The Problems of Boys and Men in Today’s America (with Richard Reeves)

Richard Reeves: Thank you for having me on Russ. I’m really looking forward to this.

Richard Reeves: To everybody’s surprise, there’s a very large gender gap in education now, in every advanced economy–I’ll talk mostly about the United States–but with boys and men behind. Obviously we’re used to thinking about gender gaps that go the other way, and for a long time it was that way. But, boys and men are behind girls and women throughout the education system and falling further and further behind. And, that’s particularly true if they’re from a low-income community or household and/or if they’re black.

But just to put a few data points on the table because I know you’ll enjoy getting some empirical specificity here, boys are behind girls throughout school, especially throughout K12 (kindergarten through 12th grade) education, especially in subjects like English and literacy. So, in the median school district in the United States boys are almost a grade level behind in English and literacy. By the end of high school, we see the gap really showing up in GPA (Grade Point Average). Interestingly, not in standardized tests. So, if you look at SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test), ACT (American College Testing) scores–the typical standardized tests–there isn’t really a gender gap. But in GPA, grade point average, there’s a massive gender gap.

So, the top 10% of students, measured by their GPA, break two-thirds female, one third male; and the bottom 10% of high school students by GPA is the other way around. It’s two-thirds of that bottom 10% are boys. That then flows into the higher education system where there’s a large and growing gap with girls and women outperforming boys and men at every stage. Much more likely to enroll–or if you want to put it together around, boys much less likely to enroll. So, since 2010, college enrollment has dropped by about 1.2 million in the United States. Which is kind of expected because of the demographic changes. But of that 1.2 million drop, a million of the drop is men. Campuses are about 60/40 now. And, there’s actually a slightly bigger gap–

Richard Reeves: Sorry. Female. Yeah. There’s a slightly bigger gap now in getting a four-year college degree in favor of women than there was in favor of men in the 1970s. In the early 1970s.

And that’s a good data point to emphasize because in 1972, the United States passed Title IX, a big piece of legislation to promote women in higher education especially. And, at that point, men were about 13 percentage points more likely to get a four-year college degree than women. Now women are about 16 percentage points more likely to get a college degree than men.

And so, we’ve got slightly wider gender inequality today on college campuses than we did in 1972 when we passed Title IX–but it’s completely reversed.

And again, it’s worth emphasizing: That wasn’t predicted. No one was planning for that world, as we were quite rightly fighting for more equality for women and girls. No one expected that the lines would just keep going. And, on current trends, I don’t see much sign that that trend is going to reverse. If anything, we see it going forward into the future.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, when you look at this intriguing difference in the gender gap in something like GPA versus, say, standardized tests, what I think that’s telling us is: it’s not really that there’s much of an intelligence gap in favor of girls. So, I think I can say reasonably confidently that there’s no evidence that girls are more intelligent than boys or vice versa, just obviously to make it clear, too.

So, that’s what I think is showing up in these standardized tests. But, GPA and actually most of the ways we think about educational performance now, they don’t just reward intelligence: they reward the ability to organize yourself, to stick with a task, to turn in your homework, to have some future orientation. And, that comes with a degree of maturity, which are around these executive functioning skills or whatever you want to call them.

And, because girls develop a little bit earlier than boys, especially in those skills–whatever you want to call them, soft skills, life skills, there’s a whole bunch of labels for them–but they’re basically not just about how smart you are. They’re about whether you can get your act together.

Because turning your homework in–and I speak as a father of three sons–actually completing a homework assignment and turning it in is a very difficult task for a 15-year-old boy. And, it just turns out to be that much harder for a 15-year-old boy on average than for a 15-year-old girl. And, every parent knows that. Every teacher knows that. They know that on average, if you ask the girls to open up their book bags, they’re more likely to be well-organized with the homework and so on in there. And, you open up the boys’ book bags and it’s quite likely to be a controlled explosion with yesterday’s crumbled up homework, and last week’s sandwich, and whatever.

