How the world’s singular focus on girls is creating a generation of struggling men and why this affects everyone.
For decades, the international community has rightly championed girls’ education and women’s rights, achieving remarkable progress in closing historical gender gaps.
However, whilst celebrating these victories, the world has turned a blind eye to an emerging crisis: boys and men are now falling catastrophically behind across education, mental health, employment, and nearly every measure of wellbeing.
This isn’t merely a statistical curiosity it is a looming disaster that will reshape societies, economies, and families for generations to come.
The uncomfortable truth is that our singular focus on girls, whilst morally justified by history, has created new inequalities that threaten the very fabric of global development. Today, 139 million boys are out of school 6 million more than girls.
Men die by suicide at rates three to four times higher than women globally. Boys are 50% less likely than girls to meet basic proficiency in reading, maths, and science worldwide.
Yet these crises remain largely invisible, dismissed, or actively suppressed under the assumption that discussing men’s struggles somehow diminishes women’s issues.
This assumption is not only false but dangerously shortsighted. The boy crisis isn’t just about fairness it’s about the future stability and prosperity of our world.
The Education Emergency: Boys Are the New Disadvantaged Gender
The statistics are staggering and impossible to ignore. Globally, 139 million boys are out of school—more than half of the global out-of-school youth population and more than the 133 million girls who are also out of school. This represents a seismic shift that few policymakers have acknowledged.
In 57 countries with data on learning poverty (not being able to read and understand a straightforward text at age 10), 10-year-old boys fare worse than girls in mastering reading skills and adolescent boys continue to fall behind girls in reading. The gaps start early: in 23 of 25 countries with data for proficiency in reading at Grade 2/3, the proportion of girls achieving minimum proficiency in reading was higher than that of boys.
This is not confined to wealthy Western nations. Boys are more likely than girls to repeat primary grades in 130 countries, and more likely to not have an upper secondary education in 73 countries.
At the tertiary level, the reversal is stark: globally only 100 men are enrolled for every 114 women.
Yet despite these alarming figures, improving educational opportunities for girls continues to be of paramount importance if gender equality in and through education is to be achieved a statement that unconsciously reveals how deeply embedded our bias has become.
Why is girls’ education of “paramount importance” when boys are now the ones falling behind in most developed nations?
The causes are complex but identifiable. Gendered norms and expectations impact on boys’ motivation and desire to learn. In many contexts, school activities and certain subjects are considered at odds with expressions of masculinity, making education unpopular with boys. Economic pressure compounds the problem.
The cost of this educational failure extends far beyond individual boys. Poverty is also a main driver of boys’ disadvantages in education, creating a vicious cycle where poorly educated men struggle economically, perpetuating poverty into the next generation.
Crucially, educated men are more likely to treat women equally and support gender equality. Boys who complete secondary education are more likely to condemn gender-based violence. By neglecting boys’ education, we’re not only failing boys we are undermining the very gender equality we claim to champion.
The Mental Health Catastrophe: Men Are Dying in Silence
If a disease killed men at rates three to four times higher than women, it would be declared a global health emergency. Yet male suicide which does exactly that is met with relative silence and minimal global action.
There were 39,282 men lost to suicide during 2022 in the United States, which is 3-4.5 times higher than women, depending on the age group, and nearly 80% of total suicides. This translates to approximately 100 men dying by suicide every single day in the United States alone. The tragedy extends globally, affecting every region and culture.
More than 6 million men in the U.S. suffer from depression every year. This contributes to the annual 1 trillion dollars in lost productivity across the globe due to depression and anxiety disorders.
Yet despite this staggering economic and human cost, the dialogue around men’s mental health remains largely silent.
The barriers men face in seeking help are numerous and deeply rooted. There are stereotypes of men to be strong, stoic, and self-reliant, even if it means ignoring serious mental health symptoms.
This often leads men to be reluctant to talk about their mental health, downplay symptoms, or develop unhealthy coping behaviours. The cultural conditioning is so pervasive that phrases like “man up” have become reflexive responses to male vulnerability.
Men report lower levels of life satisfaction than women, according to the government’s national wellbeing survey. Men are less likely to access psychological therapies than women: only 36% of referrals to NHS talking therapies are for men. This help-seeking gap has deadly consequences.
Even when men do seek help, the system often fails them. Data from Canada and the United States found that more than 60% of men who died by suicide had accessed mental health care services within the previous year.
The problem isn’t just that men don’t seek help it’s that when they do, healthcare providers may not recognise or appropriately treat male depression, which often manifests differently than female depression.
Research has shown that mental health providers may miss or misdiagnose psychological problems in men because of their own gender biases. They might believe that men simply need to “man up” and stop showing weakness, or that the symptoms they present are not consistent with diagnostic tools.
The very professionals trained to help are hampered by societal expectations of masculinity.
The cultural attitudes that prevent men from seeking help are reinforced at every level of society. Men’s mental health is a critical but often overlooked topic.
While mental health disorders are slightly more prevalent among women, men are less likely to seek treatment or receive a diagnosis. This disparity is largely due to social stigma, cultural pressures, and societal expectations for men to “man up” or “tough it out”.
