The key ideas

Of Boys and Men

Richard Reeves, 2022

Girls get better grades, women graduate from university more often, and millions of men lose work, family, and the sense of being needed. Richard Reeves, a father of three sons and a researcher of inequality, examines what has happened to boys at school and to men at work and in the family. He proposes concrete steps to help them without taking anything away from girls and women.

Who it is for

For parents of sons, teachers, and anyone who notices that boys and men around them are having a harder time and wants to understand why, without turning to blame or nostalgia.

We can hold two thoughts in mind at once: passionately supporting women’s rights and feeling compassion for vulnerable boys and men.

The boys nobody thought to ask about

Imagine a school graduation in an ordinary American town. The best students come onstage for awards, and almost all are girls. Meanwhile, the list of those who fell short of graduating contains almost only boys. Teachers have long grown used to this and stopped being surprised.

Richard Reeves, a Briton who moved to the United States, spent years studying inequality. He worked at the Brookings Institution, one of Washington’s oldest research centers. He wrote about poverty, which children have a chance of rising above their parents, and the gender pay gap. He also has three sons himself. When Reeves began gathering figures about boys, the picture, he says, was worse than he had thought.

His book asks why, in a country where men held the upper hand for centuries, millions of boys and men are now falling behind at school, at work, and in the family. Reeves does not blame women or call for a return to the past. His main idea is that men’s problems are largely structural. They cannot be reduced to individual laziness or weakness and must be addressed as seriously as women’s problems once were.

Six chapters lie ahead: school, work, fathers, boys facing a double disadvantage, the debate about male nature, and finally the author’s concrete proposals. The book’s figures are American, but much may be recognizable in your own life. We begin with school.

Boys are not less intelligent; they mature later

In 1972, the United States passed a law known as Title IX, prohibiting sex discrimination in education. At the time, men earned a bachelor’s degree considerably more often than women, with a gap of thirteen percentage points. Reeves notes that it had closed by the early 1980s. But the gap did not stop at zero. By 2019, it had grown again to fifteen points, now in women’s favor.

Today, women earn 57 percent of US bachelor’s degrees. This is not an American peculiarity: in every OECD country, the club of the world’s most developed economies, young women with higher education now outnumber young men. The gap begins long before university. Girls make up two-thirds of students with the best grades, while boys make up two-thirds of those with the worst.

The familiar explanation is that boys are lazier or simply less suited to studying. Reeves disagrees and looks at the brain. The prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for planning, self-control, and thinking about consequences, matures in boys on average roughly two years later than in girls.

Imagine two apples on one branch. One is ripe, the other still green, though no worse in itself. Pick both on the same day, and the second will taste sour. School does exactly this: it assesses all children of the same age on the same day, although boys on average have not yet developed the skills expected of them.

In Reeves’s view, the trouble lies neither in boys themselves nor in teachers’ ill will. It lies in a collision: boys’ biology meets a school system organized around girls’ development. Homework, deadlines, neat exercise books, sitting quietly, and planning depend on that same cortex that develops later in boys. This hits hardest in high school, when grades begin determining who gets into college.

The main adult mistake is therefore treating later maturation as a lack of ability. A boy who hears for years that he is worse eventually stops trying. Reeves has a different answer, which we will return to in the last chapter.

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About the author

Richard Reeves is a British-American researcher and journalist who spent many years at the Brookings Institution in Washington studying inequality and children’s chances of rising above their parents. In 2023, he founded the American Institute for Boys and Men.

All books by this author: Richard Reeves

Terms from the book

  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Baltimore
  • Brookings Institution: One of the oldest independent US research centers, founded in Washington in 1916. It studies economics, education, and public policy.
  • Title IX: A US law passed in 1972 that prohibited sex discrimination in educational institutions receiving government funding.
  • Bachelor’s degree: The first level of higher education. In the United States, it usually follows four years at a college or university.
  • OECD: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a group of nearly forty developed economies that collects and compares data about them.
  • College: In the United States, the term refers to institutions awarding bachelor’s degrees as well as two-year institutions.
  • Dwight: Richard Reeves’s godson, a car salesman from Baltimore. His story opens the book’s chapter about Black boys and men.
  • Rosemont: The West Baltimore neighborhood where Dwight grew up. Reeves calls it one of the worst places in the country for boys.
  • Chetty: Raj Chetty, an American economist at Harvard. His team uses data on millions of families to study which children have a better chance of rising above their parents.
  • Kalamazoo: A city in the US state of Michigan with a population of around seventy-five thousand.
  • Kalamazoo Promise: A program launched in 2005 with anonymous donors’ money to pay college tuition for graduates of Kalamazoo public schools.
  • Toxic masculinity: An expression for harmful stereotypes of male behavior, such as aggression or prohibitions on feelings. Reeves argues that it is often applied to male characteristics as a whole, which he disputes.
  • Prosocial: Directed toward benefiting other people. In Reeves’s book, prosocial masculinity means male characteristics that serve those around you.
  • HEAL: Reeves’s abbreviation for health, education, administration, literacy. He uses it for caring professions where men are underrepresented. The word heal means to make well.

All terms

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