal Study 2009.

By high school, the female lead has solidified. Girls have always had an edge over boys in terms of high school grade point average (GPA), even half a century ago, when they surely had less incentive than boys given the differences in rates of college attendance and career expectations. But the gap has widened in recent decades. The most common high school grade for girls is now an A; for boys, it is a B.³¹ As figure 1-1 shows, 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.

Girls are also much more likely to be taking Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes.³² of course national trends disguise huge variations by geography, so it is useful to zoom in and look at specific places. Take Chicago, where students from the most affluent neighborhoods are much more likely to have an A or B average in ninth grade (47%), compared to those from the poorest (32%).³³ That is a big class gap, which, given that Chicago is the most segregated big city in the country, means a big race gap too. But strikingly, the difference in the proportion of girls versus boys getting high grades is the same: 47% to 32%. If you’re wondering whether grades in the first year of high school matter much, they do, strongly predicting later educational outcomes. As the Chicago researchers who analyzed these data insist, “Grades reflect multiple factors valued by teachers, and it is this multidimensional quality that makes grades good predictors of important outcomes.”

It is true that boys still perform a little better than girls do on most standardized tests. But this gap has narrowed sharply, down to a thirteen-point difference in the SAT, and it has disappeared for the ACT.³⁴ It is also probably worth noting here that SAT and ACT scores matter a lot less in any case, as colleges move away from their use in admissions, which, whatever other merits this has, seems likely to further widen the gender gap in postsecondary education. Here is a more anecdotal example of the gender gap: Every year the New York Times runs an editorial contest among middle and high school students, and it publishes the opinions of the winners. The organizers tell me that among the applicants, there is a “2–1, probably closer to 3–1” ratio of girls to boys.³⁵

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.³⁶ The male graduation rate is only a little higher than the 80% among poor students. You might think these were easy numbers to come by, a quick Google search away. I thought they would be when I started writing this paragraph. But in fact it took a small Brookings research project to figure it out, and for reasons that are instructive. 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.

An energetic nonprofit alliance, Grad Nation, is seeking to raise the overall high school graduation rate in the U.S. to 90% (up from 85% in 2017).³⁷ This is a great goal. The alliance points out that this will require improvements among “students of color, students with disabilities, and low-income students.” It definitely will. But they missed a big one—boys. After all, girls are only 2 percentage points from the target, while boys are 8 percentage points below it.

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE TIMING

(OF BRAIN DEVELOPMENT)

What is going on here? There are many potential explanations. Some scholars link the relative underperformance of boys in school to their lower expectations of postsecondary education, surely the very definition of a vicious circle.³⁸ Others worry that the strong skew toward female teachers—three out of four and rising—could be putting boys at a disadvantage.³⁹ This matters, for sure. But I think there is a bigger, simpler explanation staring us in the face. Boys’ brains develop more slowly, especially during the most critical years of secondary education. When almost one in four boys (23%) is categorized as having a “developmental disability,” it is fair to wonder if it is educational institutions, rather than the boys, that are not functioning properly.⁴⁰

In Age of Opportunity: Lessons from the New Science of Adolescence, Laurence Steinberg writes that “high-school aged adolescents make better decisions when they’re calm, well rested, and aware that they’ll be rewarded for making good choices.”⁴¹ To which most parents, or anybody recounting their own teen years, might respond: tell me something I don’t know, Larry. But adolescents are wired in a way that makes it hard to “make good choices.” When we are young, we sneak out of bed to go to parties; when we get old, we sneak out of parties to go to bed. 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).

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.”⁴² There are obvious implications here for parenting, and the importance of helping adolescents develop self-regulation strategies.

Adolescence, then, is a period when we find it harder to restrain ourselves. But the gap is much wider for boys than for girls, because they have both more acceleration and less braking power. The parts of the brain associated with impulse control, planning, future orientation, sometimes labeled the “CEO of the brain,” are mostly in the prefrontal cortex, which matures about 2 years later in boys than in girls.⁴³ The cerebellum, for 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.⁴⁴ I know; I have three sons. These findings are consistent with survey evidence on attention and self-regulation, where the biggest sex differences occur during middle adolescence, in part because of the effect of puberty on the hippocampus, a part of the brain linked to attention and social cognition.⁴⁵ The correct answer to the question so many teenage boys hear, “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” is something like, “Because, Mom, there are sexually dimorphic trajectories for cortical and subcortical gray matter!” (Returns to video game.)

While parts of the brain need to grow, some brain fibers have to be pruned back to improve our neural functions. It is odd to think that parts of our brain need to get smaller to be more efficient, but it’s true. The brain basically tidies itself up; think of it like trimming a hedge to keep it looking good. This pruning process is especially important in adolescent development, and a study drawing on detailed brain imaging of 121 people aged between 4 and 40 shows that it occurs earlier in girls than in boys. The gap is largest at around the age of 16.⁴⁶ Science journalist Krystnell Storr writes that these findings “add to the growing body of research that looks into gender differences when it comes to the brain . . . the science points to a difference in the way our brains develop. Who can argue with that?”⁴⁷ (It turns out, quite a few people. But I’ll get to that later.)

It is important to note, as always, that we are talking averages here. But I don’t think this evidence will shock many parents. “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, chair of the department of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “This fact is no surprise to most people if we think of 15-year-old boys and girls.”⁴⁸ 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.

