Where the Boys Aren’t

According to the Tao of blue-state T-shirts—the sort that every nine-year-old soccer-playing girl in my Brooklyn neighborhood wears—“The Future Is Female.” On college campuses, that future has arrived. Women are now 60 percent of college graduates, men a mere 40 percent. This gender gap is not new—among college grads, the ratio has moved in women’s favor since the early 1980s—but it has reached a record extent, and people are paying attention.

That attention is a good thing. With its ripple effects on male underemployment, falling marriage rates, and family instability, the fading male presence in higher education should set off alarm bells for anyone concerned about the country’s social and economic future. Dig deeper into the issue, however, and you’ll discover that focusing on college, as so many media stories do, misses a big part of the problem. In fact, the education gender gap favoring girls goes all the way back through the education pipeline, showing up in high school, middle school, and even in the proverbial little red schoolhouse. No one suggests that the gap results from any male cognitive deficiency; average IQ scores for the sexes don’t vary that much.

I’m not the first to notice the pipeline problem. Christina Hoff Sommers and Richard Whitmire wrote landmark books on it more than a decade ago. Yet the discussion has stalled. Trying to analyze this particular gender gap lands one in the middle of one of the culture’s hottest war zones: the conflict over sex and gender identity. As a powerful minority of activists, educators, and academics seek to dismantle—or at least, blur—the sex binary, gender gaps are an uncomfortable reminder of the reality of what the French call—or at least, used to call—la différence. But there’s no way to help boys, or to alleviate the societal woes that follow from their struggling school performance, without directly confronting the fact that, for some only partly understood neurological-hormonal-genetic reasons, they develop differently from girls. And let’s face it, the boy problem isn’t going away, whatever pronouns kids want to use.