Are men in danger?

So, following my column last week about why the “she-cession” is a blip, and women are poised to dominate labour markets, I received many plaintive (and some angry) emails from men who are concerned for the future of their gender.

Before you laugh, let me say — I am too, honestly. I recently picked up a book called The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. There were many worrisome statistics in it, like the fact that boys are 50 per cent less likely than girls to meet basic proficiency levels in reading, mathematics and science. In their teen years, boys commit suicide at four times the rate of girls. 

This isn’t just an American thing; rates of male suicide are growing faster in most countries, and many countries have specific terms for the trend of downward mobility among men (in China, it’s “yin sheng, yang shuai”, meaning females are on the way up, males down). 

Other depressing facts and figures: young men have a harder time launching — as I read in a recent 13D Research and Strategy report, between the ages of 25 and 31 men are 66 per cent more likely than their female counterparts to live with parents. Boys are expelled more frequently from school, and those without college degrees have seen their economic prospects (as measured by median income) diminish significantly over the past 40 years. Though women obviously started from a lower base, their fortunes have risen. Even sperm counts are down (sad face). 

This isn’t a new phenomenon. Hanna Rosin wrote a much talked about piece for The Atlantic, “The End of Men”, in 2010 which posited that the modern world was simply better suited to women (I read a scary dystopian novel of the same title recently, in which every man in the world was killed by a virus. The mothers and wives that survived were devastated).

Rosin had a point. Many of the jobs that have disappeared in the past 40 years involved physical labour, formerly done by men, now done by machines. As Angus Deaton, Anne Case and many other academics have explored, this has led to “deaths of despair” and more single families (women are choosing to have more children out of wedlock rather than marry down economically). 

That has ramifications for boys, too. More of them grow up without fathers, and while this isn’t good for kids in general, it’s particularly bad for boys. One 2017 study in the journal Pediatrics found that at age nine, children with father loss had significantly shorter telomeres (the cells that keep our genes young and healthy). But telomere damage for boys was 40 per cent greater. 

What to do about all this? Two possible solutions come to mind. First, make education more boy friendly. I’m sure I’m not the only one out there that had a girl who breezed through public school education, able to sit for hours, read easily and learn in lectures, and a boy who could not. My son, like many, is on medication for ADHD, which I believe is such a common diagnosis in part because of the way in which we are all forced to learn and work. We sit, rather than move. We listen, rather than learn by doing. 

This doesn’t suit many boys. The rubber tends to hit the road in middle school, which is when I had to take my increasingly demoralised son out of the state school system and put him into a private school where he could get more individual attention and tactile learning opportunities, less busy work that kept him at a desk late into the night, and have the ability to move around during the day. He went from being a struggling B/C student, to a thriving straight A student. While some of these things (like small class sizes) are costly, there are things that public schools might be able to do, like change the physical environment to better suit boys. How about a Gates Foundation grant for standing desks? Or the opportunity for kids to take physical education breaks every couple of hours if needed? 

Second, we also need to encourage more men to go into care work. As I’ve written, this is where most of the jobs and investment in the economy is going. But men are under-represented in these fields, perhaps partly because care is still seen as “women’s work”. Just as women are now encouraged to move into the Stem fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), so men should be part of the care economy, particularly as Joe Biden’s administration moves to upskill these jobs and increase pay.

Ed, does any of this resonate with you? What can we do about these issues? Should we worry about the end of men? 

Recommended reading

• Following on from the above topic, this Wall Street Journal opinion article about the disappearance of men on college campuses is worth a read.

• Greg Ip, also in the WSJ, had a clear and concise read on China’s necessary but risky pivot from debt. 

• And of course, the FT’s coverage of Evergrande has been unsurpassed. Don’t miss this Big Read on the topic by James Kynge and Sun Yu.

Catch up on previous Swamp Notes on FT.com.

Edward Luce responds

Rana, some of this resonates with me. I should declare though that I’ve no idea why the sperm count is falling so sharply or indeed why bees are dying out. There are long-term phenomena that I do not understand. Are these things related to how we eat, industrialised agriculture, the long-term impact of chemicals and artificial additives in our food systems, or something deeper and more psychological?

Clearly some of America’s declining birth rate stems from the precarious outlook of the generation that hit the labour market after the 2008 financial crisis. To that extent, the halt in population growth is a poor reflection on our ability to redress the economic insecurities of millennials and Generation Z. But at some point human population growth should level out and that, in itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing (the Club of Rome may have been right, just a few decades too soon). 

I am a little hesitant to join this bandwagon of despair about men in our society. You are quite right to point out that girls are doing relatively better in higher education than boys, and that bodes well for their future careers and augurs badly for men’s. But some trends are going in the right direction. Teenage pregnancies are less than half the level they were a generation ago. Teenage substance abuse and alcohol consumption is way down. And the growth of single-parent families levelled off in the late 1990s, though it has yet to fall by much.

Perhaps because I have a daughter I’m worried about the things that affect young people of all genders — the impact of social media on the cognitive wiring of young lives that have known nothing else, the sense of loneliness in an electronic crowd and the push to market yourself to everyone at all times. The warping of our sense of self cannot easily be measured. But I believe it is profound. 

Meanwhile, I mentioned in the previous Swamp Notes that the final column by my colleague Philip Stephens was last week. In fact it’s this week. He’ll continue to write for the FT from time to time as a contributor.