Parental age might explain why boys and men are failing

Men, on average, aren’t doing too hot. Their economic prospects are looking particularly bad.

Recently, my very own father put forth a super interesting hypothesis. Maybe parental age is playing a part in men’s poorer performance.

Here’s what the evidence indicates:

• Younger parents tend to have sons. Older parents tend to have daughters.

• Kids with older parents do better in life along every measurable dimension.

The average girl’s parents should be somewhat older than the average boy’s. And the average kid with older parents does better than the average kid with younger parents. Therefore, it’s possible that this age advantage is strong enough to actually explain some of the gender achievement gap.

So I did my thang and looked at some data. Here’s what I found: