The decline of men and boys, particularly in the areas of education and the economy, has been much in the news lately, which I count as a good thing. Nothing that’s left out of the public debate is likely to receive the attention of policy makers and, since the education establishment has proven itself, over the past 20 years, to be mostly unconcerned about the falling academic achievement of boys, a few words in The New York Times on the subject are always welcome.
More important than the Times piece, however is the study by MIT economist David H. Autor that was nominally its subject. The Times article was short and its author not very well informed, but Autor’s study is the opposite on both counts. Here’s a piece I published recently on the Fathers and Families website.
Briefly, Autor examined data on men’s and women’s educational and workplace achievements over time and found what many have been suggesting for years – that women and girls are outpacing men and boys in a wide range of categories. Perhaps more importantly, Autor’s analysis of the data shows women and girls to be reacting more rationally to the economic realities of today’s America than are men and boys.
Specifically, over the past 40 years or so, what Autor calls middle-range jobs, i.e. those that pay well but require limited education, have become more and more scarce. In response, women have tended to stay in school, acquire higher levels of education and thus greater earning ability, while men have tended to keep the same level of education and move into low-paying service jobs.
And that, for Autor and most economists, poses a problem. Their chosen field assumes that people act rationally to enhance their economic positions and, in this case, women have done just that. But men haven’t, a fact that’s profoundly troubling to economists. How to explain an entire segment of the working populace that opts for lower earnings over increased education? It’s a thorny question and Autor should be congratulated for seeking an answer outside of his academic discipline. Economics can tell us there’s a problem, but it can’t explain why there’s one.
The question is one of the most important the country faces: “Why the decline of men?” It’s not only important because males make up almost half the population of the country, although surely that’s enough. The question begs an answer because to ask it is to force us to confront the realities of U.S. public policy since roughly the end of the War in Viet Nam. When we do that, certain themes appear each tied together by a single thread. That thread is a disregard for the well-being of boys and men. Put simply, the decline of men and boys is a matter – and a result – of public policy.
Autor notices the phenomena, but seems not to understand that they are specifically anti-male in outcome, if not purpose. That he does so while writing about the decline of men speaks volumes about our ability to look something square in the face and fail to see it.
Autor touches on three public policies that have negatively impacted men and boys: free trade policies, zero tolerance and mandatory sentencing for criminal behavior, and single motherhood. He knows these things exist and limit men’s educational and economic options, but, with the exception of single motherhood, he somehow fails to grasp the fact that these are policies aimed directly at men.
Back in the early 90s, the Clinton Administration rammed approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement through Congress over the opposition of labor unions. Since then, CAFTA and numerous other trade agreements prohibiting tariffs on imported goods have been enacted into law. As many people feared at the time, those agreements have allowed a massive outflow of capital to foreign countries that provide efficient production of goods at a small fraction of labor costs in the United States. It’s often called shipping jobs overseas.
Needless to say, those policies aimed at the heart of American manufacturing – jobs overwhelmingly held by men. And of course, they were among the highest paying in the vast sea of blue-collar employment this country once offered. At one time, a man with a high-school education could support his family alone. Free trade agreements, more than any other single policy, destroyed that arrangement.
Meanwhile, jobs traditionally considered “women’s” remained essentially untouched by free-trade policies. Teaching, nursing, retail sales and secretary/clerical positions saw little or no reduction due to NAFTA and its progeny. According to data compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, four years into the Great Recession, men in the U.S. had lost over 1.5 million jobs while women had lost about 400,000.
Some 90% of those incarcerated in the United States are men and boys. The entire prison population stands at a whopping 2 million, more than any other country in the world, even China that’s four times our size. We also incarcerate at the highest rate per 100,000 people in the world.
Now, of course men commit more of the criminal activity in this country than do women, particularly violent crime. But, since the early 90s, violent crime has dropped precipitously. From 1993 to 2009, violent crime of all kinds is down 72%, but the prison population goes ever upward due to mandatory sentencing and zero tolerance policies.
More important is the fact that, when similar criminals are charged with similar crimes, the criminal justice system doles out harsher sentences to men than to women. If the sentence involves a fine or restitution, a man pays more than a woman according to a study performed for the State of Washington. Men are about twice as likely to receive a custodial sentence as women and men’s sentences are over 50% longer than are women’s on average. Indeed, one study of federal sentencing guidelines found being a man as much of a detriment in sentencing as being black.
