Richard Reeves

On some measures at least, now men are lagging quite a way behind, not least on college campuses.

That reflects the fact that boys are trailing girls throughout the education system.

Two-thirds of the top academic performers in high school measured by GPA are girls.

And two-thirds of those at the bottom are boys.

And it's not just in the US.

If we look at the 20 most economically advanced countries in the world, there's on average a 13 percentage point gap in the share of young men and young women with a college degree, with young women much more likely to have a college degree.

And just like in the US, these differences at the college level reflect what's happening earlier in the school system.

It used to be that maybe boys were ahead in math and science, girls were ahead in reading and language in roughly equal measure.

That's not true today.

Internationally, at the age of 15, there's a five-point gap in favor of boys in math.

There's essentially no gap in science.

But boys are 30 points behind girls at the age of 15 in reading and language skills.

But not all boys and men are struggling in the same way.

The intersection of gender with class and race really matters here.

So boys from poorer households and middle-class households are much less likely to attend college than girls from the same background.

And the gender gaps are even more stark for black Americans.

So anybody who really cares about boys and men

has to care about racial injustice and economic inequality.

And anybody who really cares about racial injustice and economic inequality has to care about boys and men.

There's a reframing to start with, which is it's not zero-sum.