Young Men Aren’t the Only Ones Struggling
On a sunny Monday last November, I filed into a single large room in Washington, D.C. There I saw a crowd of older white men, wearing crisp suits and shaking hands; a few women were sprinkled among them. This was the Symposium on Young American Men, where politicians, researchers, nonprofit leaders, higher-education administrators, and journalists had gathered to discuss what they agreed was a troubled and downtrodden population. The question was what to do about it.
The plight of young men has, for some years now, been a cause of public concern; recently the din of alarm bells seems louder than ever. Men are attending and graduating from college at rates lower than in the past—and lower than women. Large shares of working-age men, especially young ones, are unemployed. Jarring numbers are dying “deaths of despair,” a term coined by the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to describe mortality due to suicide, overdose, or alcoholic liver disease. In response, a mini-industry of experts has sought to explain what’s going on: Richard V. Reeves, a social scientist and the author of Of Boys and Men, created the think tank the American Institute for Boys and Men. The New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway wrote the book Notes on Being a Man and on podcasts speaks regularly about modern manhood. Along with an abundance of other commentators, they’ve lamented that men have lost their sense of purpose and identity: With the decline of manufacturing and other male-dominated industries, the rise of “toxic masculinity” critiques, and the difficulty of being a breadwinner when everything costs so much, they argue, young men no longer know how to behave or what to reach for.
By many measures, they’re right. Young men, as a population, are struggling more than they used to. But sometimes that point gets twisted into a different argument: that young men are struggling more than young women. Women tend to be present only as a comparison; they’re the ones who are more likely to attend college or to lean on close friends, less likely to depend on drugs or alcohol or drop out of high school. They’re symbols of success, used to make a point. The problem is that, in a number of ways, young women are actually doing worse than men. That this fact has been obscured—that women themselves have been obscured in this conversation—says a lot about who gets prioritized in American culture, and how misguided our understanding of human flourishing is in the first place.
First, consider some facts. Women have long been more likely than men to report experiencing depression and anxiety. That gap, though it could be attributed partly to differences in how likely men and women are to admit their symptoms in studies, has remained persistent and pronounced. And more recently, those rates have been climbing for women, in the United States and elsewhere. In one 2024 study, researchers found that across 34 countries and several different measures of well-being—including fear and anxiety, suicidality, and feelings of overwhelm—mental health was worse for women than for men. And although more men than women die by suicide, women are significantly more likely to attempt it. The discrepancy comes in large part from men being likelier to choose more lethal means, such as firearms. At one point in the Symposium on Young American Men, one of the few female panelists named a statistic about suicidal thoughts among young men—then, as if in parentheses, added that the rate was even higher for women. The comment hung in the air. But the speaker, and the conference, moved on.
[Read: Are young men really becoming more sexist?]
The idea that women are thriving, at least relative to men, seems to stem largely from their academic dominance: In a 2024 analysis, Pew Research Center found that 47 percent of women have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37 percent of men. The gap is referenced in pretty much any conversation about the “crisis of masculinity.” But all that striving for accomplishment may cost women a great deal. When researchers with the Harvard Graduate School of Education surveyed roughly 700 adults ages 18 to 25 in 2022, they found that women were significantly more likely to report dealing with achievement pressure; more than 60 percent of female respondents said the weight of that pressure was negatively affecting them. Women also happen to hold about two-thirds of America’s student-loan debt.
That effort and expense doesn’t always pay off. A woman with a bachelor’s degree earns about the same, on average, as a man with an associate’s degree; a man with a bachelor’s degree makes more on average than a woman with the same education level, even within the same field of study. Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist specializing in young adulthood and the author of The Twentysomething Treatment, told me that a lot of her female clients work themselves ragged in college, expecting that it will translate into career success—but when they arrive in the workforce, it’s “a little bit of an unwelcome shock.” These women look around in their companies and see that men occupy most of the leadership positions, or begin to realize that the high-paying fields are the male-dominated ones. She mentioned one woman who decided to go to graduate school because she believed that it was the only place where women could be on equal footing with men. “She’s hoping to kind of take shelter in that,” Jay told me. But most people can’t stay in school forever.
[Read: What Black Swan Knew About Leaning In]
Young adulthood tends to be a difficult period regardless of gender. It’s a time of great uncertainty and high stakes, when people undergo a ton of change and are tasked with building a meaningful life from the ground up. And modern life—complete with an affordable-housing shortage, a harrowing job market, and collapsing social trust—doesn’t make growing up any easier. But in many ways, the world today is especially hostile to women. Manosphere influencers and politicians alike are exploiting young men’s vulnerability, stirring resentment against women. Gen Z men are less likely than their grandfathers to say they support gender equality. The constitutional right to an abortion is gone, and funding cuts have further weakened access to reproductive health care. Meika Loe, a Colgate University sociology professor, told me that many of her female students are grieving the loss of bodily autonomy. “Their generation grew up watching The Handmaid’s Tale, maybe reading it,” she said. “But now they’re living it.” In a Gallup poll last year, 40 percent of U.S. female participants ages 15 to 44 said they would move abroad permanently if given the chance—a number four times higher than in 2014, and more than double the share of male respondents who said the same. Participants were especially likely to dream of migration if they had low confidence in institutions such as the national government, the military, and honest elections, or if they disapproved of current political leadership.
