Best Of: The Men — and Boys — Are Not Alright

Episode Summary

Executive Summary: Ezra Klein and Richard Reeves examine why boys and men are falling behind across education, work, health, and social connection. Reeves argues the problem is structural, not just individual: schools, labor markets, and cultural institutions increasingly fit girls and women better, while boys—especially poor boys and Black boys—face compounding disadvantages. He proposes policy, cultural, and institutional responses, including earlier support, vocational pathways, and more male role models.

Main Topics: Education gaps begin early and widen (Priority: 5/5): Reeves details how boys lag girls in school readiness, GPA, graduation, and college completion, with the gaps especially large for low-income boys and Black boys. He argues schools reward behaviors girls tend to develop earlier. School structure and developmental timing (Priority: 5/5): The conversation focuses on boys’ later average development and Reeves’s view that the school system is inadvertently female-friendly. He suggests redshirting boys and expanding more developmentally sensitive options. Higher education and interventions that help women more than men (Priority: 4/5): They discuss Title IX’s historical reversal, women’s higher college completion today, and evidence that scholarships and mentoring programs often raise attainment for women but not men. Labor market change and the motherhood penalty (Priority: 4/5): Reeves explains how men’s wages and participation have weakened while women’s advanced, but emphasizes that the remaining pay gap is largely driven by parenting and career structure rather than simple pay discrimination. Cultural drift, masculinity, and meaning (Priority: 5/5): The discussion broadens to loneliness, fragility of male identity, deaths of despair, and the need for pro-social scripts for masculinity. Reeves argues men need institutions and role models that help them become men. Workforce segregation and ‘HEAL’ jobs (Priority: 4/5): Reeves argues that efforts to bring women into STEM succeeded, but society has neglected the opposite problem: men leaving education, care, psychology, and other HEAL fields that need them. Policy and cultural solutions (Priority: 5/5): Proposals include redshirting boys, expanding technical high schools, supporting male teachers and caregivers, and creating institutions that make boys’ struggles visible without blaming women’s progress.

Key Arguments: Boys and men are underperforming across multiple domains, but the problem is concentrated among lower-income and Black boys and men. The education system is structurally misaligned with boys’ developmental timing and rewards non-cognitive skills that girls tend to develop earlier. Standardized test scores remain closer to parity, suggesting the gap is less about innate ability and more about school behavior, organization, and timing. Many policies meant to raise attainment work better for women than men, implying that generic interventions are not enough. The gender pay gap is better understood as a parenting/motherhood penalty than as identical-pay discrimination for identical work. Men’s crisis is also a crisis of meaning, friendship, and institutional belonging, not only economics. Society has invested heavily in getting women into STEM but has not comparably addressed the decline of men in HEAL professions. Cultural and institutional role models matter: boys need to see men as teachers, caregivers, and community leaders so those roles feel available to them. The appropriate response is not zero-sum; it is possible to care about women’s gains while also addressing boys’ and men’s losses. Mainstream institutions often frame women’s setbacks structurally but men’s setbacks individually, which distorts public understanding.

Data Points: Bachelor’s degree gender gap: 13-point male advantage in 1972; 15-point female advantage now - Used to illustrate the reversal since Title IX in higher education. High school GPA top decile: About two-thirds girls - Top-scoring students by GPA are heavily female. High school GPA bottom decile: About two-thirds boys - Bottom GPA performers are heavily male. On-time high school graduation gap: About 6 percentage points - Gender difference in favor of girls. School readiness at age five: Girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be school ready - Controlled for parental characteristics. Teacher gender share in K-12: 24% men now, down from 33% in the 1980s - Decline in male teachers in public K-12 schools. Men in psychology: Male share fell from about 39% to 29% in the last decade or so - Example of male exit from a HEAL field. Male share in elementary and middle school education: About 40% in 1980 to about 20% now - Shows sharp decline in male participation in teaching. Women in STEM jobs: Roughly 8% in the 1970s to about 27–28% now - Demonstrates the success of efforts to bring women into STEM. Women earning more than the median man: 13% in 1979; about 40% today - Shows major rise in women’s earnings relative to men. Men’s earnings trend: Most American men earn less today than in 1979, inflation-adjusted - Overall wage stagnation for men. College enrollment gap in 2020: Men fell by seven times as much as women - Example of pandemic-era gender disparity in enrollment. Male suicide share: Men are about four times more likely to die by suicide - Part of the deaths-of-despair discussion. Opioid overdose deaths: 70%+ male - Illustrates male overrepresentation in drug-related mortality. COVID mortality: About twice as many middle-aged men as middle-aged women died - Gender difference in pandemic mortality. No close friends: 15% of men in 2021 vs 3% in 1990 - Survey Center on American Life friendship recession statistic. Meaning from children/grandchildren: 43% of women vs 24% of men - Used to show men’s narrower sources of meaning. Kalamazoo Promise effect on women: About 50% increase in college completion for women - Promise scholarship program had strong female gains. Kalamazoo Promise effect on men: No effect on male college completion - Same program showed no comparable male gain.

Pivotal Quotes: "Men and boys are in bad shape. They're in real bad shape." — Ezra Klein: Opening framing of Richard Reeves’s thesis. "We need to think two thoughts at once." — Richard Reeves: Argument that concern for boys and men is not zero-sum with concern for women and girls. "It's really the parenting penalty." — Richard Reeves: Clarifying that the wage gap is driven largely by childbearing/parenting effects rather than simple equal-pay discrimination.

Implications: The episode argues for a broader gender-equality agenda: keep advancing women while also redesigning schools, work, and institutions to better support boys and men—especially those furthest behind. Without that, grievance politics and male alienation will likely deepen.