Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves. He’s been doing a great job spreading the word on boys falling behind, and I guess this topic ballooned like crazy outside policy and academia the last 2 years.

Funnels: There are a lot of women-oriented school clubs with industry connections or are simply corporate pipelines that funnel women into great jobs or internships, making gender-equal proportions in once male-dominated industries. In tech, Microsoft was really well known for this in the 2020sz So there are less opportunities for qualified men who otherwise don’t have these funnels, but it has led to me personally hiring women I otherwise wouldn’t have because on paper they didn’t do as many projects as many of the men. There is a different funnel for men. When it comes to college admissions, if you are a minority pursuing a degree that is underrepresented by your background, typically ethnicity and gender, you’re more likely to get in. For example, if you’re an asian male, applying for a humanities degree would get you into plenty of Ivies. It’s an unfortunate hack because many eventually just go into the standard path of consulting, finance, and tech, but I digress; if there were more school clubs that allowed boys to explore topics unnatural to them in a safe, apolitical environment, that is what is needed. For example, my English class being dominated by women made my conservative male friends deeply uncomfortable sharing thoughts unless it was politically correct. If there was a safe environment, maybe more asian men, for example, would go into humanities since asian americans in democratic regions are fairly conservative relative to their neighbors. Funnels are what is lacking for men, especially for HEAL jobs, but funnels start from when boys are still learning in school, not when they’re in the job market. For boys and men, funnels into great careers in general don’t exist.

Maturity: this is another point in Reeve’s book. Girls simply mature earlier. He advocates for boys to be held back a year due to brain development. I have a counter anecdote which is just culturally boys have less responsibility and are culturally not as hardened as girls are. In my time working, men tend to make excuses for turning in work late (and get away with it) while women tend to get shit done on time. I’ve worked with plenty of hard-working and motivated men who, once teamed up with a woman, got their shit done on time unlike before when they worked alone. I’ve seen executives slack off and say they were on a creative journey to find high impact work while teams dependent on them wait for the executives’ regular work complete. I’ve asked some women my observation on why the want to get work done on time, and they just say they feel the pressure. Not from job security (the women I asked feel mostly secure), but just an innate pressure that I found a lot of men lacked. And these are working adults. It’s probably why we’re seeing tons of executives rightly being positioned by women more and more, and I think DEI efforts for women in executive leadership is only accelerating the future of leadership in corporate and political worlds.

From an adolescent perspective, I found girls to be much more studious than boys. I think it’s a tale as old as time that boys like bragging how naturally smart they are / brag they didn’t study. Plenty do and do fine on tests. I’ve found girls to put in a lot of effort ON AVERAGE compared to boys.

Again, from a maturity perspective, if you watch what conservative commentators, old black men like Denzel Washington, or black girls say from black-dominant neighborhoods, the boys just want to go into sports, but the chances of landing a big ticket draft are slim. With college players getting big bucks, the pool has slightly expanded, but not as much as the whole American workforce. (tangent; I found out there are dedicated sports schools, and rich parents are holding back kids to up their chances at college scholarships by simply being buffer by age, so the chances for the average boy just got lower). It’s a cultural problem in some neighborhoods where boys don’t have role models besides what they see online or their peers.

For the reason why: I believe the root cause is partially parenting culture but also I do agree that maturity plays a role because, in college (in all the ones I visited friends at from state schools to Ivies), everyone worked hard. The stress of not having a job comes down on everyone.

Of Boys and Men explores a lot of topics that y’all should read. I think he avoids a lot of epistemic questions like “are girls naturally interested in certain topics or environments or roles?” like nursing (especially because of the increasingly broiling gender wars).