The Missing Script

Are young men lost because the world no longer tells them what they are for? What the data on school, work, love, health and votes show, where the story holds, and where it does not.

Essay · society · October 2026

“Boys are suffering, in the modern world,” Jordan Peterson wrote in 2018, in the chapter of 12 Rules for Life that ends with his best-known line: “And if you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.”[1] The Canadian psychologist became famous for telling young men that what they lacked was not rights or opportunities but a reason to grow up, and that the reason was responsibility. A man who stands up straight, he wrote, accepts “the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.” His critics heard nostalgia for an old order. His audience, which he himself put at about 80 per cent male on YouTube, heard someone who had noticed them.[2]

Four years later Richard Reeves, a British-American economist with none of Peterson’s taste for myth, published Of Boys and Men, and reached a similar diagnosis by another route. In the words of the book’s own description, “the male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges”: boys fall behind at school, men without degrees have lost the jobs that once made them good providers, and fathers are “dislocated because the cultural role of family provider has been hollowed out.”[3] In 2023 he founded the American Institute for Boys and Men to work on it.

Young men themselves seem to agree that something has shifted. In a YouGov survey of 2,000 American men aged 18 to 29, carried out in April 2025 for the Institute for Family Studies, a socially conservative think tank, 73 per cent agreed that it is “harder to know what it means to be a man today than it was 20 to 30 years ago.”[4]

Behind the debate are three different claims, and they need different evidence. The first is that young men are falling behind: in school, in work, in forming families, in health. That can be measured. The second is that they feel lost about what a man is for. That can be asked about, less precisely. The third is about causes and cures: that they are lost because the old role was taken away and nothing replaced it, and that the answer is to give it back in some form. That is the part people fight about. This essay takes them in order, with Portugal beside the United States, where most of the debate is conducted, and the European Union.

35%of Portuguese men aged 25–34 have a degree, against 51% of women their age (2025)

4.8×the suicide rate of young Portuguese men aged 15–29 compared with young women (2023)

2×as many American schoolgirls as schoolboys report persistent sadness (2025)

73%of American men aged 18–29 say it is harder to know what being a man means than 20–30 years ago

School

The gap that opened in the classroom

The clearest evidence is in education, and it is not new. In the OECD’s PISA tests of 15-year-olds, girls read better than boys in every participating country. In the 2025 round, published in September 2026, the gap in Portugal was 33 points, against 30 on the OECD average; boys were ahead in mathematics by 11 points in Portugal and 13 on average, a smaller lead.[5] Boys are also more likely to leave school early: in 2025, 7.6 per cent of Portuguese men aged 18 to 24 had left education and training with no more than lower secondary schooling, against 4.5 per cent of women; across the EU, 10.6 against 7.5.[6]

The gap widens at university. Women were 58 per cent of new graduates in the EU and in Portugal in 2024. Among Portuguese aged 25 to 34, 50.7 per cent of women had a degree in 2025 and 34.6 per cent of men, a gap of sixteen points; the EU average is 50.5 against 39.3.[6] In the United States, 45 per cent of women aged 25 to 29 had a bachelor’s degree in 2023 and 36 per cent of men; in 1970 the advantage ran the other way.[7] Reeves counts two-thirds of American ninth-graders in the bottom tenth of school grades as boys, and two-thirds in the top tenth as girls.[8] What Schooling Bought followed what Portugal’s great expansion of education did for pay and productivity; one of its quieter results is that the expansion was led by women.

Whether this is a problem depends on what is compared with what. For most of history the gap ran the other way, and part of the change is simply girls catching up and then overtaking once doors were opened. But the male shortfall is not only the mirror of female progress: boys’ reading has not risen to meet girls’, and early leaving still costs those who leave for the rest of their working lives.