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.⁴⁹ A 2019 report on the importance of the new science of adolescence from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine suggests that “sex differences in associations between brain development and puberty are relevant for understanding . . . prominent gender disparities during adolescence.”⁵⁰ But this emerging science on sex differences in brain development, especially during adolescence, has so far had no impact on policy. The chapter on education in the National Academies report, for example, contains no specific proposals relating to the sex differences it identified.

The debate over the importance of neurological sex differences, which can be quite fierce, is wrongly framed as far as education is concerned. There are certainly some biologically based differences in male and female psychology that last beyond adolescence. But by far the 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. It hardly needs saying that this was not the intention. After all, it was mostly men who created the education system; there is no century-old feminist conspiracy to disadvantage the boys. The gender bias in the education system was harder to see when girls were discouraged from pursuing higher education or careers and steered toward domestic roles instead.⁵¹ Now that the women’s movement has opened up these opportunities to girls and women, their natural advantages have become more apparent with every passing year.

PINK CAMPUSES

The gender gap widens further in higher education. In the U.S., 57% of bachelor’s degrees are now awarded to women, and not just in stereotypically “female” subjects: women now account for almost half (47%) of undergraduate business degrees, for example, compared to fewer than one in ten in 1970.⁵² Women also receive the majority of law degrees, up from about one in twenty in 1970.⁵³

Figure 1-2 shows the gender gap in the share of degrees awarded at associate’s, bachelor’s, and graduate degree levels from 1970 to 2019.⁵⁴

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.⁵⁵ 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 2019.⁵⁶ 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.⁵⁷

FIGURE 1-2 The great educational overtaking

Degrees awarded to women for every 100 awarded to men, 1971–2019

Note: Master’s, professional, Ph.D., and law degrees included in postgraduate degrees. Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, “Degrees conferred by degree-granting institutions, by level of degree and sex of student” (2005 and 2020).

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%.⁵⁸ Today, 40% of young British women head off to college at the age of 18, compared to 29% of their male peers.⁵⁹ “The world is waking up to . . . this problem,” says Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, rector of the University of Akureyri in Iceland, where 77% of the undergraduates are women.⁶⁰ Iceland is an interesting case study, since it is the most gender egalitarian country in the world, according to the World economic Forum.⁶¹ But Icelandic universities are struggling to reverse a massive gender inequality in education. “It’s not being discussed in the media,” says Steinunn Gestsdottir, vice rector at the University of Iceland. “But policymakers are worried about this trend.”⁶² In Scotland, policymakers are past the worried stage and into the doing-something-about-it stage, setting a clear goal to increase male representation in all Scottish universities.⁶³ Their approach is one that other countries should follow.

FIGURE 1-3 Women more educated, around the world

Share of 25–34-year-olds with tertiary educational attainment, by gender

Note: Select OECD countries. Year available varies slightly by country.

Source: OECD, “Educational Attainment and Labour-Force Status: ELS—Population Who Attained Tertiary Education, by Sex and Age Group,” data accessed November 15, 2021.

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 undergraduate degrees awarded in STEM subjects, including 41% of those in the physical sciences and 42% in mathematics and statistics.⁶⁴ 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. (I will be saying more about how to get more men into these HEAL jobs in chapter 11.)

In every country in the OECD, there are now more young women than young men with a bachelor’s degree.⁶⁵ Figure 1-3 shows the gap in some selected nations. As far as I can tell, nobody predicted that women would overtake men so rapidly, so comprehensively, or so consistently around the world.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION BY STEALTH

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.⁶⁶ The steady feminization of college campuses may not trouble too many people, but there is at least one group whose members really worry about it: 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.”⁶⁷

The evidence for this stealthy affirmative action program in favor of men seems quite clear. At private colleges the acceptance rates for men are considerably higher than for women.⁶⁸ At Vassar, for example, where 67% of matriculating students are female, the acceptance rate for male applicants in fall 2020 was 28%, compared to 23% for women.⁶⁹ You might be wondering if this is because Vassar was a women’s college until 1969. But Kenyon, which was all-male until the same year, has a similar challenge.⁷⁰ By contrast, public colleges and universities, which educate the vast majority of students, are barred from discrimination on the basis of sex. This is one reason they skew even more female than private institutions.

You might think that this discrimination on the basis of sex by private colleges is illegal. But read the small print of Title IX, Section 1681 (a) (1), which contains a specific exemption from sex discrimination provisions for admissions to private undergraduate colleges. To be clear, this provision was made to protect the small number of single-sex colleges, rather than to allow discrimination in favor of men in the other institutions. The evidence for the gender bias was so strong that in 2009, an investigation was launched by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, despite the Section 1681 loophole. Gail Heriot, the commissioner who instigated the probe, says that there was “evidence of purposeful discrimination.”⁷¹ But two years later, the matter was dropped, ostensibly on the grounds of “inadequate data.” Nobody knows for sure what happened behind the scenes. But I think Hanna Rosin’s assessment is right. “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.”⁷²

As Kenyon’s Delahunty put it candidly in a September 2021 interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Is there a thumb on the scale for boys? Absolutely. The question is, is that right or wrong?”⁷³ My answer is that it is wrong. Even though I am deeply worried about the way boys and men are falling behind in education, affirmative action cannot be the solution. (Or perhaps I should say, not yet.) To a large extent, the gaps at the college level reflect the ones in high school. Differences in early attainment at college can be explained by differences in high school GPA, for example. Reading and verbal skills strongly predict college-going rates, and these are areas where boys lag furthest behind girls.⁷⁴ Equalizing verbal skills at age 16 would close the gender gap in college enrollment in England, according to a study by Esteban Aucejo and Jonathan James.⁷⁵ The most urgent task, then, is to improve outcomes for boys in the K–12 school system.

