The Boy Crisis — What the Data Shows | The Men's Work Directory

The education data

The PISA data from the OECD shows that in reading — the foundational academic skill — girls outperform boys in every country surveyed. The gap is largest in English-speaking countries. Boys are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, suspended, or expelled. They are less likely to participate in extracurricular activities, to have strong relationships with teachers, and to report positive experiences of school.

At the college level, women earn 57% of bachelor's degrees in the United States (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022) and a higher proportion of master's and many professional degrees. The college completion gap — women completing college at significantly higher rates than men who enroll — has widened over three decades.

What men's work understands about it

James Hollis's account of the failure of initiation provides one framework: a culture that has lost the structures for preparing boys to become men produces boys who are struggling to organize themselves toward adult purpose and responsibility. The absence of elder men who are invested in boys' development, the absence of meaningful challenge and meaningful community, the absence of initiation — these produce the disengagement and drift that the educational data reflects.

Michael Meade's youth work — bringing the mythological and ritual traditions into contact with boys and young men who are on the margins of society — demonstrates that boys who are disengaged from institutional structures are often not deficient but uninitiated. Given the right container, the right challenge, and the right witness, they often find purpose that institutional education never provided.

Common Questions

Is this a reason to be anti-feminist?

No. The boy crisis is not caused by women's advancement. It is correlated with the loss of structures that prepared boys for adult life — structures that decline in both progressive and conservative cultural contexts. The problem is not that girls are doing well. The problem is that boys are not.