Work

Work: an American story more than a European one

The second part of the argument is about work, and here the picture depends on the country. In the United States the decline is long and real: in 1960, 97 per cent of men aged 25 to 54 were working or looking for work; in 2020, 87.9 per cent. It has since recovered a little, to 89.5 per cent in September 2026.[9] For men without a degree the fall in earnings is starker. David Autor of MIT found that, for full-time male workers without a bachelor’s degree, “real weekly earnings ... in 2018 were 10 to 20 log points below their real levels in 1980”, roughly 10 to 18 per cent less, after inflation, four decades later.[10] The jobs that disappeared, in factories, mines and warehouses, were jobs that paid a man without schooling enough to support a family.[a]

In Europe, and in Portugal in particular, the data do not show young men dropping out of work. In 2025, 80.2 per cent of EU men aged 25 to 29 were employed, against 73.4 per cent of women; in Portugal the two rates were level, 82.5 per cent for men and 83.0 for women. The share of young people neither in work nor in education or training, the so-called NEETs, is higher among young women than young men across the EU, 12.1 against 10.0 per cent, mostly because of care; in Portugal it is about the same for both, around 8 per cent. What differs is the reason: young men who are NEET are more often unemployed, young women more often outside the labour market altogether.[11] Young Portuguese of both sexes have answered a weak labour market less by staying idle than by leaving: The Leavers counted the cost of that.

Figure 1 puts seven indicators side by side, for Portugal and the EU, as the ratio of young men’s rate to young women’s. On education the men are behind, and on employment they are not; on living with their parents and, most of all, on violent death, they stand out.

Fig. 1 — Young men’s rate divided by young women’s, logarithmic scale; to the right of “same”, men’s rate is higher. For “has a degree” and “in work” a higher rate is good; for the rest it is bad. Early leavers: aged 18–24 with at most lower secondary education and not in education or training. Suicide and road deaths: crude rates per 100,000, 2023; other indicators 2025. Sources: Eurostat, edat_lfse_14, edat_lfse_03, lfsa_ergan, edat_lfse_20, ilc_lvps08 and hlth_cd_acdr2, retrieved 27 October 2026; own calculations in scripts/young_men.py.

Home

The provider without a wage

The link between work and the role that Reeves and Peterson worry about is marriage. The best evidence comes from the economists David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, who followed what happened to American towns when Chinese imports wiped out their factories between 1990 and 2014. In their words, the shocks “differentially reduce employment and earnings, raise the prevalence of idleness, and elevate premature mortality among young males”; and because they lowered men’s earnings relative to women’s, they also reduced marriage and births, and raised “the share of mothers who are unwed and share of children living in below-poverty, single-headed households.”[12] The title of their paper names the mechanism: the falling marriage-market value of young men. Where a man’s value as a partner had rested on a wage, losing the wage lowered it.

Young European men also leave home later than young women. In 2025, 46.6 per cent of Portuguese men aged 25 to 34 lived with their parents, against 37.4 per cent of women; in the EU the figures were 35.6 and 24.3.[13] Part of the gap is that women tend to partner with somewhat older men, and so set up house earlier; part is housing, which in Portugal keeps both sexes at home far longer than in the north of Europe, the subject of The Rent.

In the United States, the Pew Research Center found in 2022 that 63 per cent of men under 30 described themselves as single, against 34 per cent of women the same age.[14] The figure is often repeated as if it meant that most young men have no sex; it measures self-described relationship status, and the difference between the sexes is partly the age gap in couples. A separate measure from the US General Social Survey does show a rise in sexlessness among the youngest men: the share of men aged 18 to 24 who reported no sex in the past year went from 18.9 per cent in 2000–02 to 30.9 per cent in 2016–18, while the change among women of that age was not statistically significant.[15] Fewer Than Wanted showed that Portuguese women end up with fewer children than they wanted, and that the stable partner and the stable job usually come before the child; these trends among men are the other half of the same story.

Deaths

Women report, men die

The starkest figures are about death. In 2023, 76 per cent of the 48,370 people who took their own lives in the EU were men.[16] Among people aged 15 to 29, the male rate was 2.9 times the female rate in the EU and 4.8 times in Portugal, where 7.7 young men per 100,000 died by suicide, against 1.6 young women. Two things qualify the headline. The male suicide rate peaks in middle age, between 45 and 64, not in youth; and youth suicide in the EU is falling, with 20 per cent fewer deaths among 15-to-29-year-olds in 2022 than in 2011. And in Portugal the larger excess risk for young men is not suicide but the road: 14.4 young men per 100,000 were killed in transport accidents in 2023, against 2.3 young women, and against 9.1 young men on average in the EU.[16] In the United States, men died of drug overdoses at 2.3 times the rate of women in 2024.[17]