Of course, these are averages, and of course we shouldn’t use them as an excuse, but it’s a neuroscientific fact that the average 15-year-old boy is younger, developmentally–especially in those skills–than the average 15-year-old girl.

And we couldn’t see that before because the education system wasn’t really encouraging women and girls to go on further and faster. But, now that we’ve taken away the artificial barriers to the performance of women and girls, we’re seeing their natural advantages playing out. Or, if you put it a different way, the fact that there is a natural disadvantage to being a boy in the school.

That’s one of the reasons why I think we should be looking hard at things like starting boys in school a year later to try and level the playing field a little bit, which a lot of affluent parents are already doing. I’m not suggesting that’s the single solution. There’s lots of other things we could talk about. But, it is very interesting. Like, you go into a school and suggest that maybe boys are a little bit behind developmentally, and every teacher is, like, ‘Well, duh. You don’t need a social scientist to come in and tell you that.’

Richard Reeves: Yeah. I think descriptively everything you’ve said is right. I think an unexpected or inadvertent consequence of that has been to, in a sense, over-correct and make the education system somewhat more female-friendly now than male-friendly. I think as a general proposition, the sorts of behaviors that are rewarded–the kinds of ways that you grade–have tilted a little bit more towards the natural strengths of girls and women. I think that’s true.

I also just think there’s a general point here you’re making, which is how the stakes have just gotten risen generally around homework, extracurricular. And it’s interesting, you see that’s–extracurricular is another area where girls are doing much better than boys. And, actually what that means is that in college admissions–this is something that I discovered. I’m pretty sure I discovered this after I finished the book. But, there has been this move, especially during the pandemic, to go test-optional in college admissions. And, I’m sure you’ve been following this. And now you’re seeing some move back, with MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and others moving back.

But, there’s a very good study from a Vanderbilt scholar, which actually shows that the main effect of taking standardized tests out of the admissions process, or making them optional, is to skew significantly further female in your undergraduate composition, by four percentage points. Which is a really big effect. Much bigger than any effect on anything else, including race, etc.

And, if you think about it, that’s just mechanically obvious given the data that we’ve just been discussing. Right? Girls are way ahead in GPA. They’re way ahead in extracurricular. They’re ahead by the looks of it in teacher recommendations. The only area of college admissions competition where boys are even holding their own is in standardized tests.So, if you take them out of the equation, then inevitably you’re going to skew even further female.

Now I think it’s worth saying that critics would say that in your day–and to some extent in my day; I’m a little bit younger than you when I was raised in the United Kingdom–but the same applies. Which is that they would say there was so much emphasis on these high-stakes competitive exams that actually that skewed a bit in favor of boys. Right? That it just turns out that, everything equal, boys and men, just, they’re a little bit more likely to kind of cruise through the courses, not turn the homework in, but then turn up on the day and do pretty well by comparison to girls. So, that was seen as kind of a male-centric system.

And we’ve counterbalanced that now with more continuous assessment–GPA, etc.

I think that the balance has now gone too far that way and that we want a system that recognizes some of these differences and tries to be even-handed towards both. And, that leaves aside the question of how far we should be weighting standardized tests versus something like GPA.

And, that’s a deep question Russ about: What’s education for? Who do we want in our colleges? Do you want people that are good at performing tasks even when they’re a bit boring, those sorts of–the grit or whatever you want to call it? Well, maybe because some of those skills are exactly the ones you’re going to need in the workforce.

And so, I think there’s a set of deep challenges there. And, a criticism of my work is: ‘Yeah, girls are doing better and they should be doing better because they are better. And, tough.’

Richard Reeves: Well, the big mistake to make is to treat your son like a malfunctioning daughter or for schools to treat boys like malfunctioning girls. And so, this sense of, ‘Why aren’t you more like your sister?’ or ‘Why aren’t you more like the girls?’ is just a straightforward way of capturing what I think is a real problem, which is that if you end up with the female way of being in school, for example, or the female way of behaving–and obviously this is all on average. I’ll stop saying that now because everyone listening knows that distributions overlap.

And, but, actually if you kind of have that as your default standard, then it means you end up lacking empathy and compassion and openness and flexibility when it comes to your son.

I did it with one of my kids. And, the truth is that for a lot of boys now the education system feels a little bit like a round hole and they feel like a square peg. And, too often we’re just ramming them in and saying, ‘Well, tough. That’s just the way it is.’

And, even around issues like behavior, you see there are differences on average in externalizing behavior to use the psychological language.

But, just, there are huge differences, for example, in physical aggression between boys and girls at the age of 18 months.

Now, I think you honestly have to be, like, off-the-chart social determinists to think that if there’s such a huge difference in that externalizing behavior at 18 months, that is not only because the way they’ve been socialized. That is a natural difference. And so, you obviously want to regulate that behavior. But there’s a physicality to the way that boys tend to be, which we will need to be very careful not to pathologize. We have to moderate it and regulate, but we don’t want to pathologize it.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. That’s the ultimate expression of pathologizing it, of what is within the normal distribution of male behavior. But, towards the tail of the distribution of female behavior. Right? So, the question then is: to what extent is that a problem?

And, I will say–and this data is old, but it hasn’t been updated; it’s in 2009–that that’s the latest data showing the share of K12-aged children who have been diagnosed at some point with a developmental disability. And the number for boys is 23%, which is twice the share of girls.

And, I have to tell you, if you get to the point where almost one in four members of a population have been diagnosed with a developmental disability, then I’ve got to say that can’t be right. I mean, I’m just saying that’s not right. That must be the system. Or there’s something badly wrong with a system that says, ‘Well, a quarter of you are disabled.’

And, I think it’s because of what you just said. And you only see massive rise in ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) medication, etc. And, that’s almost always–that’s mostly boys. Much higher rates of diagnosis of ADD among boys.

And so, there’s a line here that’s very difficult to draw. And I’m no expert, but I will say that it is clear to me that we’ve gone way past the line in terms of now medicalizing what are actually just kind of more normal behavioral issues, and in a sense, trying to medicate our boys into being ersatz girls in order for them to navigate an education system that’s just poorly designed for them. So, rather than changing the system, we’re trying to change the boys. We’re trying to fix the boys rather than fix the schools.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. Well the idea of starting boys a year later is, as we just mentioned, it’s motivated by this developmental gap–which is, depending on how you measure it, about a year. Boys are about a year behind girls, especially in adolescence in the development of those study skills.

Now, as you just mentioned, part of that is because the way the system works now. The system is rewarding those skills that developed earlier in girls. And especially in that critical period of High School, the transition from Middle through High School.

And, look: One of my principles generally is look at what rich people are doing and see whether or not they know what they’re doing and that could be more broadly learned. And, you do see this sport red shirt, academic red shirting. So, it’s for academic reasons, not athletic reasons, but this is relatively common in upper middle class circles. And, indeed some private schools do it almost by default. They have a second year of pre-K (pre-Kindergarten). And that second year of pre-K skews very male.

And so, I see people with resources and means doing this. And that makes me think, ‘Hmm. Maybe there is something to this.’ Maybe not. Maybe they’re all wrong. But, I’m convinced enough by the evidence that in many cases the boys in particular would benefit from an extra year of pre-K or double dose, high quality before going into the school system rather than being held back later.

Now, as a policy matter, there’s all kinds of issues with doing it by default. Changing birth dates, etc. There are some places that are looking at evaluating what that would look like to do that. And so, I may have more to report on that, but obviously it’ll take a while to see what the results are.

I guess where I’d land on this is just that I think that it’s certainly something parents should think about and be able to do. There’s a couple of cities now where it’s actually not allowed. So, New York and Chicago forbid parents from having that choice. And that just seems, in the public school system, that seems deeply unfair to me. I think that if parents in consultation with the teachers think actually my son–and some cases daughter–would benefit from just an extra year of development, they should have the ability to do that. Whether or not you can do it with a single stroke through public policy, I don’t know.

