Of Boys and Men (Richard V. Reeves, 2022)

What it is

Of Boys and Men is Richard V. Reeves's 2022 study of male disadvantage, published by Swift Press in the UK and the Brookings Institution Press in the US. Drawing on labour-market and education data, it argues that structural shifts — automation, the decline of manual work, and women's rapid advancement — have left many men behind, with boys underperforming girls at school, Black men disproportionately affected by higher incarceration rates, and men without degrees facing falling wages and increased family disruption. ^[1]

What it gets right

The book's discipline is its virtue: it treats male struggle as a policy problem rather than a grievance, and pointedly refuses to blame feminism or women's gains for men's difficulties. Several of its headline claims are well supported. Boys' academic lag is real — see do boys fall behind in school? and the reading-gap evidence in NCES reading performance — and the widening degree gap is documented in do women now outnumber men in college? and AIBM's "Degrees of Difference".

Where it needs care

Reeves is scrupulous, but the book is often cited to support stronger conclusions than its evidence carries. On suicide, for example, the male rate is genuinely higher, yet the flat framing that the issue is simply "ignored" is more contested than it sounds — see is male suicide ignored? and NIMH suicide statistics. And its sober diagnosis is frequently repackaged by online communities into the harder rhetoric of male disposability, a framing Reeves himself does not endorse.

Verdict

The most credible mainstream entry point to the male-disadvantage debate — best for readers who want the data without the ideology, provided its individual claims are checked against the evidence rather than accepted as a settled whole.