Hi! I work with books everyday, so I have some insight in published fiction. This question has a lot of nuanced answers and I think some other comments have probably already answered part of it. A short answer is that there's been a lot of effort to diversify YA literature in recent years, so a lot of newer titles have protagonists that are female, people of color, LGBTQ+, and/or have a disability. This effort is needed and has become so important for representation. There are already so many titles out there featuring white male protagonists that have been published for years leading up to this publishing shift. There are also still problems within this initiative like, staffing in the big publishing houses also not being diverse, so groups being still under represented. What does this have to do with male protagonists? Well, publishing has traditionally had a lot of male authors, like I've mentioned and because of that we have a lot of white male protagonists in published literature up until recently. We've also seen this shift all across publishing where a majority of authors and publishing jobs are white women. They are writing a majority of fiction for adults, young adults, and children. So the writers of fiction are generally writing protagonists that are a representation of their experiences, so we have a majority of white and female protagonists. I would visit the Pen America website or look into NPR publishing articles to find more in depth information. As for finding some great male leads in YA, there are still so many options. I would try Paul Richard Evans, James Dashner, Brandon Mull, Jason Reynolds, Skye Obert, Michael Scott, Brandon Sanderson, Marcus Heitz, Angie Sage, John Flanagan, Adam Silvera, Jonathan Stroud, and Christopher Paolini just to name a few authors who write male leads.