Written by Hana Reid
“Guys know that if they sit back and relax, something will get done by someone else,” one high schooler told Education Week when asked why boys avoid leadership roles. Brutal. But also: exactly.
The internet is drowning in think pieces about young men in crisis, boys falling behind, girls surging ahead. Claire Cain Miller said in The New York Times: “School has changed in ways that favor girls, and work has changed in ways that favor women.” At first glance, the numbers look grim for boys: women now outpace men in high school, college, and early employment. The narrative is simple – girls are winning, boys are drowning.
But if you look past the headlines, the truth tells a different story: women’s wages are “rising faster” only because they’re still fighting to catch up. They dominate many low-paid sectors, and even when they outperform men academically, they still earn less once they enter the workforce. Working women in the UK do 50 hours per month more domestic labour than men, with mothers earning £302 less than fathers per week. Even female breadwinners usually take on the heavier domestic labour; one study found 45% do the majority of home/caring work. Even when women negotiate just as much for higher salaries, the odds are against them. Promotion? Recognition? Equal pay? Not a given. This doesn’t look like women “winning”. It looks like women are carrying not just professional loads, but invisible burdens society refuses to acknowledge.
Meanwhile, men’s workforce participation has slipped since the ’70s, but fewer full-time working men also means more men are choosing caregiving roles. About 20% of stay-at-home parents in the U.S. are now dads, double the rate in 1989. That’s not collapse. That’s change. Why do we treat men choosing the home front as a crisis instead of progress?
Economic shifts tell a more complete story. Many manual labour jobs once held by men have disappeared. Service-sector roles – traditionally female – have boomed. Gen Z women now make up 53% of their generation in the workforce, but a lot of that work is part-time or lower paid, while men often hold out for higher status or pay. So yes, women are working more, but working more for less money, power, and recognition.
In education, similar patterns emerge: women account for 57% of higher education. Rather than ask why boys might be checking out, we label education “girly”, “woke”, and “emasculating”. The tempting, faster-reward path? Hustle bros on YouTube selling alpha energy and dominance without discipline.
This is gender flight theory in action: when women start showing up in spaces of power or prestige, many men abandon them. Once women dominate a field or institution, it loses prestige and perceived value, and salaries decrease. That pattern shows up everywhere, from medicine and education to tech. Prestige is hoarded, then dismissed as “overrun”.
Powerful, perhaps overcompensating, Mark Zuckerberg has griped about the lack of “masculine energy” in the corporate world. Similarly, Donald Trump has said America has become “too feminised”. These aren’t neutral observations – they’re dog whistles. They shift the blame for the outcomes of patriarchal leadership styles onto women’s progress rather than systemic inequality, bias, or power-hoarding.
Women often feel they have to be more qualified just to be taken seriously, but it’s not just a feeling. Studies show that women are hired based on experience and evidence, whilst men are hired based on potential. Even to be hired, you need to be called back after submitting your resume, and with a woman’s name, that’s 30% less likely.
If girls are really “doing so much better”, why doesn’t it translate into power, pay, or investment? When women do get to the C-suite, female founders and female-led startups often receive less funding, are penalized more harshly for failures, and on average have lower valuations, even when they generate better returns.
This is an expression of the “prove-it-again” phenomenon: the expectation that marginalized groups (women, Global Majority people) must continuously prove their competence, while default trust is afforded to men. These dynamics are structural: bias in evaluation, in networks, in investment, in promotion.So yes, men face challenges. But the system still stacks the deck in ways that “privilege” them – often invisibly – while women must play by different, harsher rules.
