Boys are more delicate than girls

Source

January is Poverty Awareness Month. I thought this would be a good time to share something I learned not too long ago about boys and poverty.

I particularly liked the way

Ruth Whippman

described this finding in Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity (ongoing review thread here). Boys are, on average, more “delicate” than girls.

For example, Harvard economist Raj Chetty and colleagues find that the average boy’s family life has a bigger impact on his future employment prospects than the average girl’s.

Obviously, what happens during childhood matters for everyone. Here’s David Brooks on the impact of growing up in a single-parent household:

On average, children of single parents or unmarried cohabiting parents tend to have worse health outcomes, worse mental-health outcomes, less academic success, more behavioral problems, and higher truancy rates than do children living with their two married biological parents. According to work by Richard V. Reeves, a co-director of the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck.

We’ve known for decades that poverty is an adverse childhood experience, as is growing up in a low-opportunity neighborhood and being raised by a single parent.

The fact that these disadvantages impact boys more than girls is a more recent finding.

Income, location, and family composition all seem to matter more for boys. Male children whose family incomes are in the bottom quintile are less likely to work as adults than female kids from similar circumstances. Being raised by a single parent also seems to harm boys’ future employment more than girls’. Where they grow up is also more important for boys than girls.

“Girls seem more resilient,” Chetty said. “It’s poor boys who seem highly sensitive. When [boys] are in a negative environment, they’re more likely to go on a downward trajectory – more likely to misbehave in school and not do as well on tests, more likely to drop out of high school, and more likely to get involved in crime.”

Many attribute the steady decline in male employment (and other status markers) to factors like globalization, an aging population, and technological innovation. I certainly have.

Chetty’s work implicates “the growth of residential segregation, income inequality, and the fraction of children raised in single-parent households – all factors associated with lower employment rates for boys relative to girls,” the study authors wrote.

Democrats and leftists should care about boys (and men) because Democrats and lefties understand, far better than Republicans and right-wingers, that circumstances matter.

Another reason caring about boys and men should not be right-coded is that most people think boys and men matter. Alienating most people is not, and will never be, a winning proposition.

US parents are more worried about their sons’ future prospects than their daughters’. Most voters agreed that American society is not doing enough to help boys become successful adults. This was true for voters of all genders and political parties. And people who care a lot about boys and men were also the most likely to vote for Trump. (Hat tip:

Young Men Research Initiative

) As I wrote not long ago, the idea that global trade, tech innovation, and feminism threaten men and boys is a major driver of rising illiberalism.

One core reason I am not a conservative is that I oppose all hierarchies based on dumb shit. Genitalia should not qualify or disqualify anyone from leadership (nor should skin color, country of origin, etc.). By that same logic, neither should genitalia exempt anyone from empathy, compassion, concern, or assistance.