STOP OUTS AND DROPOUTS

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.)⁷⁶

In 2019, Matthew Chingos, director of the Center on Education Data and Policy at the Urban Institute, in collaboration with the New York Times, created a league table of colleges based on their dropout rates. To judge the performance of institutions fairly, Chingos took into account the kind of students they enrolled, since “on average, colleges have lower graduation rates when they enroll more lower-income students, more Black and Latino students, more men, more older students and more students with low SAT or ACT scores.”⁷⁷ In other words, colleges should not be penalized for having higher dropout rates because they enroll more disadvantaged students. When I read that article, the addition of “more men” in that category jumped out. It shows that the educational underperformance of half the population is now a routine fact to social scientists, one to be added to the standard battery of statistical controls.

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.⁷⁸ This is not a small difference. In fact, taking into account other factors, such as test scores, family income, and high school grades, male students are at a higher risk of dropping out of college than any other group, including poor students, Black students, or foreign-born students.

But the underperformance of males in college is shrouded in a good deal of mystery. World-class scholars have pored over the low rates of male college enrollment and completion, piling up data and running regressions. I have read these studies and spoken to many of the scholars. The short summary of their conclusions is: “We don’t know.” economic incentives do not provide an answer. The value of a college education is at least as high for men as for women.⁷⁹ Even a scholar like MIT’s David Autor, who has dug deeply into the data, ends up describing male education trends as “puzzling.”⁸⁰ Mary Curnock Cook, the former head of the UK’s university and college admissions service, says she is “baffled.”⁸¹ When I asked one of my sons for his thoughts, he looked up from his phone, shrugged, and said, “I dunno.” Which may in fact have been the perfect answer.

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.⁸²

But I think there is an aspiration gap here too. Most young women today have it drummed into them how much education matters, and most want to be financially independent. Compared to their male classmates, they see their future in sharper focus. In 1980, male high school seniors were much more likely than their female classmates to say they definitely expected to get a 4-year degree, but within just two decades, the gap had swung the other way.⁸³ This may also be why many educational interventions, including free college, benefit women more than men; their appetite for success is just higher. Girls and women have had to fight misogyny without. Boys and men are now struggling for motivation within.

Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book had a gloomy title: The End of Men. But she remained hopeful, back then, that men would rise to the challenge, especially in education. “There’s nothing like being trounced year after year to make you reconsider your options,” she wrote.⁸⁴ So far, however, there is little sign of any reconsideration. The trends she identified have worsened. There has also been no rethinking of educational policy or practice. Curnock Cook correctly describes this as a “massive policy blind spot.”⁸⁵ With honorable exceptions—go Scotland!—policymakers have been painfully slow to adjust. Perhaps this is not surprising. The gender reversal in education has been astonishingly swift. It is like the needles on a magnetic compass reversing their polarity. Suddenly, north is south. Suddenly, working for gender equality means focusing on boys rather than girls. Disorienting, to say the least. Small wonder our laws, institutions, even our attitudes, have not yet caught up. But catch up they must.

CHAPTER 2
WORKING MAN BLUES

Men Are Losing Ground in the Labor Market

In May 2019 I was moderating a panel discussion on inequality at a conference organized by the Federal Reserve. 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.”⁸⁶

Kearney was brave to say it, and she is right. If we want a more dynamic economy and a better future for our children, we need to help the men who are struggling. In chapter 1, I described the challenge they face in schools. Here I turn to jobs. Growing numbers of men are detaching from paid work. For most of those who are in a job, wages have stagnated. In fact, one reason that the gender pay gap has narrowed is that median male pay has fallen, surely a suboptimal way to achieve equality. But while women have been catching up with men, workers on the top rungs of the economic ladder—men as well as women—have been pulling away from everyone else. 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, the subjects of chapters 4 and 5.

“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.”⁸⁷

I describe and explain here the declining economic fortunes of these men. It’s very important to see how these result from the fracturing of the labor market, rather than the frailties of the men themselves. It’s a structural problem, not a personal one.

MISSING MEN

“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.”⁸⁸ If that sounds bad, it is. Labor force participation among men in the U.S. has dropped by 7 percentage points over the last half century, from 96 to 89%.⁸⁹ Even before COVID cratered the economy in 2020, there were 9 million men of prime working age who were not in employment. (Economists define the “prime” years as beginning at the age of 25 and ending, unnervingly, at 54.) A technical but important point is that most of the men who are not in work don’t count in official statistics as “unemployed,” because they aren’t looking for work. One in three men with only a high school education are now out of the labor force.⁹⁰ That is 5 million men, a reserve army of labor twice the size of the People’s Liberation Army of China.⁹¹

If you think of a man hit by economic trends, chances are that you have a middle-aged man in mind. But the problem is not just one for older men. The biggest fall in male employment has in fact been among young men, aged between 25 and 34, as figure 2-1 shows.⁹² (Now that is prime age.) Scholars are not sure why. Standard economic models struggle to explain it. One popular explanation is the attraction of video games, and it is easy to see how Assassin’s Creed could seem like a better way to spend your day than in a poorly paid, unappealing job. But there isn’t really any good evidence for this. A careful analysis of time-use data by University of North Carolina economist Gray Kimbrough finds that hours spent gaming have increased the most among men in their 20s, but from just three hours a week in 2005, to six hours a week in 2015.⁹³ Based on my own experience as a father of three sons, I honestly had to double-check that these numbers were really for hours per week rather than hours per day. The figure does not strike me as justification for a moral panic. Kimbrough also shows that men who leave employment do not increase the hours spent gaming, or at least not immediately.

