Girls get better grades and are more likely to graduate from high school than boys. Women make up 60% of college students and 66% of college graduates. Men are substantially more likely to abuse drugs, die from drug overdoses, commit suicide, and be incarcerated than women.
In Wednesday’s New York Times, under the headline, “If Men Are in Trouble, What Is the Cause?” Thomas B. Edsall acknowledges this burgeoning problem by highlighting a recent paper published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist David Autor, finding that “family socioeconomic status particularly influences boys’ relative to girls’ outcomes at the lower tails of the outcome distribution, precisely where gender gaps are most pronounced.”
Using a dataset consisting of “Florida birth records for years 1992-2000, matched to public school test score and disciplinary outcomes,” Autor found that “a substantial fraction of the gender gap in high school outcomes can be explained by the differential effect of family SES (socioeconomic status) on boys’ medium-run outcomes.”
So, just what is “family SES,” and how does it affect outcomes for boys?
Edsall quotes Autor, “For the lowest decile of the behavioral and academic outcome distributions, a one standard deviation increase in family SES — equivalent to the difference between a family with a married high school graduate mother and a family with an unmarried high school dropout mother — would eliminate over 40 percent of the decile-specific gender gap in high school dropout.”
In other words, whether or not a boy had a married father in the home at birth was the largest predictor of that boy’s academic success. Edsall passed over this finding, but Autor continues in the paper, “Having a mother who is married at birth — a proxy for male role models in the home — confers additional benefits to boys relative to girls, particularly at the lower tails of the outcome distribution.”
Autor later concludes, “We do find that, conditional on financial and educational resources, having a mother who is married at birth differentially benefits boys.”
Edsall then goes on to praise the work of Richard Reeves, Brookings Institution nonresident senior fellow and founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, who, Edsall says, “has led the charge” into a growing body of research on the plight of males in academia and the workplace.
Unfortunately, as I detail in my book, Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy, there is no greater apologist for the decline of marriage than Reeves.
Instead of acknowledging the harm the collapse of marriage has caused, and looking to rebuild the institution, Reeves celebrates the decline of marriage and advocates a new “Fatherhood as an Independent Social Institution.”
“There is no residency requirement for good fatherhood,” Reeves wrote. “The relationship is what matters. Fatherhood matters just as much as ever in a world of women’s economic independence, but necessarily in a reinvented form.”
But this is just plain false. Studies show that the positive behavioral changes associated with fatherhood only occur in residential fathers. More importantly, marriage binds men and women into a long-term project of cooperative care that is absent outside of marriage.
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If fathers are not bound to the mothers of their children through marriage, what is stopping them from having multiple children with multiple women? Nothing. And this is exactly what is happening. As I write in the book, “Of men who father a child outside of marriage, 50 percent of them go on to have a child with another woman. Overall, about 15 percent of men and about 20 percent of women in the United States today have children with more than one partner. The United States is the world leader in this multipartner fertility statistic. No nation has more mothers with children from more than one father than us.”
It’s great that the Left is finally paying attention to the fact that young men are falling behind and suffering in this country. The next step is getting the Left to admit that the decline of marriage is a huge part of the problem.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