Surveys of how young people feel give the opposite picture. In the American Youth Risk Behavior Survey, the share of high-school girls who reported persistent sadness or hopelessness rose from 39 per cent in 2013 to 57 per cent in 2021, and then fell to 43 per cent in 2025; among boys it went from 21 to 29 and back to 24 (Figure 2). Girls also report about twice as many suicide attempts.[18] In Europe, 28 per cent of 15-year-old girls said in 2022 that they felt lonely most or all of the time, against 13 per cent of boys.[19] Psychiatrists call this the gender paradox of suicide: young women report more distress and make more attempts; young men use more lethal means, take more risks and seek less help, and die more often.

Fig. 2 — United States: share of high-school students who felt sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more in a row in the past year, so that they stopped some usual activities. The dashed segment joins 2013 and 2021; the survey ran every two years in between, but those years are not shown by sex here. Sources: CDC, YRBS Data Summary & Trends Report 2013–2023; MMWR Supplements 73(4), 2024, and 75, 2026.

The best-known study of what is killing men without prospects is less male than its use suggests. Anne Case and Angus Deaton named the rise in American deaths from overdoses, alcohol and suicide “deaths of despair”, and found that it “fell almost exclusively on prime-aged adults without a four-year college degree.” Men die more often from these causes, but, Case has written, “the increases for women have kept pace, year after year for the last quarter century.”[20] Their dividing line is the degree, not sex.

Loneliness

Fewer friends, mostly in America

The loneliness of young men has become a theme of its own. In 2021 the Survey Center on American Life found that 15 per cent of American men had no close friends, which it described as “a fivefold increase since 1990”, and that the share of men with six or more close friends had halved, from 55 to 27 per cent. The figure is for men of all ages; the 1990 survey was by telephone and the 2021 one was not, which the Center itself notes may matter; and women’s friendships shrank almost as much, from 41 to 24 per cent with six or more.[21] Equimundo, an organisation that campaigns for gender equality, found in 2023 that 65 per cent of American men aged 18 to 23 agreed that “no one really knows me well”, in an online panel whose other figures run high.[22]

The international comparison is more revealing. Gallup asked people in 2023 and 2024 whether they had felt lonely “a lot of the previous day”. Among American men aged 15 to 34, 25 per cent said yes, more than young American women (18 per cent) and other American adults (17); only young men in Türkiye scored higher among OECD countries. But the OECD median for young men was 15 per cent, slightly below the 16 per cent for all adults (Figure 3).[23] The EU’s own loneliness survey in 2022 found no statistically significant difference between men and women within age groups, and loneliness falling with age.[24] Young men being especially lonely is, on this evidence, a feature of a few countries, led by the United States, more than of young men in rich countries in general.

Fig. 3 — Share who said they felt loneliness “a lot of the previous day”, Gallup World Poll, 2023 and 2024 pooled; young people are aged 15–34. The countries shown are those Gallup names; about 1,000 people are interviewed per country each year, so the figures for one sex and age group have wide margins of error. Portugal is not reported separately. Source: B. Vigers, Gallup, 20 May 2025.

Votes

A divide that is mostly women moving

In January 2024 John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times drew charts that went round the world: in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Korea, young women had become far more progressive than young men of their age. The countries were compared on different measures, from self-placement on a left-right scale to attitudes to immigration and to gender roles.[25] Gallup’s own figures for the United States show where the movement came from. The share of women aged 18 to 29 who called themselves liberal rose from 28 per cent in 2001–07 to 40 per cent in 2017–24; among young men it stayed at about a quarter (Figure 4).[26] Using a much larger election survey, a researcher at Berkeley found the American gap among the young at about 7 to 10 points and not growing up to 2022.[25]

Fig. 4 — Share of Americans aged 18–29 who describe their political views as liberal, averages of Gallup surveys in each period. Source: L. Saad, J. M. Jones and A. Fioroni, Gallup, 12 September 2024.

