Now males in general don’t thrive more than females
The historical life-experience disadvantagement of females is undeniable, but current statistics regarding psycho- and socio-pathologies indicate males to now be less thriving:
* male life expectancy: 72; female life expectancy: 79
* males commit suicide 3.5 more often than females
* more than nine times as many males have ever been incarcerated
* males constitute 73 percent of those arrested overall and about 80 percent of those arrested for violent crime
* the prevalence of depression in males is not, as had previously been thought, lower; it’s approximately the same (older studies had relied on disclosure of traditional symptoms such as sad/depressed mood, loss of vitality, tiredness, ambivalence, anxiety/uneasiness, complaintiveness; considering other factors such as anger attacks/aggression, sleep disturbance, alcohol or drug abuse, risk-taking behavior, hyperactivity, stress, loss of interest in pleasurable activities yielded more accurate results)
And females do quite a bit better in school.
American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s. The imbalance reveals a genuine shift in how men participate in education, the economy, and society. For decades, American women have been told that the path to independence and empowerment flows through school. Although they are still playing catch-up in the labor force, and leadership positions such as chief executive and senator are still dominated by men, women have barnstormed into colleges. And the education gender gap isn’t just a college phenomenon. Long before female students outnumber men on university campuses, they outperform boys in high school.
“The fact that the gender gap is even larger today, in the opposite direction, than it was [when Congress passed Title IX regulations in 1972] seems like something we should pay attention to,” says Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who is writing a book about men and boys in the economy. “I’m struck by the fact that nobody seems to understand why this is happening.”
The gender gap is an economic story, a cultural story, a criminal-justice story, and a family-structure story that begins to unfold in elementary school. The attention-grabbing statistic that barely 40 percent of college grads are men seems to cry out for an immediate policy response. But rather than dial up male attendance one college-admissions department at a time, policy makers should think about the social forces that make the statistic inevitable.