Figure 2-1 Fewer men, more women at work

Change in employment to population ratio, 1979 to 2019

Note: Seasonally adjusted; ages 25–54; 1979 Q1 to 2019 Q4.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment-Population Ratio series.

The economic downturn of 2020 obviously caused employment levels for both men and women to plummet, as lockdowns put the economy into a state of suspended animation. In the space of just a few weeks, female employment fell by 16%, and male employment dropped by 13%.⁹⁴ The difference was partly the result of more women taking time away from employment to care for children, especially as schools and childcare providers closed, and the downturn was quickly dubbed a “she-cession.”⁹⁵ Certainly the 2020 recession was a departure from recent economic downturns in which “women’s employment declines were barely perceptible,” as Michigan economist Betsey Stevenson observes.⁹⁶ Most previous recessions have in fact been he-cessions, hitting male employment hardest.

But since the 2020 downturn was generated artificially by a pandemic, rather than by the usual economic cycle, the recovery was extremely rapid too. The CoVID-19 recession was very sharp but very short, lasting just two months, less than any previous downturn in U.S. history. The gender gap closed very quickly too. By october 2021, the 1.2 percentage point decline in labor force participation rates since the start of the pandemic was evenly divided between men and women.⁹⁷ There was some good news too: the proportion of female senior executives rose to 24% in 2020, up from 21% in 2019.⁹⁸

ROBOTS AND TRADE

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.⁹⁹ And these are “all occupational groups with current task loads 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.

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.”¹⁰⁰ There is already evidence that the female advantage in “soft skills” is giving them an additional boost in the U.S. labor market, and that they are switching more quickly than men to “robot-proof” occupations.¹⁰¹ It is important to note, however, that there is a lot of uncertainty about the likely impact of automation. empirical estimates vary widely.¹⁰² Fears about automation have been around for a long time, and they are often a proxy for broader pessimism about economic trends.

One thing is certain. 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.”¹⁰³ 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.¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, and perhaps more surprisingly, women are getting physically stronger. In 1985, the average man in his early 30s could squeeze your hand with about 30 pounds more force than a similarly aged woman. Today, their grip strength is about the same.

The goal here is not to bring back brawny jobs for men, it is to help men adapt. Most of the occupations set to grow the most in coming years are female dominated.¹⁰⁵ 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.

Male workers are challenged on one side by robots, and on the other by workers in other countries. Free trade has become a hot political topic in recent years, especially in the U.S. and the UK. It is hard to untangle the empirical knots here. There is no doubt that Chinese imports caused declines in U.S. manufacturing employment, of around 2 to 3 million jobs.¹⁰⁶ Arguments continue, however, over whether there were offsetting increases in other kinds of jobs; how much the impact was restricted to certain places, especially the Midwest; whether the shock was short term, for just a few years after 2001 when China joined the World Trade Organization, or has had longer-lasting effects; and whether the reduced geographical mobility of workers has made matters worse. In other words, it is complicated. It is also very difficult to get a good economic measure of the benefits of cheaper Chinese goods for tens of millions of consumers (as well as for workers in China, of course—but that is a different argument).

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.¹⁰⁷ (The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 imposed a tax on the biggest of these funds.) In the populist backlash, the technocratic elite largely reaped what they sowed.

For men who are in work, pay levels are typically lower than in the past. The median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since. While women’s wages have risen across the board over the last four decades, wages for men on most rungs of the earnings ladder have stagnated. Only men at the top have seen strong earnings growth. Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less, in real terms, across their working life than those who started out in 1967. For women, by contrast, life-time earnings have risen by 33% over the same period (these numbers are at the median).¹⁰⁸ In the dry words of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The long-term trend in men’s earnings has been quite different than that for women.”¹⁰⁹

BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT GENDER PAY GAP?

When I hire a new research assistant, I ask them to read two books. The first is How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark, an excellent guide to sharp communication in a world of blogs and tweets (and yes, I am aware that the book you’re holding is rather long). The other is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, who is something of a hero to me. Rosling, who died in 2017, was a Swedish physician who became obsessed with statistical illiteracy. In Factfulness, he describes various biases, including the “straight line instinct,” an assumption that a historical trend line will continue unaltered into the future; the “negativity instinct,” which is a tendency to think things are likely getting worse; and the “gap instinct,” which is a “basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between.”¹¹⁰ As Rosling puts it, “We love to dichotomize.”

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.

The gender pay gap is a case in point. A woman at the middle of the female wage distribution (for full-time, year-round workers) earns 82% as much as a man at the middle of the male one: in 2020, $891 and $1,082 a week, respectively.¹¹¹ When we hear about this gap, the thought that naturally gets generated is “women earn less than men.” But in fact, the distribution of women’s wages looks strikingly similar to the distribution of men’s wages, and a lot more similar today than just a few decades ago; figure 2-2 shows the wage distribution for men and women in 1979 and in 2019.