I will say this though, that choosing any birth date as the cutoff date for school entry is an incredibly blunt instrument anyway. Right?

And so people say, ‘Look, actually there’s a huge overlap between girls and boys on this front.’ That’s true. There’s also a huge overlap between grades.

In fact, when I’ve looked at the evidence, the overlap in developmental ability between one grade of students and the grade above them, actually that overlap is tighter than between girls and boys within one grade.

So, I think that the point is just that these are blunt instruments anyway, and if we could get to a system that was more flexible, great.

The second one–and it’s timely of course because we’re recording this the day after Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her Vice-Presidential candidate pick; and he’s a high school teacher or former high school teacher in social studies. Which is very exciting to my son, who is just starting his career as a social studies teacher. So, he sees this potential alternative career path. Our family text exchange is like, ‘Well, maybe one day you could be Vice President.’

But also, there’s these lovely stories of these former students going down to the rally where he was announced because they wanted to see their old teacher, like, traveling some across–sweet.

And, when he became a teacher in the 1980s, about 33% of K12 teachers were men. It’s now down, as you said(?), to 23%; and continues to fall year after year without much notice and without much attention and with basically zero policy response.

And so, the question is: Does it matter if we have fewer and fewer men in our classrooms? If it does–and we think representation matters–and I do, not least because I worry that the whole idea of educational excellence is increasingly coded as female. I think if you are a boy and you come from a K12 system where the girls are always doing better than the boys–right? that’s the system that you’re in now?–almost all the teachers are women. The ones most likely to go to college are your female friends. Then it’s not surprising if, especially at a young age, you form the idea that actually this whole education business is coded female.

And, in my case, it was a male English teacher that helped me move from remedial English to a much better level of English, which is probably one of the reasons I’m able to talk to you today. It was Mr. Wyatt.

Now, if it had been Ms. Wyatt, would it had the same impact? I’m just going to tell you: No.

To me as a kid from a working class community wondering what this was all about, to have a guy–and he was a Korean War veteran. He was curmudgeonly. He had all of the affects you might expect. He wasn’t very good at sticking to the curriculum. He was amazing.

But, he lit this idea in my head, which is, ‘Oh, oh, interesting. Boys and men can get into words as well.’

And, it was life changing for me. And, if you look at surveys, a number of people will say that. They’ll look back to a teacher and very often if it’s a man–and sometimes even if it’s a woman–is a male teacher.

So, I think, we need to learn more. There isn’t much research on this. I’ll have to say that to you, Russ. There’s some research showing the positive impact of male teachers, but it’s a mixed field and there’s not much. But, I’m just going to go on a limb here and say I don’t think it’s good if the teaching profession becomes all female. And, I don’t think we would think it was good if it was going all male, either. I think representation matters and 23% is way too low. And, I would love it if policymakers could actually start acting on this before we drop below 20%. Because every percentage point we drop now it gets harder and harder.

I’ve mentioned I have a son who has entered the public school, the public teaching profession, but he’s in a huge minority and he’s faced a certain amount of stigma to do that. Right? And so, we’re making it harder and harder for men to enter the profession because it’s an odd thing for men to do now. It raises questions that I think are deeply unfortunate.

Richard Reeves: It just tilts that way. And, there is a little bit of evidence on this, which is from the work on women into male professions where there is quite a big literature as you might expect, especially women into STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) professions.

And, there is some evidence of exactly what you’ve just talked about, which is a cultural tipping point, which is that there’s a certain level of representation below which you’ll see it skewed the other way. So, right?–and, it looks like it’s about 30% from this evidence, right?, on women in STEM. It looks like if you have fewer than 30% of a institution or a culture or profession being male or female, then that’s about the point where the culture will tip.