[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]
A lot of today’s young women were told as little girls that they could do anything they set their mind to. Then they entered adulthood just in time to witness a backlash to the idea of their equal worth, to see the promise of power recede right when they reached for it. Many people—even critics of the man panic—seem to assume that men are the only ones struggling to know their role in the world. In a November New Yorker article, Jessica Winter argued that women don’t have the luxury to sit around worrying about their gender’s unique purpose, the way men longing for positive models of masculinity supposedly do. “What a gift it is, really, to have no choice in the matter,” she wrote archly. “To have to move out of your parents’ house, to show up for your shift, to change the diaper, not because any of it is gender-affirming but because life is full of tasks that need doing, and you are the person who does them. At least then you know who you are.” But just as the culture’s understanding of manhood has shifted, so too have ideas about womanhood—which of course influences the way young women see themselves.
Many of them are trying to understand whether they’re expected to be a CEO or a mother of five, whether they’re valued for their thoughts or their looks or their ability to support a husband. “That’s just the way young adult minds work,” Jay told me: People this age tend to think about what others believe they should do rather than what’s really right for them. (The latter, after all, isn’t totally clear yet.) One of Jay’s therapy clients went to an Ivy League college, but now she’s struggling to find a job—and feeling like the successful women around her aren’t the highly educated ones but the tradwives and beauty influencers. “Why did I work so hard in school,” Jay said her client wonders, “if this is what people want for me?” Many of the young women she speaks with don’t know what to prioritize: “hitting the gas pedal at work” or becoming a mom. Often they feel alone in these decisions; the men around them aren’t pushed to think about how grueling it would be to balance work and family life.
What young women are going through, then, is an identity crisis. It’s also a mental-health crisis. But it’s not typically recognized as any kind of crisis at all, perhaps because it’s a quieter one: This population, overall, may not be happy, but it’s a high-functioning one and therefore easier to ignore. Loe trained as a medical sociologist, and she recalled a saying: Men die quicker, but women are sicker. Women are more likely to endure many chronic illnesses and to soldier on with their pain unnoticed. Or maybe their turmoil isn’t all that quiet. Perhaps American society is simply more tolerant of women suffering because they always have.
Hardship shouldn’t be a competition. Well-being is not a zero-sum game for men and women, Sarah C. Narendorf, a social-work professor at NYU, told me; everyone would benefit from letting go of strict, traditionalist ideas about masculinity. Take, for instance, the notion that men need to be sturdy, stoic protectors, responsible for feeding a family but assumed incapable of carework, play, or tenderness. Some figures in the men’s movement have challenged that idea. Reeves has encouraged young men to go into more traditionally feminized fields such as teaching or nursing; to spend more time with their children; to model a “prosocial” version of masculinity.
But plenty of other pundits want men to find meaning in the same places that they used to: in the military, church, or fraternities; as breadwinners, which a growing share of men can’t afford to be; as patriarchs asserting their supremacy over women. At the symposium on young men last fall, I heard a lot of talk about how to reconnect men to traditional sources of discipline or community. Of 35 speakers, five were representing fraternities or related organizations—they outnumbered the legislators. But even in the one segment on “What Policymakers Can Do,” panelists seemed hesitant to suggest any structural changes. “I’m a limited-government guy,” one equivocated when my colleague McKay Coppins, the moderator, asked what single policy the speakers would choose to institute to help young men. Another meandered through a response about the importance of “narrative shift.”
Moderating a different panel, Kathryn Jean Lopez, a National Review editor at large, told a story about a mom taking her son to an amusement park. The boy said he didn’t want to go on one of the rides, but when they got back to the car, he began to cry, saying his father would have made him get on. Lopez’s conclusion was that “men and women are different”—that a father figure would have offered the kind of tough-love push a mother never could. And she wanted men to know: “We need you.”
Her anecdote was a microcosm of a stubbornly persistent mindset: that men are meant to be tough, that boys run off course when that quality is not instilled in them, that women exist in an entirely separate lane. All I could think about, walking back to my hotel later in the dimming light, was the bizarre idea of forcing a frightened little boy onto a roller coaster—and the sad fact that a movement meant to find a way forward is replicating so many of the patterns that have gotten us here in the first place.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.