When a gender gap disfavors women, we hear about it. But in his new book, Richard Reeves shows that today, a lot of gender gaps disfavor men. A scholar from the Brookings Institution, Reeves has written a book about how one of the two human sexes is struggling and needs special attention from the government. It’s called Of Boys and Men — and it’s impossible to pigeonhole ideologically.
The tome is too pro-male to fit in with today’s Left, too friendly with “social justice” concepts to belong on the Right, too big-government to be libertarian, and too interesting and unpredictable to qualify as centrist. Reeves’s goal seems to be to force everyone to confront their blind spots while grabbing attention with a “made for cable news interviews” proposal:
Boys, Reeves says, should be “redshirted” in school by default. That is, unless their parents opted out, boys would get an extra “dose” of pre-K while girls of the same age were in kindergarten and then start kindergarten alongside girls one year younger than them.
Males’ inferiority in modern America is most clear in education. Males do fine on standardized tests and dominate certain lucrative STEM fields, though females are gaining ground. Males are lagging and not gaining ground, by contrast, when it comes to overall school performance and college attendance.
Girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be considered “school ready” at age 5, which 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.” A gender gap favoring girls in reading proficiency appears in elementary school and widens in middle school, while a math gap favoring boys disappears during that same time period. In high school, about two-thirds of the children with GPAs in the top 10% are girls. In college, women caught up to men in bachelor’s degree attainment all the way back in 1982, and by 2019, there was a 15-point gap in their favor.
Meanwhile, men still out-earn women in the labor force, and men are less likely to pare back their paid labor when they have children. (The latter fact is the major driver of the former.) Yet even the work picture is not as rosy as it appears for men. Labor force participation was almost universal for “prime-age” men (age 25-54) decades ago. Now, more than 1 in 10 men, and 1 in 3 with just a high school degree, lacks a job and isn’t actively looking for one. Automation and globalization pose a special threat to men who once would have worked in manufacturing.
Combine all that with women’s own growing ability to support themselves, both in the workforce and with government help, and lower-skilled men are simply less needed as breadwinners than they used to be. And what replaces that old breadwinner role? For now, not much. Americans still think men should support their families with a paycheck, and this norm is especially strong among those with a high school education or less. So low-skilled men face long odds in the marriage market. Outside of marriage, fathers are expected to pay child support but not to have a relationship with their children. Many of these dynamics affect the most disadvantaged men, including black and lower-class men, the most. Poorer men have proven vulnerable to “deaths of despair.”
What to do about all this? Importantly, Reeves is not one to assume that the sexes are exactly the same or to insist that any gender-specific problem is simply the result of bigotry. He frankly acknowledges biological sex differences, including men’s higher aggressiveness, appetite for risk, and sex drive, as well as men’s disproportionate interest in working with things as opposed to people. He attributes boys’ poor school performance to the fact that human males mature a bit more slowly than females. Biology, it seems, must inform our analysis of where men’s struggles come from — and must disabuse us of the notion that full-on gender parity in all areas of life is even possible.
Another striking observation Reeves makes is that, in addition to lagging behind girls in many ways, males seem to respond less well to efforts to help. Social science is full of evaluations touting this or that “intervention” as a way to educate children or improve job outcomes, and oddly enough, lots of them seem to work best on the female half of the study population. This puts the onus on Reeves to come up with something rather different from what’s already been tried.
Of course, there’s the redshirting idea. There’s a good case to be made that boys are, on average, better matched developmentally with girls a year their junior. But Reeves notes serious downsides to his proposal, too, such as that redshirting robs children of a year of their adult lives and that a boys-only default might violate civil rights law.
Since education gaps are already evident by elementary school, a better idea might be to develop a test (or adapt an existing one) to flag children of both sexes who aren’t ready for school, then use the test to recommend redshirting to parents. This would avoid stunting high-performing boys, provide help to girls maturing slowly, and disproportionately flag boys based on objective criteria rather than holding them back in school explicitly because of their sex. Admittedly, though, additional developmental differences emerge in puberty, which might not be foreseeable through tests on young children.
For older students, Reeves would like to see “a massive investment in male-friendly vocational education and training” to complement the funding we already give to colleges. Putting these kinds of training on a more even footing with traditional higher education is an idea that’s gained some ground lately — see Tom Cotton’s recent bill — and it deserves much more engagement. Not everyone is cut out for college, and males especially are not well-served by the status quo.
Some of Reeves’s other proposals amount to “what we already do in the name of gender equity, but also for boys,” a simultaneously obvious and radical extension of current thinking on the feminist Left. He suggests a “30 by 30” plan: Make 30% of the STEM workforce female and 30% of the HEAL workforce male by 2030. HEAL, if you didn’t know, stands for health, education, administration, and literacy. These fields are thriving in a way that could help replace lost manufacturing employment for men, and boys in school could use more male teachers as role models.
Of course, the obvious objection is that gender gaps result from a complicated mix of biology, supply and demand, and cultural pressures. Absent some obvious malevolent bias, is it not somewhat presumptuous for the government to step in and say all the other forces at work got it wrong?
On the family front, Reeves sees a need to get fathers more involved in their children’s lives. He envisions a “direct dads” model, in which policy supports the relationship between fathers and their children, independently of mothers. Fathers and mothers would each get paid parental leave after the birth of a child, for example, and would not have the option of having the mother take all of it while the father continues to work: Dad can use it or lose it. Unmarried fathers would have greater rights to see their children.
If Reeves wins fans on the Right with his realism on sex differences, he’ll lose some with his social engineering. To a conservative, Reeves’s policy prescriptions involve far too much added government intrusion into private spheres of life. Then again, to a progressive, his focus on men’s struggles is a little baffling — and his forthright discussion of biological sex differences is possibly unforgivable at a time when many resist the idea that sex means anything at all.
Few other than Reeves himself will endorse the full gamut of ideas here. But Of Boys and Men is a potent and thought-provoking combination of science and policy analysis — and a reflection on the plight of males in a society with women on the rise.
Robert VerBruggen is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