As you can see, the distributions now overlap rather tightly. In fact, 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. In June 2021, I polled my Twitter followers, asking them what proportion of female workers they thought earned more than the median man: 10%, 20%, 30%, or 40%. The poll got just 264 votes, so I’m not going to make any scientific claims here. But my followers, being an academic kind of crowd, are likely better informed on this kind of thing than most. But still the votes were, in order, for 20%, 10%, 30% and, finally, the correct answer of 40%. The gap instinct is strong.

The wage charts in figure 2-2 illustrate the other danger of gap-instinct thinking, which is to miss the extent of differences within groups. The wage distributions of men and women overlap more than in 1979, but they are also much more spread out. The gap between high-wage women and low-wage women, and to a lesser extent between high-wage and low-wage men, has widened dramatically. The closeness of the male and female wage distributions is of course stupendously good news on the gender equality front. The last half century has seen what Claudia Goldin calls a “grand gender convergence,” with a dramatic narrowing in the gap between men and women, not only in earnings but in employment levels, hours worked, and occupation type.¹¹² It is also true that in recent years, however, progress on closing the pay gap has slowed, despite women’s successes in the classroom.

FIGURE 2-2 The shrinking pay gap

Male and female wage distributions 1979 and 2019

Note: 2019 dollars, adjusted for inflation with CPI-U-RS. The figure shows a smoothed line with the share of workers in each hourly $10 wage bin as displayed on the x-axis. Source: Current Population Survey, author’s calculations.

So, what is causing the remaining gap? The answer to this question matters a lot, especially when it comes to potential solutions.

The basic facts are not in dispute. As I have already said, the typical (i.e., median) full-time female worker earns about 82% as much as the typical man. The question is why. Here things quickly get heated. For the feminist Left, the pay gap proves patriarchy. “The wage gap is a blatantly unfair vestige of a patriarchal labor system that haunts women’s economic potential throughout their lives,” says Toni Van Pelt, president of the National Organization for Women.¹¹³ Conservatives, meanwhile, dismiss the idea of a pay gap as a feminist myth, used to create the impression of inequalities that simply do not exist. The wage gap is a “massively discredited factoid,” says Christina Hoff Sommers of the American Enterprise Institute.¹¹⁴ Sommers is not alone. In a 2019 survey, 46% of men and 30% of women said the problem of unequal pay was “made up to serve a political purpose.”¹¹⁵

The pay gap accurately describes the difference in the economic resources available to individual men and women in the middle of their respective wage distributions. It is not a myth. It is math. The real disagreement is not over whether the typical woman earns less than the typical man but why. Conservatives point to studies showing that once a range of factors influencing pay are taken into account—hours, industry, experience, seniority, location, and so on—the pay gap almost evaporates.¹¹⁶ Various studies of this kind put the adjusted gender pay gap at around 5%. In a foreword to a 2009 study commissioned by the federal government, Deputy Assistant Labor Secretary Charles James concluded that “the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct.”¹¹⁷

There is certainly very little evidence that women are paid less than men for doing the same work in the same way. Women are paid less because they do different work, or work differently, or both. But, of course, that is not the end of the story. Women may earn less because they occupy fewer senior positions, but that fact itself may be the result of institutional sexism. Similarly, it is true that women tend to be more clustered than men in lower-paying occupations and industries, which explains perhaps a third of the pay gap. But that may reflect socialized gender roles, not least in terms of family responsibilities, or a devaluation of work that is done by women, or both. In any case, while there is a pay gap between occupations, there is as big a gender pay gap within occupations.

THE PAY GAP IS A PARENTING GAP

The one-word explanation for the pay gap is: children. Among young adults, especially if they are childless, the pay gap has essentially disappeared.¹¹⁸ “There’s remarkable evidence that earnings for men and women move in sync up until the birth of a couple’s first child,” says economist Marianne Bertrand. “This is when women lose and they never recover.”¹¹⁹ To make matters worse, the crucial years for wage gains are from the mid-30s onward, which, as Michelle Budig, another top economist in the field, points out, is “the same period when intensive family responsibilities, particularly for mothers, are in full force.”¹²⁰ The earnings trajectory for women who do not have children looks similar to that for men. The one for mothers does not. The more children women have, the further behind they fall in terms of both employment and earnings.¹²¹

Some of the best proof that the gender pay gap is mostly a parenting pay gap comes from innovative studies in Sweden and Norway comparing new mothers in same-sex relationships with those in heterosexual relationships. Ylva Moberg, from the Swedish Institute for Evaluation of Labour Market and Education Policy, shows that the impact on earnings for the birth mother is almost identical in both family types.¹²² Meanwhile, the nonbirth mothers in the lesbian couples show a similar earnings pattern to fathers in the heterosexual ones. Over time, the inequality seems to balance out in the lesbian couple if they have more than one child, as each takes their turn at being the birth mother. For heterosexual couples, by contrast, the gap gets wider with each child.

A study of bus and train drivers working for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel, a duo of Harvard economists, provides some strong evidence here too.¹²³ Women account for 30% of the drivers, and on average earn $0.89 for every dollar earned by their male peers. By focusing on men and women doing the same job for the same employer, Bolotnyy and Emanuel can tease out the various factors contributing to wage differences. They conclude that the pay gap “can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different choices.”¹²⁴ 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.