In Portugal, an exit poll of the May 2025 election gave Chega 27 per cent of men’s votes and 20 per cent of women’s, and 27 per cent of voters aged 18 to 24, second only to the AD coalition; the Catholic University’s exit poll for RTP found that Chega came first among voters aged 25 to 44. No published poll gives a figure for young men specifically, and a pre-election survey by ICS/ISCTE found the party’s supporters evenly divided between the sexes, which counsels caution about reading the national vote as a revolt of young men.[27] Fora do Arco looked at why parties outside the old consensus grow, and found the economic and cultural explanations hard to separate.[b]

The role

What a man is for

So far, the measurements. The claim that young men are disoriented, rather than merely behind, rests on something harder to measure: an expectation that has outlived the conditions that made it achievable. Americans still expect men to provide. In a 2017 Pew survey, 71 per cent said it was very important for a man to be able to support a family financially in order to be a good husband or partner, against 32 per cent who said the same of a woman; among adults under 30, 64 per cent still said so of men. Three in four said men face a lot of pressure to support their families.[28] If a role is defined by an income, and the income is no longer within reach of many men without a degree, the role becomes harder to fill, and the people it was written for are left without a script.

The psychology of manhood suggests why that might hurt men more than a parallel loss would hurt women. In a set of experiments published in 2008, Joseph Vandello, Jennifer Bosson and colleagues found that people see manhood as “a precarious state requiring continual social proof and validation”, something earned and easily lost, while womanhood is seen as given. When men in their experiments were given feedback that cast doubt on their manhood, they reported feeling threatened, and in one study had more aggressive thoughts; women given the equivalent feedback about their womanhood did not react.[29] A follow-up in 62 countries, with 33,417 university students, found that beliefs that manhood is precarious are held everywhere, more strongly where gender equality and human development are lower.[30] What these studies measure is a belief about manhood, not a feeling of being lost; but they show that the belief exists, and that it can make a man who cannot prove himself feel diminished.

Young men’s own answers are mixed in an instructive way. In the same YouGov survey in which 73 per cent of young American men said it is harder to know what being a man means, 89 per cent agreed that “being a man requires a willingness to sacrifice for others”, and 85 per cent that manhood “involves strength, responsibility, and leadership”. Only 32 per cent wanted a family in which the man is the main breadwinner.[4] The values are not missing. What seems uncertain is how to live them when the old way of proving them, a wage that keeps a family, is less available and less expected.

That is close to Peterson’s case, in his own terms. His answer to the young man without a script is to write one through responsibility: take on a burden, care for others, become someone with “something to offer”, as he put it in a television interview in 2018.[2] In 12 Rules for Life he connects the toughening of men to politics: “Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it”, he wrote, in a passage that links the support for Donald Trump and the rise of far-right parties to the same process.[1] Reeves agrees about responsibility but puts the cause in structures rather than in culture or character, and wants the definition of providing widened rather than restored: in his words in a 2024 interview, “I switched the idea of provider away from purely money to providing support and time and energy and love.”[31]

The objection

Or perhaps the script is the problem

The strongest reply comes from the psychology of masculinity itself. Since Joseph Pleck’s The Myth of Masculinity in 1981, a school of psychologists has argued that what harms men is not the loss of traditional roles but the strain of living up to them: the distress of falling short of an ideal, the damage done by meeting it, and the cost of being raised to it.[32] The evidence for that is real if modest. A 2017 meta-analysis by Joel Wong and colleagues, pooling 78 samples with 19,453 people, found that men who conform more to traditional masculine norms have, on average, somewhat worse mental health, and are considerably less likely to seek psychological help. The norms that did most harm were self-reliance, power over women and sexual promiscuity; the “primacy of work”, the provider norm, was not related to any mental-health outcome.[33]

This view shaped the American Psychological Association’s first guidelines for work with boys and men, approved in August 2018, which described traditional masculinity ideology as “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence”, and said socialisation into it had been shown to “limit males’ psychological development” and “negatively influence mental health”. The furore that followed in January 2019, which Peterson’s audience joined, was mostly about a phrase, that traditional masculinity “is, on the whole, harmful”. That phrase is not in the guidelines; it comes from an article about them in the association’s magazine.[34]

The language itself divides the young. In a 2023 survey for King’s College London, 37 per cent of British men aged 16 to 29 found the term “toxic masculinity” unhelpful, against 19 per cent of women their age; 16 per cent of the young men thought feminism had done more harm than good, against 9 per cent of the young women.[35] Each side of the debate tends to see the other’s vocabulary as part of the problem.

