A student recently approached me as I packed up after lecture with an unexpected question. To paraphrase: where are all the dudes? “My discussion section1 is, like 40% guys,” he estimated, “but I often count only a handful in lecture. What’s up with that?”
To be honest, I hadn’t noted the gender imbalance. Or rather, I had, but I chalked it up to the topic of the course (marriage and family), which I assumed would attract a majority-female crowd. If my student was correct, though, the issue was not so much an enrollment imbalance as an attendance imbalance. The girls were showing up, but the boys were MIA.
This is exactly the kind of dynamic (writ miniature) that motivated Richard V. Reeves’ 2022 book Of Boys and Men. “In the space of just a few decades,” he writes, “girls and women have not just caught up with boys and men in the classroom—they have blown right past them.” Girls earn better grades throughout their schooling. They’re more likely to graduate from high school and less likely to drop out of college. Among young adults aged 25-34, U.S. women are now far likelier than men to have a college degree.
Reeves’ book, the latest example of the Male Doomsday genre, is full of statistics like these. Like Hanna Rosin in The End of Men a decade before him,2 Reeves believes the gender to worry about is increasingly men, not women.3 His first few chapter titles (“Girls Rule,” “Working Man Blues,” and “Dislocated Dads”) aptly convey his pessimistic tone.
Given my research beat, you may be surprised (I was!) that I didn’t totally hate Reeves’ argument. His tone is eminently reasonable, and he’s clearly been around enough left-leaning thinkers to anticipate and rebut many of my knee-jerk objections. This is no MGTOW manifesto nor Jordan Peterson-inspired diatribe.
Reeves makes the case that in our collective (and noble, he hastens to point out) quest to improve women’s lot, we—the Left, more or less—have failed to notice that the real gender problem, at least in some areas, lies now with men. When we do notice, we rarely speak up, for fear that doing so would undermine the feminist cause. But the Right, he argues, has noticed, and is providing the only real outlets for men and boys who feel adrift but object to hearing masculinity described as “toxic.” It’s time, in his view, for “a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.”
Reeves acknowledges the most obvious objection to his thesis from the jump: Men have been on top for how many millennia, and you’re upset about a few decades of parity or female advantage on select indicators? Please. But with his customary reasonableness, Reeves contends that it is not an either/or proposition. Acknowledging that boys need help doesn’t mean we stop pursuing gains for girls. “We can hold two thoughts in our head at once,” he insists. “We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.”
This seems true in principle, if somewhat naïve to the way human brains, politics, and resource allocation work. But that’s not what I want to focus on here.4 My concern is not that we shouldn’t care about boys’ wellbeing but that Reeves—like Rosin before him5—underestimates the resilience of social hierarchies when he prophecies a dismal future for men.
It’s true that women are now better-educated. It’s true that men’s wages have stagnated in recent decades, while women’s have grown. It’s true that men are more at risk of suicide, alcoholism, and even COVID. But what exactly all this means for the gender hierarchy long-term is less clear.
Pardon an apparent digression that will, I hope, illustrate my point. Sociologist Natasha Warikoo recently visited Madison to speak about her 2022 book Race at the Top, a qualitative study of white and Asian6 parents in an elite Massachusetts suburb. In keeping with trends throughout the U.S., Asian kids in this town are eclipsing white kids on many of the traditional achievement metrics: their GPAs and SATs are higher, for instance, and they enroll in more advanced classes.
But Warikoo documents a parallel set of changes, too. The white parents she interviews argue that homework is detrimental to kids’ mental health, that well-roundedness is preferable to one-dimensional academic prowess, and that pushing your kids too much in school is a sign of negligent parenting. Partly in response to such complaints, the school district has banned homework and abolished class rank, to the consternation of many of Warikoo’s Asian interviewees. (See also: the affirmative action cases the Supreme Court is due to rule on next month.7)
I doubt, at least in most cases, that white parents are consciously seeking to maintain their kids’ racial dominance. (This is liberal Massachusetts, after all.) But regardless of intent, what we’re seeing is the resilience of status hierarchies—by race, or gender, or whatever other marker you like—which persist in part because the folks on top keep changing the rules of the game in ways that preserve their dominance.
Back to Reeves: while some hand-wringing over men’s current state may be warranted, I suspect Reeves underestimates the tenacity of historically dominant groups. Women may be on top in new ways. But if history is any indicator, the “top” may not stay up there for long.8
A small-group supplement to the larger weekly lectures. Notably, attendance is required, whereas it is optional but encouraged for lecture.
Rosin has changed her mind somewhat since then.
He devotes little-to-no real estate to genders other than male and female.
I’m also setting aside Reeves’ gender essentialist ideas, which drove me crazy but are a topic for another day.
Primarily Indian, Chinese, and Korean immigrants with second-gen kids enrolled in the local schools.
There’s a long history of this dynamic in higher education. In The Chosen, a 700-page book I once made a book club read, Karabel documents how our current admissions paradigm initially emerged as a way to keep Jews out of the Ivy League.