The Employment and Purpose Crisis: Young Men Without Direction
Beyond formal statistics, young men around the world are facing a crisis of purpose and economic opportunity. The traditional pathways to manhood education leading to stable employment, marriage, and family formation are increasingly blocked for millions of young men.
The educational failures cascade into employment challenges. Without basic literacy and numeracy skills, boys who drop out of school face severely limited economic prospects. In an increasingly knowledge-based global economy, the lack of education is notjust a disadvantage it is often disqualifying.
The global economy loses about $1 trillion each year due to depression and anxiety, with men’s untreated mental health issues contributing substantially to this loss.
The economic implications extend beyond lost productivity. Young men without education or employment opportunities are more vulnerable to radicalisation, criminal activity, substance abuse, and violence.
Moreover, struggling men make poor partners and fathers, perpetuating cycles of disadvantage. Children growing up without involved fathers or with fathers struggling with mental health, unemployment, or addiction face significantly worse outcomes across virtually every measure.
The boy crisis isn’t just about today’s generation of men it is about the children they’ll raise and the societies they’ll shape.
Why the Silence? The Dangerous Politics of Male Disadvantage
The most puzzling aspect of the boy crisis is the deafening silence surrounding it. Any attempt to discuss boys’ educational struggles is often met with accusations of misogyny, derailing, or dismissed as “men’s rights activism” used as a slur.
The assumption is that focusing on male disadvantage must necessarily come at women’s expense.
This zero-sum thinking is both false and destructive. Ensuring access to quality education for all is not a zero-sum game. It is important to ensure that a focus on achieving gender parity and equality does not ignore boys. Supporting boys does not mean that girls lose out and vice-versa.
The reality is that helping boys helps everyone. Equal education opportunities benefit both boys and girls and broader society.
When boys succeed academically, they become healthier, more productive adults who earn more, contribute more to their communities, and crucially are more likely to support gender equality. Educational success for boys doesn’t threaten girls; it creates better partners, fathers, colleagues, and citizens.
The institutional framework of gender equality has been ideologically captured by a form of feminism that views gender issues exclusively through the lens of female disadvantage and male privilege. This framework cannot process male disadvantage without treating it as an exception, aberration, or somehow men’s own fault.
The Global Consequences: What Happens When We Ignore Half the Population
The consequences of neglecting boys and men extend far beyond individual suffering. They threaten the stability and prosperity of nations.
Economic Costs:When millions of young men fail educationally and economically, they cannot contribute productively. They cannot support families. They cannot pay taxes. They require social services.
The economic loss is measured not just in immediate productivity but in the unrealised potential of millions of human beings.
Social Instability: Young men who feel abandoned by society, who see no path forward, who watch opportunities flow to others whilst their own prospects dim these men become vulnerable to extremism, whether political, religious, or ideological.
The rise of various angry male-dominated movements globally is partly a response to legitimate male grievance, even when the proposed solutions are often destructive.
Family Breakdown: Struggling men make poor partners and fathers. When men cannot fulfil traditional provider roles or modern partnership roles, family formation declines. Birth rates plummet. Children suffer. Societies age and stagnate.
The Gender War: Perhaps most tragically, ignoring male suffering breeds resentment that poisons relations between the sexes. When boys see girls receiving targeted support whilst their own struggles are dismissed or mocked, it creates genuine grievance.
When young men are told that masculinity is toxic but offered nothing to replace traditional sources of meaning, they drift toward anger and alienation.
The Path Forward: True Equality Means Caring About Everyone
The solution is not to abandon support for girls and women. Historical inequalities still exist in many parts of the world, and continued vigilance is necessary. Rather, we must expand our conception of gender equality to include both sexes.
We need educational reforms that acknowledge boys’ learning styles and interests. We need male role models in teaching. We need to address the “school is for girls” culture that alienates boys. We need targeted support for boys in literacy from early grades. We need to address the economic pressures that pull boys out of school.
For mental health, we must destigmatise male help-seeking behaviour. We need male-friendly mental health services. We need to train healthcare providers to recognise male depression.
We need to invest in suicide prevention specifically targeted at men. We need to address the social isolation many men experience.
Most fundamentally, we need to reframe gender equality itself. True equality means recognising disadvantages affecting both sexes and providing support based on need, not gender ideology.
It means measuring outcomes, not just opportunities. It means rejecting zero-sum thinking. It means celebrating success for all children, regardless of gender.
Conclusion: The Moral Imperative to Act Now
Every boy who drops out of school, every man who dies by suicide, every young man who drifts into purposelessness and despair these are preventable tragedies. They represent human potential destroyed, families devastated, and society diminished.
The data is unambiguous: in education, mental health, and multiple other domains, boys and men are falling behind catastrophically.
We can address male disadvantage whilst continuing to support girls and women. These are not competing interests but complementary ones.
The question is no longer whether boys and men face serious disadvantages. The data answers that question definitively: they do. The question is whether we care enough to acknowledge it and act.
The future of our world the stability of our societies, the strength of our economies, the happiness of our families depends on how we answer.
The time for silence has passed. The boy crisis is real, it is growing, and it will shape our collective future whether we acknowledge it or not.
The only question is whether we will face it with courage and compassion or continue to ignore half the human population until the consequences become impossible to deny.