For decades, Americans have told a clear story about gender. Women were held back. Society was built by men and for men. The moral task of our time, we were told, was to dismantle male advantage and help women catch up. That story may have once described reality. It no longer does.
Today, a growing body of evidence points to a different and deeply uncomfortable conclusion. Boys and men are now falling behind across many of the institutions that structure a stable, dignified life: education, work, family, and mental health. And yet our public conversation remains frozen in an earlier era, unable or unwilling to recognize what has changed.
This is not an argument against women’s progress. Women have made extraordinary and deserved gains. It is an argument that a society can correct one injustice and create another if it refuses to update its moral lens.
Start with education. In elementary and secondary school, boys now lag behind girls in reading in every developed country. They are more likely to struggle academically, to be disciplined, and to disengage from school altogether. That early gap compounds over time. Seven out of 10 valedictorians are female. On college campuses, the gender balance has flipped: Women now make up nearly 60% of undergraduates and earn close to 60% of bachelor’s degrees. Among young adults, women are significantly more likely than men to have a college degree, a reversal of the gender gap that defined much of the 20th century. Yet our educational rhetoric still sounds as though girls are the ones being left behind.
The consequences don’t end at graduation. Men’s connection to work, a central source of purpose, structure, and social standing, has been eroding for decades. Prime-age male labor force participation has steadily declined, especially among men without college degrees. Entire cohorts of working-class men have drifted out of stable employment, not because they prefer idleness, but because the economy increasingly rewards credentials and social skills while offering fewer pathways for men whose strengths are practical, mechanical, or physical.
For generations, society made a promise to such men: Work hard, show up, and you will earn a place. That promise has been quietly broken.
The fallout shows up starkly in our health statistics. Men die by suicide at nearly four times the rate of women. Middle-aged men, particularly those without college degrees, account for a disproportionate share of what economists grimly call “deaths of despair”: suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related disease. When we talk about mental health, we often focus, appropriately, on the pressures facing teenage girls. But while that crisis is loudly discussed, another one unfolds in silence: Men are dying in extraordinary numbers, and few seem to notice.
Loneliness deepens the wound. Surveys show that young men are significantly more likely than young women to report feeling lonely. Male friendship has collapsed over the past few decades, with approximately 25% of young men reporting that they have no close friends at all. As traditional institutions that once anchored male social life — stable jobs, unions, churches, and fraternal organizations — have weakened, little has replaced them. Men, on average, are less likely to seek emotional support and less likely to be invited into spaces where vulnerability is encouraged.
The result is a quiet epidemic of isolation.
Family life tells a similar story. Roughly 1 in 4 American children now grow up without a father in the home. This is often discussed solely in terms of its impact on children, and rightly so, but it also reflects the broader marginalization of men from family life. Many men are disconnected from stable work, from marriage, and ultimately from daily involvement in their children’s lives. For all our concern about “toxic masculinity,” the more common problem in many communities is not men behaving badly, but men being absent altogether.
When men fail, society often responds with punishment rather than repair. Men make up more than 90% of the prison population. The United States incarcerates more people than any other nation on Earth, and the burden falls overwhelmingly on men — disproportionately poor men and men of color. Many of the same struggles we ignore in schools and workplaces — illiteracy, untreated mental illness, and addiction — reappear in our jails and prisons, where they are far more expensive and difficult to address.
None of this means women no longer face injustice. Women still bear disproportionate caregiving burdens, face violence, and encounter barriers in certain professions. Acknowledging male disadvantage in some areas does not erase female disadvantage in others. Justice is not a finite resource.
But our gender conversation has become dangerously one-sided. We have built institutions, policies, and cultural narratives that assume men are always advantaged and women are always vulnerable, even when the data tell a different story. That mismatch matters. When people feel unseen or misrepresented, they disengage. When boys grow up hearing only what’s wrong with men, they struggle to imagine a hopeful future for themselves.
HAVE HIGH SCHOOL BOYS REALLY GOTTEN THAT BAD?
A healthier society would be capable of holding two truths at once: that women’s progress has been real and valuable and that many boys and men are now struggling in ways we have failed to address. That would mean investing in early literacy programs tailored to boys, expanding vocational and apprenticeship pathways, designing mental-health outreach that men will actually use, and building family policies that include fathers rather than treating them as optional.
Most of all, it would require a cultural shift: the courage to say that caring about men and boys is not reactionary, anti-woman, or nostalgic for some lost patriarchy. It is simply humane. A society that cannot tell a hopeful story to its sons will eventually struggle to tell one to its daughters, too.
Jason E. Thompson is a member of the Utah House of Representatives.