Where have all the Men Gone?

A Few Less-Than-Hopeful Statistics

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

A sociological—or at least statistical—take on men. It’s something you don’t see very often, but that basically describes Richard Reeves’ 2022 book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It.

Before we dive into some of its analysis, I shouldn’t have to do this, but we live and breath in a pretty silly partisan discourse on most issues, including ones about gender and politics. So it feels important to point out—right out of the gate—that Reeves is no right-winger. I’ve mentioned the likes of Jordan Peterson and Michel Houllebecq on this Substack recently; Peterson is a Canadian psychologist and Houllebecq is a French novelist. The two of them have certainly placed a concern for men and masculinity in the center of their own work and critiques, but they also sometimes earn the criticism they receive for being too resentful and/or reactionary. If I remember right, I believe Reeves actually mentions Peterson in the book at one point, but in terms of his own work and credentials, he’s a pretty far cry from him. If grievance sometimes seems at the heart of Houllebecq and Peterson’s messaging, the British-born Reeves, on the other hand, comes off as one who’s genuinely driven by care.

Which isn’t to say that Reeves isn’t afraid to throw punches at both the political left and right (which is a good thing), and he works for the prestigious (and supposedly non-partisan) Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C. think tank. Oh, and Hanna Rosin—an editor for The Atlantic and the author The End of Men and the Rise of Women—is no right-winger either, and her book is cited by Reeves and worthy of comparison. She’s a better writer than him, and he’s probably more of a scholar.

So what is, exactly, the picture being shown and story told by Reeves (and Rosin)? Well, the superior achievement by girls over boys starts quite early in elementary school (Reeves actually recommends holding boys back a year later than girls, which strikes me as a unique proposal). Young men are getting crushed both in university enrollment and graduation rate (“women are earning three out of five master’s degrees”), and as Reeves points out, these trends are in no way limited to the United States. Reeves quotes some folks from Admissions departments who admit that the selection criteria for young men is often and informally lower than that of young women because the institutions are so embarrassed by their numbers. That’s a sentiment I can confirm from my own five-and-a-half years spent as an academic advisor at a public university. Oh, and here’s a bombshell for you, courtesy of Reeves: “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” (emphasis his).

Men do still hold an edge over women in earnings—this is a complicated issue but largely has to do with the fact that many women have a kid or three around the age of 30, and Reeves advocates for a much more robust and government-led approach to parental leave to make this fairer—but if looked at over several decades, that gap is definitely closing, and male wages are down.

For families that have gained in income, Reeves points out more than once, it is likely because the women have increased their income. While presumably women are glad for their improved earning capacity, it’s worth pointing out that most heterosexual women still prefer a male partner who earns more money than they do and who come with some status while they’re at it: “Men are divided into what the college girls call the players (a smaller group) and the losers (a much larger group),” writes Rosin. This creates a dynamic whereby most women are fighting for a small pool of men. It’s almost certainly also true that most men are competing for a small pool of women based on different criteria, but I didn’t see anything to confirm this in either of the main books I’m discussing here. Rosin’s book in particular devotes some attention and energy to exploring couples where the woman is out-earning the man, sometimes dramatically so.

Reeves points out that as women have been given more permission to work, they’ve also done a better job than men at adjusting to economic change. It’s a point Rosin seems to agree with, and she devotes a whole chapter to the way in which women have come to dominate the well-respected and decently-paying field of pharmacy. Reeves’ proposals don’t shy away from affirmative action-like solutions, and while he grants the Jamie Damore point that men statistically prefer to work more with things, while women prefer working with people, Reeves still—to deal with problems of male unemployment—recommends both marketing and financial investments in persuading more men to pursue careers in HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) professions.

As one who has dabbled in education and government and had some proximity to social work-like environments, I think I mostly agree with the need for this push, while also knowing that there is something about those domains that don’t quite do it for me. Writing aside, one of the best professional experiences I’ve ever had was as a part-time high school sports referee and umpire, and it’s not lost on me that I was surrounded by a lot of men during that time, and that part of the appeal of it was the movement and being involved in real sporting contests. I’m sorry, but teaching fourth graders and inputting CRM data just doesn’t make me feel quite that alive, though maybe this is just my own experience of “a gnawing sense of purposelessness,” a phrase that Reeves borrows from Barrett Swanson in Harper’s to describe his cultural sense about men as a whole.

Reeves’ (and Rosin’s) concerns about men aren’t just educational and professional/financial. Turns out there’s also suicide data to be aware of (up, for both men and women, actually), sexual activity (down for men), marriage rates (down and later for men), and fatherhood (more people are growing up without the presence of one).

Rosin devotes a compelling chapter to what we might call “hook-up culture,” and she makes the surprising observation and claim that she thinks it’s at least in part 1) driven by women and 2) for economic reasons. Meaning: as women have, again, gained more professional and lifestyle freedom and choice, they haven’t stopped wanting sex, but they have an inherent interest in delaying long-term commitment and babies until they’re on a solid career path. Most people still eventually want to find someone and settle down, Rosin concedes, and for someone like me, it was refreshing to even have found someone prominent who’s willing to admit that women, you know, have sexual power.

There also appears to be a class element—the rich marry more and divorce less—which makes sense, given that both marriage and divorce are expensive endeavors (though married couples also tend to do better financially, which isn’t nothing in terms of consideration for one’s life). Oh, and marriage does seem to benefit men more than women when considering variables like how long one lives, health, and even financial thriving. In terms of meaning and happiness, many single, middle-aged women seem to be doing fine; a lot less so for single men in this same age range.

Rosin also doesn’t shy away from demonstrating—again, statistically—that incidents of sexual assaults and rapes—have actually had a pretty good couple decades, meaning these incidents are going down significantly (“The rate of rape…declined by 60 percent since 1993”). And male violence in general? This is probably one of the better trends that either Rosin or Reeves mention, and of course it, too, was surprising because it cuts against so much of the public rhetoric, but yeah, men are still more violent than women (by a large margin), but male violence has been trending down quite a bit, while female violence is going up (Rosin: “The share of women arrested for violent crimes rose from 11 percent in 1990 to 18 percent in 2008”). I’ve had at least one life experience with this trend, as I was a graduate student at the University of South Carolina in 2015 when a female divorce came onto campus and killed her ex-husband professor and then herself.

Rosin points out as an aside to this fact about rates of female violence that some it may actually be something like good, i.e. female abuse victims fighting back, but she also writes that “The more women appropriate power, the more behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.”

I suppose I could keep riffing here, as there’s more to say and discuss and think about. But the truth is, while I think reading both Reeves and Rosin was helpful (and surprising in a lot of ways, as I have pointed out), I’m not quite sure what to think about all of it. Many years ago, I read the 2000 Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson book, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, and benefitted greatly from its thesis, but that was more of a psychological lens, and therefore any potential solutions that were offered up were largely interpersonal in nature. Two child psychologists writing for therapeutic and educational domains. Reeves and Rosin are different; they demonstrates persuasively and quantitatively that there are macro trends we ought to be deeply concerned about, and the solutions that are advocated for are mostly political.

We need both the psychological and sociological perspectives—on gender and otherwise—mostly because both ways in describe an important piece of the puzzle while also carrying their own distinct limits. Care too much about the numbers, and you risk giving up your own agency. Have too much faith in yourself apart from culture (and biology, as Reeves does not shy away from while admitting that, you know, testosterone, for example, matters when analyzing men, just as the not-indefinite female capacity to become pregnant and carry a child to term is also an important consideration on many of these topics), and the risk is that your actions won’t take the world that really is there seriously enough.