A generation of young men are facing far worse outcomes than young women. We don’t value boys and masculinity. Too many young men are isolated. Boys and young men are in crisis.
The headlines, opinion pieces and speeches about the crisis facing boys and men have been relentless in recent weeks, as the Netflix drama Adolescence has sparked conversations from the school gates to the Houses of Parliament.
But while public debate has focused on the crisis facing boys, a series of less remarked upon statistics suggest that girls are far from being the winners of a zero-sum game. The Children’s Commissioner for England told the Guardian this week that the current debate risked pitting boys and girls against each other – to the detriment of both.
“This is an optimistic generation, eager for change – but both boys and girls are facing pressures and influences that previous generations never imagined,” said Rachel de Souza. “We can’t pit boys against girls, because these are shared issues for every child.”
Last month a report from the Centre for Social Justice argued that the last 100 years had “been marked by great leaps forward in outcomes and rights for women” but in this generation “it is boys who are being left behind”. The Lost Boys report noted that in education girls were outperforming boys “from nursery to university”, while men aged 16-24 were more likely to be unemployed than young women, and if in full-time work, paid on average 9% less.
Yet men are still more likely to be paid significantly more over their working lives, with their earnings “almost completely unaffected by parenthood”, according to analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It showed that women’s earnings fell sharply after they have children and stabilised at a much lower level with little growth – seven years after the birth of a first child, women’s earnings are on average less than half of men’s.
In terms of education, girls in England say they feel less safe at school and are more disenchanted, according to research published last week. Research from the University of Manchester published last month asked teenage girls about their experiences of school and found that outperforming came with its own pitfalls. “On the narrative that girls are always outperforming boys, some of them said, ‘Well, that’s quite a lot of pressure, actually’,” said the report author, Dr Ola Demkowicz. “‘There’s this assumption that we’re fine’.”
And current research suggests that is far from the case. While there is a widely recognised mental health crisis among all young people – a study published in the Lancet earlier this year revealed that the number of children admitted to acute hospital wards in England with serious mental health concerns has increased by 65% in a decade – other research suggests girls are particularly hard hit.
Recent data from a Europe-wide study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggested that English girls are the sickest and unhappiest in Europe. Almost two-thirds of 11-year-old English girls – more than in any other European country – reported having multiple health issues at least twice a week, while also experiencing the poorest mental health in all of the 44 countries examined. This chimed with a report last year from the Children’s Society, which found that 15-year-old girls’ average life satisfaction worsened between 2018 and 2022, while boys’ satisfaction remained largely the same.
It is a picture that Dr Elaine Lockhart, the chair of the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ child and adolescent faculty, recognises. “We’re absolutely running to try and catch up and not very successfully, unfortunately, because there is so much demand,” she said. “The girls we are seeing are the tip of the iceberg … behind them will be many more who will be sub-clinically anxious or sad.”
NHS numbers show a large increase in the number of girls admitted to hospital after self-harming, while annual admissions for eating disorders (which, according to NHS data, are four times more prevalent among 11- to 16-year-old girls than boys) also grew from 478 to 2,938 over the last decade.
“I would also say boys aren’t doing great either,” stressed Lockhart. “I wonder if part of this is that girls and women are more likely to present with emotional disorders and boys with behavioural problems – it is the same two sides of the same coin.”
Covid has undoubtedly had an impact on children and young people, while an increasing number of countries are taking action to limit the impact of potentially damaging online content on children’s mental health.
Children and teens were finding the normal challenges of growing up “totally distorted” by the pressures of social media, the rise of the influencer and the 24-hour nature of communication, said de Souza. “In many ways I’m worried that we’ve gone backwards as a society,” she said.
But wider social norms and outdated structural systems, such as parental leave entitlements, were letting both girls and boys down, said Joeli Brearley, a maternity discrimination campaigner and host of the To Be A Boy podcast. “Something is going badly wrong,” she said. “The old systems don’t stand any more, but this generation needs help and support to create a society that doesn’t leave them feeling like they are looking into the abyss.”
