General
If Men Are in Trouble, What Is the Cause?
The declining ability of many boys and men to compete at school and in the workplace has become both a social and a political issue. David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., writing with four colleagues, has delved into this loaded terrain to analyze …
The declining ability of many boys and men to compete at school and in the workplace has become both a social and a political issue.
David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., writing with four colleagues, has delved into this loaded terrain to analyze elementary school data and found:
Modest average differences among grade school students can be amplified with the onset of puberty, producing significant differences in high school graduation rates (89 percent for girls, 83 percent for boys in 2021), not to mention gaps in college attendance (57.9 percent female, 42.1 percent male) and college graduation rates (66 percent for women, 58 percent for men).
Autor, David Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Jeffrey Roth and Melanie Wasserman noted that the explanation lies in the disproportionate share of boys ranked at or near the bottom on measures of academic performance and behavior — what statisticians call the left tail or lower tail of the distribution.
“Female-favorable gaps in behavioral and academic outcomes during childhood — where present — stem largely from the overrepresentation of boys in the lower tails of the academic and behavioral outcome distributions,” the authors wrote.
Getting low scores is, in turn,
Why do boys disproportionately fall into the bottom tenth?
Fascinatingly, Autor and his colleagues found that boys suffered much more than girls from “adverse child-rearing conditions” and “that less favorable home environments differentially raise the prevalence of adverse outcomes among boys relative to girls.”
The consequences?
“Because these adverse outcomes are determinative of high school dropout rates,” they wrote, “this differential sensitivity could help explain the large gender gap in dropping out.”