In some ways, it makes most sense to look at women at the top of the ladder, since they have the widest choices and the greatest economic power. 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. What happened? “After facing down so many obstacles, after gaining countless freedoms, the obstruction that had always been there became crystal clear,” writes Claudia Goldin, who has studied this group in detail.¹²⁵ “The barrier is the time bind. Children require time; careers require time.” or take University of Chicago MBAs. Straight out of the business school, women earned about 12% less than their male classmates, a gap largely explained by the kind of jobs chosen. Thirteen years later, the difference had widened dramatically, to about 38%.¹²⁶ But one subgroup of the female MBAs had not fallen further behind. By now you don’t need me to tell you which: the ones without children.

For most women, having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite. For most men, it barely makes a dent. The question arises as to whether these different roles are freely chosen or not. I will dig into this question more later. For now, I will say that the mothers of young children seem to want more time at home. In the Chicago MBA study just cited, the women most likely to reduce their working hours were those with the highest-earning husbands. But even if there is a real preference being expressed here, two points need to be added. First, the labor market price paid for this choice doesn’t need to be as high as it is. Second, once children are older, there is a good case for fathers doing more on the home front.

THE $2 TRILLION WOMAN

We have women to thank, and especially mothers to thank, for fueling economic growth for at least a generation. In 2019, women accounted for 47% of all workers.¹²⁷ 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. For families on modest or low incomes, the rise of women’s work and wages has also blunted some of the pain of men’s economic decline. 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.”¹²⁸

The biggest change in employment has been among married women with children. In 1970, most mothers were not in paid work—today, almost three out of four are.¹²⁹ Even among the mothers of preschoolers, paid work is now the norm rather than the exception. Women account for around half the managerial positions in the U.S. economy.¹³⁰ Many previously male-dominated professions, including medicine and financial management, are rapidly tilting female, especially among younger professionals. The proportion of women lawyers has increased tenfold, from 4% in 1980 to 43% in 2020.¹³¹ The shift has taken place not just in economic activities but in economic aspirations and expectations. 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%.¹³² (The question has now been dropped from the survey.) The idea that women will pursue professional and economic goals has gone from novelty to commonplace. When was the last time you heard the term career woman?

“The 200,000 year period in which men have been top dog is truly coming to an end,” wrote Hanna Rosin in The End of Men. “The global economy is becoming a place where women are more successful than men.”¹³³ Wait, what? Women becoming more successful than men? No wonder Rosin got so much heat when her book was published. “Feminists don’t like the argument,” Rosin observed later, “because they say it makes it seem as though women have totally won and there isn’t anything more to worry about.”¹³⁴ This is not Rosin’s view, however—and it is not mine either. 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.¹³⁵ That is certainly better than the number in 1995, which was zero. But it is still shockingly low. The share of venture capital money going to female founders is 3%.¹³⁶ So yes, there is more work to do for women, especially at the apex of the economy. But lower down the economic ladder, it is often the men who are struggling.

Over the last few decades, girls and women have shot past men in school and on college campuses. On the economic front, many men—though not the elite ones—have also lost ground, as women have surged ahead. This has had important consequences for broader culture, especially in terms of family life. The economic rise of women has dramatically altered the terms of trade between the sexes. Many men are struggling to adjust.

CHAPTER 3
DISLOCATED DADS

Fathers Have Lost Their Traditional Role in the Family

In June 1955, Adlai Stevenson, former Illinois governor and two-time presidential candidate, addressed the all-female graduating class at Smith College. on a warm Massachusetts afternoon, he told them that as future wives, they had an important role to play in ensuring that their husband was “truly purposeful, to keep him whole.”¹³⁷ At the time, this seemed an innocuous enough statement, even from the leading progressive of the day. (Stevenson was a favorite of Eleanor Roosevelt, among others.) Sixteen years later, the commencement speech was given by a woman who had been a Smith junior when Stevenson spoke. It was markedly different, labeling God as a “she,” highlighting the political significance of the female orgasm, and most importantly, describing marriage as an institution designed for “the subjugation of women.”¹³⁸ Her name was Gloria Steinem.

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 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.”¹³⁹

The women’s movement is about liberation. (That is why it was called women’s lib.) Above all, this meant economic independence from men. This goal has been largely accomplished in advanced economies, turning marriage into a social choice rather than an economic necessity. Until the 1970s, the typical female college graduate had become a wife within a year of graduation.¹⁴⁰ Among today’s Smith graduates, only about half are married by their mid-30s.¹⁴¹ A husband may be nice, but he is no longer necessary. Steinem was right about the importance of breaking the economic chains. But—and this is obviously much harder to say—Stevenson was right too. A man who knows he must provide for a wife and children has a clear sense of how to be “purposeful” and “whole.”

In this chapter, I argue that the role of mothers has been expanded to include breadwinning as well as caring, but the role of fathers has not been expanded to include caring as well as breadwinning. Specifically I argue the following: (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.

The economic reliance of women on men held women down, but it also propped men up. Now the props have gone, and many men are falling.