And so, what they see is as women broke the 30% barrier in many previously male professions, the culture really started to change quite quickly. Right?

And so, to the extent that’s right–let’s take 30%–and that feels about right to me: it feels like once you get up to about one in three, that’s different to being one in four or one in five. And not for nothing.

Of course, the share of men in teaching has gone past that tipping point. It was above that tipping point. It was one in three when Tim Walz was a high school teacher. And, one in three. And in high school it was one in two and a bit above. It was lower in the lower grades.

And so, you weren’t in the minority. But increasingly you are. And, the profession as a whole has now gone well below that tipping point, and it looks like below 30%, the culture is going to skew the other way and it gets harder and harder.

So weirdly, as women have broken the 30% barrier in most of the STEM occupations now–not all, but they’re getting there–we’ve gone below the tipping point barrier. Not only in education by the way, but also the share of men in social work and psychology and other professions. So, there’s some professions–critical ones in my view–that have become female professions in my lifetime, but that didn’t have to happen, and I don’t think we should just be watching it happen and not acting.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. So, I think the danger is that if you live in a certain kind of environment and you look around and you see–well, so I used to live in Bethesda-Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is one of the richest zip codes in the United States; and there was still a gender gap in the outcomes, but it was much smaller and it was a gap at the top of the distribution. So, what it meant was the girls were going to the Ivy League colleges and the boys were just going to the University of Maryland flagship or whatever. And, many of the boys were going to Ivy Leagues as well.

So, A, it was a less consequential gap, and B, it was just so much smaller. Basically all of the gaps that we’ve talked about so far, you can double them for kids from low-income backgrounds, say, bottom third of income distribution, and you can double them for black kids.

I think an unremarked-upon aspect of this debate is how well black girls and black women are doing now compared to 20, 30 years ago–on every front. Which is not to say that they’re doing as well as they should in an equal society, but so much better. Whereas black men and black boys lagging way behind. And so, that separation is huge.

And so, in education especially, I think it’s irresponsible now to show outcomes by race without also breaking by gender because you miss that massive gap between black boys and black girls. But, I also think that the class dimension here is huge.

And, you’re right: One of my fears is that these upper middle class professionals–especially if they’re still struggling with gender inequality in the workplace: this goes the other way where women are still, may be underrepresented at the top. They’re sort of ‘leaning in,’ to use Sheryl Sandberg’s phrase, but they’re not looking down. And so, they miss a very different story that you’ll see at the bottom.

And actually Raj Chetty, whose work I’m sure you know, out of Harvard, just produced a report a couple of weeks ago showing that both boys and girls raised in white upper middle class households are doing even better if they were born in 1992 than if they were born in 1978. So in other words, that kind of class stratification at the top–the way that upper middle class parents are able to kind of make sure their kids do okay–that’s increased. Meanwhile, at the bottom of the distribution, you’re seeing cratering prospects, especially for men. So, white men raised in low-income households are worse off than the previous generation of white men raised in low-income households. Slight improvements for black. And, you just don’t see that. If you don’t have working-class friends, if you don’t spend time in these communities, you miss the fact that working class men and boys, and black boys and men, they’re seeing their prospects not only not improve, but in many cases go backwards.

Richard Reeves: Well, the class dimension here is hugely important, too, because what you’re obviously seeing growing wage inequality over the longer time, right? We’re seeing better. It’s been better in recent years. But over the longer time-scale since, say, the 1980s, we’ve seen much more robust wage growth at the top of the distribution than at the middle and the bottom.

But, that’s especially true for men. And so, it’s actually still the case that most men are earning a little bit less today than most men were in 1979. Women have seen an increase in wages across the board, but for men who are not in that top 25%, 30% of the distribution, their wages have stagnated.

Now, there’s all kinds of reasons for that that you will be better-placed, I think, probably, to talk about, and certainly many of your guests will be, than I. But, it’s a fact. (More to come, 34:31)