There are other candidates for the cause. Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) blames smartphones and social media for the rise in adolescent distress, and argues that boys have withdrawn from the physical world into games and pornography. The psychologist Candice Odgers replied in Nature that the search for large effects “produced a mix of no, small and mixed associations”, and that most of the data are correlational.[36] The economic explanation, from Autor’s work, makes class rather than sex the main dividing line, and Case and Deaton’s evidence points the same way. And there is the history: the American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. published an essay called “The Crisis of American Masculinity” in Esquire in 1958, and the sociologist Michael Kimmel traced similar alarms back to the 1890s.[37] That a crisis has been announced before does not mean there is none now; it means the feeling that men have lost their place recurs, and is not by itself evidence.

Remedies

What has been proposed

The proposals divide along the same lines as the diagnosis. Peterson’s are personal: order your own life first, take on responsibility, aim at something worthwhile. They are not policies, and they cannot be tested as policies, though many young men say they found them useful.

Reeves’s are structural. The best known is to let boys start school later. In 2022 he argued that boys should start “a year later than girls, on the grounds that on average they mature more slowly”; by 2024, after a published exchange with a critic, the economist Diane Schanzenbach, he had cut the proposal to six months, citing larger benefits for the youngest boys.[38] A large Florida study found that being older at school entry raises test scores by similar amounts for boys and girls, which weakens the case for treating the sexes differently, though Reeves now leans on gaps in behaviour rather than test scores.[39] The conservative scholar Scott Winship, in a sympathetic review, noted that Reeves himself acknowledges “we don’t know whether redshirting would work.”[8] His other main proposal is to bring men into what he calls HEAL jobs, health, education and literacy, which are growing and in which men are fewer than three in ten workers.[40] Others propose more male teachers, more vocational schooling, or simply the economic remedies of The Floor: better pay for the jobs that men without degrees still do.

One thing the remedies have in common is that they are about the young men who are struggling, not about young men in general. On pay, the American and British data show that the gap between young men and young women has nearly closed, but not reversed: American women aged 25 to 34 earned 95 cents per male dollar in 2024, and British women of 22 to 29 working full time earned 0.9 per cent less than men in 2025.[41] Most young men are doing well. The ones who are not are concentrated among those who left school early and found no secure work.

Coda

What the evidence says

On the first claim, that young men are falling behind, the evidence is strong in school, everywhere; strong for work and earnings in the United States, for men without degrees; and weak for work in Portugal, where young men and women are employed at the same rate. On health it depends on the measure: young men die far more often, by suicide and on the roads, while young women report more distress. Loneliness among young men is a real finding for the United States, not a general one.

On the second claim, that they feel lost about their role, the best survey says that most young American men find manhood harder to define than it was, while holding on firmly to the values it used to stand for. That fits the idea of a script that no longer matches the stage better than the idea of men without values. There is no comparable survey for Portugal.

On the third, the causes and cures, the honest answer is that both sides are partly right. Peterson and Reeves are right that something specific to men is happening, that it is concentrated among those without degrees, and that it has a cost, in deaths, in schooling not finished and in families not formed. Their critics are right that the parts of traditional masculinity that do the most damage, self-reliance and dominance, are not the ones worth restoring, that women carry their own distress, and that class explains a good deal of what is attributed to sex. The provider role, the one most often mourned, is the one the psychological evidence finds least harmful. The question is not whether men need a role, but whether the role can be one that a man without a degree can still fulfil.

On method and tools

This piece was written collaboratively with Claude Opus 5.5 (Anthropic): human specification and editorial direction; machine research, analysis and drafting. Research agents gathered and checked the sources; Eurostat figures were pulled from its database on 27 October 2026, and quotations were read in the original or in a full-text copy, except where noted. From second-hand sources: Peterson’s “something to offer” and his estimate of his audience are from a transcript of the Channel 4 News interview of 16 January 2018; Reeves’s “male malaise” lines are from the publisher’s description of his book, his provider sentence from a magazine interview, and his count of grades from a review; the APA Monitor phrase is quoted as reported; the Financial Times charts, the Portuguese exit polls, the Schlesinger essay and Kimmel’s history are described from reports and reviews. The figures come from a script, scripts/young_men.py, and its data are typed in from the sources listed.