DADS AS PROVIDERS

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 this quasi-global personage something like ‘Man-the-Impregnator-Protector-Provider.’”¹⁴² Gilmore argues that this Ubiquitous Male should be seen as nurturing, just in a different way than the typical female. 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. one of the central ideas here is that of a surplus. Mature men generate more resources than they need for their own survival, and these are shared with the clan, tribe, or family. “The idea of the provider is a major element in the construction of a masculine identity,” writes sociologist David Morgan. “It is a moral as well as an economic category.”¹⁴³

For at least the last few thousand years, men could essentially describe their role in four words: “providing for my family.” For much of this period, the family was an extended one. But in recent centuries, especially in the West, it has evolved into a more narrowly defined social institution, often labeled the nuclear family: father, mother, and children. As a result, the roles of father and husband became so tightly bound together as to be virtually indistinguishable. A good husband and father was one who provided for his family, which consisted of himself, his wife or partner, and their children. 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 interpersonal support structures, the chains of dependency, which lie at the core of any human society.”¹⁴⁴

Dench is right as a matter of history. But the question going forward is how to maintain “chains of dependency” between fathers and children, in a world where the ones between men and women have been successfully broken. The traditional family model provided a “‘package deal’ in which a father’s relationship with his child is contingent on his relationship with the mother,” write Laura Tach and coauthors.¹⁴⁵ The traditional family was an effective social institution because it made both men and women necessary. But it also rested on a sharp division of labor. While mothers had a direct, primary caring relationship with their children, fathers had an indirect, secondary, providing one. I am not suggesting that this was all there was to it, of course. My own father fulfilled the traditional provider role, but he was much more besides—swimming coach, driving instructor, moving man, chauffeur, academic adviser, you name it. But his bedrock duty was that of all the fathers of his generation: breadwinner.

The traditional contract between caring mothers and providing fathers was expressed through marriage. A breadwinner–carer marriage is part of what Gilmore described as a “special moral system . . . required to ensure a voluntary acceptance of appropriate behavior in men.”¹⁴⁶ This is one reason conservatives tend to worry most about declining marriage rates. For them, the dependency relationship between husbands and wives is precisely what makes marriage work, including as a mechanism for harnessing male energy to positive social ends. 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.¹⁴⁷ This critique is sustained by many contemporary feminist writers.¹⁴⁸

The point on which both sides agree is that marriage bound women to men, but also men to women, and thereby to children. Where they differ is on whether this was a good thing. Conservatives are right that as a social institution, marriage “worked” in the past. Feminists are right that it did so by curtailing women’s autonomy. The question is what we do now and, especially, what we do with the men. 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.

It is important to note, however, that life has not always been rosy for men in traditional families. There is a certain desolation to a life that is designed for you. The postwar angst of the “Organization Man” in his gray flannel suit, shuttling between a suburb and an office five days a week, hints at this potential hollowness. 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.¹⁴⁹ Men’s freedom has often been stifled by patriarchy too, with tightly prescribed roles and oppressive expectations.

BICYCLES IN A WORLD OF FISH

Irina Dunn’s statement that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle,” later popularized by Gloria Steinem, was a memorable rallying cry of the women’s movement, an evocative description of a world where women do not need men.¹⁵⁰ “Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence,” Steinem said in 2004.¹⁵¹

Women are now the main breadwinner in 41% of U.S. households.¹⁵² 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 1981.¹⁵³ Most mothers now work full time, and in almost half of families where both parents work full time, mothers earn as much or more than fathers.¹⁵⁴ 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. 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.”¹⁵⁵

A more positive way to make the same point is that governments increasingly see their role as supporting women raising children, in part so that they are not trapped in a dependent relationship with a man. At the same time, there has been a liberalization of divorce law, with the rise of “no fault” or “unilateral” divorces that allow either party to end a marriage on any grounds. These laws remain the subject of heated debate, but they are clearly here to stay.¹⁵⁶

Marriage and motherhood are no longer virtually synonymous. About 40% of births in the U.S. now take place outside marriage, up from just 11% in 1970.¹⁵⁷ A particularly striking trend is the decline in “shotgun” marriages. Half a century ago, pregnancies outside marriage were common, but the couple went to the registry office or church before the maternity ward. No longer. In fact, the decline in shotgun marriages is the biggest single cause of the rise in nonmarital births to first-time mothers since 1960, according to research from the Joint Economic Committee. The greatest change has occurred at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. In 1977, 26 percent of pregnancies among women with low levels of education resulted in a marriage before the birth. By 2007 the figure was just 2%.¹⁵⁸

Social norms about maternal employment have shifted so fast that the term working mother already sounds antiquated. 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 1977.¹⁵⁹

From a feminist perspective, these are marvelous developments. But what do they mean for men? The old script, mostly centered on bread-winning, has been torn up. In an influential 1980 essay, “Why Men Resist,” William Goode observed that “the underlying shift is toward the decreasing marginal utility of males.”¹⁶⁰ True. But, ouch.

Many men are left feeling dislocated. Their fathers and grandfathers had a pretty clear path to follow: work, wife, kids. But what now? What is a bicycle for, in a world of fish? Half a century may seem like a long time to an individual, especially if they are young. But in terms of cultural history, it is the blink of an eye. The transformation of the economic relationship between men and women has been so rapid that our culture has not yet caught up.

CULTURE LAGS ECONOMICS

While the role of mothers has been modernized almost beyond recognition, fatherhood remains stuck in the past. “We have a cultural lag,” says Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin, “where our views of masculinity have not caught up to the changes in the job market.”¹⁶¹ 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 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).¹⁶²

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.¹⁶³

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.”¹⁶⁴ Marianne Bertrand and her coauthors show that marriage markets have been hit hard by the social expectation that a man will not just earn, but will earn more than his wife. “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.¹⁶⁵ (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.¹⁶⁶ Notably, this dampening effect on marriage was strongest among those with less education.

