As boys get left behind, consequences ripple across culture

What you probably already know: While much attention has been focused on girls in recent years, boys in the U.S. have slowly fallen behind in nearly every metric. It’s become a crisis and it’s starting to get serious attention. Women attend college at much higher rates than men, but it starts much earlier. Boys enter kindergarten already behind and the gaps get worse as they persist. About 83% of boys graduate high school compared to 89% of girls, according to the Brookings Institute. They are also twice as likely to be diagnosed with ADHD or autism, though many believe that’s because girls just have different symptoms, and the suicide rates for young men have increased dramatically in recent years. The split in achievements between boys and girls started in the late 1980s, but it’s gotten much worse.

Why? There’s clearly a problem but no one seems to fully understand why this is happening, and thus, how to fix it. A 2023 New Yorker article reported that social scientists seem to agree that “contemporary American men are mired in malaise” though they disagree about the causes. Some point to social issues: Boys who do well in school are often characterized negatively as “nerds” while boys who act up in class can get positively rewarded by their peers for being cool. There are physical reasons, as well. Boys mature slower than girls, and hit puberty just as school gets particularly difficult. That can make it harder for boys to focus and self-regulate. Additionally, more than 77% of all school teachers are women, meaning boys don’t have as many male role models in school, where they spend the majority of their time.

What it means: The result is that teenage boys are increasingly susceptible to extremism and misogyny, which is delivered directly to them via social media. The recent Netflix show “Adolescence” has brought the issue to the mainstream with its depiction of a teen boy who attacks a female classmate after being sucked into radical content online. Nonprofit group Parents Together has a list of warning signs parents can use to identify when their kid might be influenced by these radical ideas, including withdrawing from social activity, depression, talking about new beliefs or shifting opinions on social issues, and using new slang language or symbols.

What happens now? It’s easy to see how this divide will make things worse as the kids grow up. We are already seeing that play out as the political divide between young men and women has gotten more extreme. The backlash against women’s rights in recent years has been swift, and it’s not difficult to tie this to the pushback against DEI. The Week called 2024 “The Year of the Gender Divide,” and found that the issue isn’t limited to the United States. Men and women in Brazil, France, Germany, Japan and Turkey were similarly divided. The significant gap in ideology only took six years to happen, according to a Gallup report, and really took off in 2019 during Donald Trump’s run for a second term.