Cover: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, about 1818, Hamburger Kunsthalle, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain, cropped.

Authored by: Luis Matos Ferreira — Physicist, Developer, Writer

Go deeper

Ideas this essay uses without stopping to explain them, and where this blog does. The letters in the text point here; the links go straight to the section.

[a] Tasks, not jobs

Why past automation took over tasks without ending work, with the evidence from robots and computers. The Machine and the Hour, “Machines took tasks, not work”.

[b] Why outsider parties grow

The economic and cultural explanations for the rise of parties outside the old consensus, applied to Portugal. Fora do Arco, “Porque crescem os partidos de fora do sistema”.

Related essays on this blog

1. What Schooling Bought — what Portugal’s expansion of education did for pay and productivity.
2. The Leavers — the young Portuguese who emigrated, and what their leaving cost.
3. Fewer Than Wanted — why Portuguese women have fewer children than they want.
4. The Rent — housing, and why the young leave home so late.
5. The Duty to Work — how work became a duty, and a source of standing.
6. Fora do Arco — the parties outside Portugal’s old consensus, and who votes for them.

Sources

1. J. B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, Allen Lane, 2018, Rule 1 and Rule 11.
2. J. B. Peterson, interview with C. Newman, Channel 4 News, 16 January 2018 (quoted from a published transcript).
3. R. V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, Brookings Institution Press, 2022 (quoted from the publisher’s description, Swift Press); American Institute for Boys and Men, Richard V. Reeves.
4. B. Davis, M. Toscano and C. Burchfiel, “America’s Demoralized Men, Part 1”, Institute for Family Studies, March 2026 (YouGov survey of 2,000 US men aged 18–29, 7–15 April 2025).
5. EduQA, Destaques PISA 2025 – Portugal, September 2026.
6. Eurostat, edat_lfse_14 (early leavers, 2025), edat_lfse_03 (tertiary attainment, 2025) and educ_uoe_grad01 (graduates, 2024), retrieved 27 October 2026; own calculations.
7. US National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, Table 104.20; R. V. Reeves and E. Smith, “Boys left behind: Education gender gaps across the US”, Brookings, 12 October 2022.
8. S. Winship, “Give Boys an Extra Year of School, a New Book Suggests”, review of Of Boys and Men, Education Next 23(2), 2023, pp. 66–68.
9. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, labor force participation rate, men 25–54 (LNS11300061), retrieved 27 October 2026; own annual averages.
10. D. Autor, “Work of the Past, Work of the Future”, AEA Papers and Proceedings 109, 2019, pp. 1–32, at p. 1.
11. Eurostat, lfsa_ergan (employment rates, 2025) and edat_lfse_20 (young people neither in employment nor in education and training, 2025), retrieved 27 October 2026.
12. D. Autor, D. Dorn and G. Hanson, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage-Market Value of Young Men”, American Economic Review: Insights 1(2), 2019, pp. 161–178 (abstract of NBER Working Paper 23173).
13. Eurostat, ilc_lvps08 (young people living with their parents, 2025), retrieved 27 October 2026.
14. Pew Research Center, “For Valentine’s Day, 5 facts about single Americans”, 8 February 2023 (survey of July 2022).
15. P. Ueda, C. H. Mercer, C. Ghaznavi and D. Herbenick, “Trends in Frequency of Sexual Activity and Number of Sexual Partners Among Adults Aged 18 to 44 Years in the US, 2000–2018”, JAMA Network Open 3(6), e203833, 2020.
16. Eurostat, hlth_cd_acdr2 and hlth_cd_asdr2 (causes of death, 2023), retrieved 27 October 2026; Eurostat news, 9 September 2026 and 10 September 2025.
17. M. F. Garnett and A. M. Miño, “Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2004–2024”, NCHS Data Brief 549, January 2026.
18. CDC, Youth Risk Behavior Survey: Data Summary & Trends Report, 2013–2023, p. 57; Verlenden et al., MMWR Supplements 73(4), 10 October 2024, pp. 79–86; Kiplagat et al., MMWR Supplements 75, 15 October 2026, pp. 35–43.