The old models of marriage and family, based on the economic dependency of women on men, have been largely deconstructed. This is good news, for all the reasons Steinem gave. But even great blessings can be mixed. The traditional way worked well for children by encouraging the creation of fairly stable families. And it was mostly functional for men. As the sole or at least main provider, a man would be joined to a female carer, usually through marriage, in order to raise children. “The family may be a myth,” writes Dench, “but it is a myth that works to make many men tolerably useful.”

Dench worried that without the traditional provider role, men would “struggle to get full acceptance and risk anomie and short-termism.”¹⁶⁷ 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.

Conservatives urge a restoration of traditional marriage. David Blankenhorn, author of the influential 1996 book Fatherless America, argues that fatherhood has rested securely on two foundations, “coresidency with children and a parental alliance with their mother.”¹⁶⁸ That is true as a matter of history. But the “co-residency” was something women used to have little choice about. Now they do. Blankenhorn argued that in order to tie fathers back to children, they needed to be bound back into marriage. But given the seismic cultural changes of recent decades, this is an unrealistic prescription. Rather than looking in the rear-view mirror, we need to establish a new basis for fatherhood, one that embraces the huge progress we have made toward gender equality.

For many couples, marriage now serves primarily as a “capstone” to a series of educational, social, and economic achievements, as Andrew Cherlin puts it.¹⁶⁹ 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.¹⁷⁰

But having lost their status as breadwinners and resident fathers, many men find themselves a little lost. The economists Ariel Binder and John Bound, after a painstaking study of falling labor market attachment among less-educated men, conclude that “the prospect of forming and providing for a new family constitutes an important male labor supply incentive.”¹⁷¹ 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.¹⁷²

In 1858 and 1859, a light-hearted poem appeared in newspapers across the U.S., from Virginia and North Carolina to California.¹⁷³ It was titled “What Is A Bachelor Like?”

Why a pump without a handle,

A mouldy tallow candle,

A goose that’s lost its fellows,

A noseless pair of bellows,

A horse without a saddle,

A boat without a paddle;

A mule—a fool,

A two-legged stool!

A pest—a jest!

Dreary—weary—

Contrary—unchary—

A fish without a tail,

A ship without a sail . . .

Economically independent women can now flourish whether they are wives or not. Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker.¹⁷⁴ Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010.¹⁷⁵ Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women.¹⁷⁶ one of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men. Wives were economically dependent on their husbands, but men were emotionally dependent on their wives. For all their jokes about the ball and chain, many men seem to know this. In a 2016 poll, more men than women ranked being married, either now or in the future, as “very important to me” (58 v. 47%).¹⁷⁷ Men do not want to be ships without sails.

In 2017, the Pew Research Center asked Americans a difficult question: What is the meaning of life? Specifically, they asked respondents an open-ended 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%).¹⁷⁸ 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.

Someone with multiple sources of meaning and identity would be seen by a psychologist as having high “self-complexity.” Being a complex self has costs. You may have to spend time and energy transitioning between different aspects of your identity, for instance. The term code-switching is often used for this in the context of race. Women may have to shift between being a mother and a worker, for example, with each identity being “activated” or “deactivated” as circumstances require. They may feel torn between the two. But the benefits are generally bigger. If there is a setback in one domain, according to psychologist Janet Hyde, “women activate the other identity, thereby restoring a positive sense of self, which supports the benefits of self-complexity.”¹⁷⁹ If you have a bad day as a mom, you can make up for it by nailing it at work, or vice versa. or at least, that is the theory.

Right now, men have a narrower range of sources of meaning and identity, which makes them particularly vulnerable if any one of the sources is damaged. Men seem to take a bigger dent in their happiness, for example, if they lose their job.¹⁸⁰ 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.

A DAD DEFICIT

“Too many fathers . . . are . . . missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes,” said Barack obama, on Father’s Day in 2008. “And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.”¹⁸¹ This was a blunt, brave message coming from a presidential candidate, especially to a Black audience. Obama was criticized for not paying enough attention to the structural barriers facing men, especially Black men. But it is important not to lose sight of his central message, which was a much more positive one. Fathers matter. They are not dispensable. They are, he said, “teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models.”

Obama was also right to point out that many children grow up without a strong relationship with their father. 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.¹⁸² As these statistics show, the main reason for the dad deficit is the growing likelihood that fathers are not living with the mothers of their children. Missing from their children’s home, they end up missing from their lives. This is particularly true for the most disadvantaged. Among fathers who did not complete high school, 40% live apart from their children, compared to just 7% of fathers who graduated from college.¹⁸³ In 2020, one in five children (21%) were living with a mother only, almost twice as many as in 1968 (11%).¹⁸⁴

Attitudes toward unmarried parenthood have become much more relaxed. 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.¹⁸⁵ Most children in the U.S. will not spend their whole childhood with both biological parents.¹⁸⁶ The liberalization of social norms and practices with regard to marriage and childbearing are in many ways a positive development. But it is vitally important that fathers are not benched as a result. Women have expanded their role, and the range of choices that they can make. Too many men are stuck with the narrow provider role, which is now badly obsolete, not only in theory but also in practice.

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.

The stakes here are high. Fatherhood is a fundamental social institution, one that shapes mature masculinity more than any other. “A man who is 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 1973.¹⁸⁷ Gilder was an arch conservative, for sure. But given recent political history, it is hard to say that he was wrong.