Needless to say, incarceration profoundly affects a person’s ability to get and hold a job. That fact is reflected in the data on male education and employment although Autor deals with it only in passing.
As I pointed out in my Fathers and Families article, one of the chief culprits in the decline of men and boys turns out to be single motherhood. In the early 60s, fewer than 8% of children were born to unmarried mothers; today the total is 42%. But that sea change in the acceptance of unmarried child bearing is not the only way in which children come to be raised by mothers alone. Despite decades of social science showing beyond question the value of fathers to children, family courts still work to separate the two.
For example, in 1993, 84.4% of custodial parents were mothers; in 2009, it was 83.7% according to the U.S. Census Bureau. And much persuasive research shows that non-custodial parents of both sexes tend over time to become non-parents, either absent altogether or of limited authority to their children. That’s because the standard visitation order given such parents allows them access to their children between 13% and 20% of the time, i.e. not enough to maintain a true parent-child relationship. Plus, even that meager visitation is routinely denied or limited by the custodial mother and her violation of the court’s order is rarely punished in any way.
To get an idea of the relative values public policies place on custodial and non-custodial parents, consider the fact that the U.S. Office of Child Support Enforcement spends over $5 billion annually on child support enforcement (primarily assisting mothers), but less than $10 million on visitation enforcement (primarily assisting fathers). That’s a 500:1 ratio.
In short, in addition to out-of-wedlock childbearing, the family law system contributes enormously to the absence of fathers in children’s lives.
What does that have to do with men and boys, though? After all, as many girls have single mothers as do boys. It turns out – and, to his credit, Autor devotes an entire section of his paper to this – we’re now coming to find out that single motherhood uniquely damages boys. Just why this occurs has yet to be fully explained, but one study out of the University of Chicago suggests it’s because single mothers invest less time and care in their male children than in their daughters. Single mothers in that study reported feeling less close, less attached to their sons than their daughters and spend less time with them.
And let’s be clear; despite our denials, single motherhood is the strong policy preference of decision makers. If it weren’t, we’d be doing more to prevent it. For example, we’d be teaching children about the value of fathers to children, but we don’t. We’d change family law and judicial decision-making to ensure that children have meaningful relationships with both parents following divorce or separation. But we don’t. We’d have a presumption of equal parenting, but we don’t. We’d spend as much money enforcing visitation as we do enforcing child support, but we don’t. We’d have laws against paternity fraud, but we don’t.
All of those things actively promote single motherhood that we’ve known since at least the late 60s is bad for kids, bad for mothers, bad for fathers and bad for society generally. And yet, incomprehensibly, we continue to pretend that single motherhood is “just another lifestyle choice.”
Whatever the case, single motherhood is yet another public policy preference that uniquely impacts boys and ultimately men.
These three major public policy choices over the past forty years or so go a long way to explaining Autor’s question about why men and boys are behaving differently in this economy than are women and girls. Put simply, males have been the targets of those policies and it should come as no surprise that men are reeling from the one- two- three-punch.
Of course, those policies are scarcely the only anti-male influences in contemporary society. Popular culture is ever-ready to denigrate men and boys as stupid, offensive and violent. There’s evidence that the enormous over-prescription of ADHD medication, over 70% of which is given to boys, damages the portion of the brain – the nucleus accumbens – that’s associated with motivation. We wonder aloud why boys seem so uninterested in life, achievement, promotion, etc., but we continue to medicate them with drugs that may be assuring that very outcome.
Then there are things like the feminization of the classroom and pedagogy. There’s the astonishing increase in endocrine disruptors and other substances in our diets that alter rates of maturity in girls and boys, and that have contributed to a drop in testosterone levels in boys.
Many things have played a part in the decline of males in our culture, but as long as much of that is a matter of conscious public policy, we shouldn’t be surprised. The failure to see those policies as specifically anti-male says a lot about how invisible male suffering can be in this supposedly masculine culture.
We need to look at what we’re doing and see it for what it is. We need to start valuing men and boys enough to do something about it when they’re harmed.