19. WHO Regional Office for Europe, Health Behaviour in School-aged Children 2021/22, highlights, 2023.
20. A. Case and A. Deaton, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Princeton University Press, 2020; A. Case, “Deaths of despair strike women too”, Princeton University Press.
21. D. A. Cox, “The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss”, Survey Center on American Life, 8 June 2021; “Men’s Social Circles are Shrinking”, 29 June 2021.
22. G. Barker, C. Hayes, B. Heilman and E. Reichert, The State of American Men 2023: From Crisis and Confusion to Hope, Equimundo, 2023.
23. B. Vigers, “Younger Men in the U.S. Among the Loneliest in West”, Gallup, 20 May 2025.
24. European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Loneliness in the EU, Fairness Policy Brief 3/2023 (EU Loneliness Survey 2022).
25. J. Burn-Murdoch, “A new global gender divide is emerging”, Financial Times, 26 January 2024 (described from reports); J. Hawkins, “Are the ideologies of young women and young men in the US diverging?”, Berkeley IGS, 13 February 2024.
26. L. Saad, J. M. Jones and A. Fioroni, “Exploring Young Women’s Leftward Expansion”, Gallup, 12 September 2024.
27. Instituto +Liberdade, “Perfil dos eleitores votantes nas eleições legislativas de 2025”, 30 May 2025 (Pitagórica exit poll, calculations by P. Magalhães and J. Cancela); RTP, on the CESOP–Católica exit poll, May 2025; ICS/ISCTE poll, April–May 2025, pp. 9–10.
28. Pew Research Center, “Americans see men as the financial providers, even as women’s contributions grow”, 20 September 2017; “Americans see different expectations for men and women”, 5 December 2017.
29. J. A. Vandello, J. K. Bosson, D. Cohen, R. M. Burnaford and J. R. Weaver, “Precarious manhood”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95(6), 2008, pp. 1325–1339.
30. J. K. Bosson, P. Jurek, J. A. Vandello, N. Kosakowska-Berezecka et al., “Psychometric properties and correlates of precarious manhood beliefs in 62 nations”, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 52(3), 2021, pp. 231–258.
31. R. V. Reeves, interview, Washingtonian, 30 September 2024.
32. J. H. Pleck, The Myth of Masculinity, MIT Press, 1981; “The gender role strain paradigm: An update”, in R. F. Levant and W. S. Pollack (eds), A New Psychology of Men, Basic Books, 1995.
33. Y. J. Wong, M.-H. R. Ho, S.-Y. Wang and I. S. K. Miller, “Meta-analyses of the relationship between conformity to masculine norms and mental health-related outcomes”, Journal of Counseling Psychology 64(1), 2017, pp. 80–93.
34. American Psychological Association, APA Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men, August 2018; S. Pappas, “APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys”, Monitor on Psychology, January 2019 (as reported).
35. King’s College London Policy Institute, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership and Ipsos, Emerging tensions? How younger generations are dividing on masculinity and gender equality, February 2024.
36. J. Haidt, The Anxious Generation, Penguin Press, 2024; C. L. Odgers, “The great rewiring: is social media really behind an epidemic of teenage mental illness?”, Nature 628, 2024, pp. 29–30.
37. A. M. Schlesinger Jr., “The Crisis of American Masculinity”, Esquire, November 1958, reprinted in The Politics of Hope, 1963; M. Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History, Free Press, 1996.
38. R. V. Reeves, “Who redshirts?”, Brookings, 13 September 2022; “Research summary: Three ideas to help boys at school”, American Institute for Boys and Men, 30 April 2024; D. W. Schanzenbach, reply in the Point/Counterpoint, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 2024.
39. E. Dhuey, D. Figlio, K. Karbownik and J. Roth, “School Starting Age and Cognitive Development”, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 38(3), 2019, pp. 538–578.
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41. Pew Research Center (R. Fry and C. Aragão), “Gender pay gap in U.S. has narrowed slightly over 2 decades”, updated 4 March 2025; Office for National Statistics, Gender pay gap in the UK: 2025, 23 October 2025.