Opinion | If Men Are in Trouble, What Is the Cause? – The New York Times

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.”

In order to test the strength of adverse family conditions on boys and girls, the five scholars analyzed

What were the findings?

The differential effect is striking:

In conclusion, the authors wrote:

The analysis by Autor and his collaborators fits into a growing body of research on the plight of males in academia and the workplace. Richard Reeves, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has led the charge with his book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.”

The Autor paper focused on the gender difficulties males in the bottom quintile and decile experience. A different story emerges when looking at the gender makeup of those who score at or near the top — the right tail.

Two economists, Glenn Ellison of M.I.T. and Ashley Swanson of the University of Wisconsin, reported in their 2010 paper, “The Gender Gap in Secondary School Mathematics at High Achievement Levels”:

The most striking finding, Ellison and Swanson wrote, “is that the gender gap appears to widen substantially at percentiles beyond the 99th: At the very high end of our data, the male-female ratio exceeds 10 to 1.”

In a separate 2010 paper, “Sex Differences in the Right Tail of Cognitive Abilities: A 30 Year Examination,” Jonathan Wai, Megan Cacchio, Martha Putallaz and Matthew C. Makel examined:

They discovered:

At the very highest level of test scores, Wai and his colleagues found that “the male-female ratio in the top 0.01 percent of mathematical ability on the SAT-M rapidly declined from 13.5 to 1 in the early 1980s to roughly 4 to 1 in the early 1990s,” when it stabilized.

The reality is that on many measures, some negative, others positive, men tend to dominate the extremes, a phenomenon known as the greater male variability hypothesis.

Take, for example, violence. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 2022 men committed 78.6 percent of violent crimes, nearly five times the 16.5 percent of violent offenses committed by women. (In the remainder, the sex of the offender could not be determined.)

In 2023 men committed 14,127 homicides, women 1,898. Men committed 35,304 aggravated assaults, women 10,866. Men committed 16,230 robberies, women 2,407.

Autism spectrum disorder, to give another example, is diagnosed four times as often in males as in females. In 2021 nearly five times as many men as women committed suicide.

These differences can emerge in unexpected domains. Take disease. More than nine out of 10 cases of primary biliary cirrhosis, an autoimmune disease of the liver, are found among women, while primary sclerosing cholangitis, a cholestatic liver disease, is far more common in men than women.

Or take brains. In a 2009 paper, “Sexual Differentiation of the Human Brain in Relation to Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation,” Dick Swaab and Alicia Garcia-Falgueras reported that “the intermediate nucleus of the human hypothalamus” is “2.5 times larger in men than in women and contains 2.2 times as many cells.”

Conversely, the National Institutes of Health in 2020 reported that a study found:

What remains unknown is which of the myriad arcane variations between the sexes contribute to one of the most salient gender differences: risk tolerance.

“Across many real-world domains, men engage in more risky behaviors than do women,” Christine Harris and Michael Jenkins wrote in “Gender Differences in Risk Assessment: Why Do Women Take Fewer Risks Than Men?,” a 2006 paper republished in 2023.

The authors surveyed 657 men and women to determine “their likelihood of engaging in various risky activities relating to four different domains (gambling, health, recreation and social).”

Women, they found, reported a “greater perceived likelihood of negative outcomes and lesser expectation of enjoyment,” factors that “partially mediated their lower propensity toward risky choices in gambling, recreation and health domains.”

One consequence of men’s lower level of risk aversion, they wrote, is that “men are three times as likely as women to be involved in fatal car accidents.”

In addition, in the United States, “women report using seatbelts substantially more often than men, and men have been shown to run yellow lights more often than women,” according to Harris and Jenkins.

Male pedestrians in Britain, they noted, “are involved in accidents about 80 percent more often than female pedestrians, and men die much more often from drowning or accidental poisoning throughout the Western world.”

The authors cited a 2002 study, “A Domain-Specific Risk-Attitude Scale: Measuring Risk Perceptions and Risk Behaviors,” by Elke Weber, Ann-Renee Blais and Nancy E. Betz, that assessed risk taking in five domains: financial, health and safety, recreational, ethical and social decisions.

They found that “for the 307 women and 253 men in our sample, male and female respondents differed significantly in their perceptions of all risk categories except social risks.”

Research on gender differences has been fraught, a focal point in campus wars, entangled in bitter disputes over genes and culture, the fixity or fluidity of sexual identity and demands for equal representation.

Even so, this research has proved consistently illuminating, including from a political perspective. In contemporary America, the more one learns about male and female propensities, the more one understands partisan hostility — the currently male-heavy Republican Party, today’s female-freighted Democrats and the understandable but increasingly hopeless impossibility of reaching productive compromise or finding common ground.