Last year, psychologist Lee Chambers set off across the United Kingdom to listen to boys. In his work training companies in equality, he had met hundreds of parents who said they were concerned that boys were struggling after the COVID-19 pandemic and being manipulated online. So he decided to go and find out what the lives of 12–16-year-olds are really like.
The results of this research, which included the views of more than 1,000 adolescents, revealed boys’ frustrations with the modern world1. More than 80% said there aren’t enough real-world spaces — such as parks or youth clubs — to be a boy. More than half found the online world more rewarding than the physical one. And nearly 80% said they were not clear what masculinity is. “It’s toxic, that’s all I ever hear,” said one participant.
The idea that boys and young men are struggling is not a new concern — but the hand-wringing has intensified over the past few years. Globally, more boys than girls are out of school and young men are less likely than young women to attend higher education. Boys and young men tend to have fewer close connections and less emotional support than do girls and young women, surveys suggest, and many feel under pressure to conform to stereotypical ideas of masculinity and body image. Last year’s hit Netflix show Adolescence triggered widespread concern that teenage boys were being drawn into the ‘manosphere’, a network of male-focused, often misogynistic online spaces. Some “people would say that boys are in crisis”, says Matt Englar-Carlson, a specialist in counselling and director of the Center for Boys and Men at California State University, Fullerton.
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It is uncomfortable and sometimes controversial to talk about a male ‘crisis’ in the face of entrenched and often worsening discrimination against girls and women. No country in the world has achieved gender equality — and one in four reported a backlash against women’s rights in 2024. “I agree with this ‘crisis for boys’, but for many outcomes, things still look much worse for adolescent girls,” says Sarah Baird, a health researcher at the George Washington University in Washington DC. Some people worry that the ‘boys in crisis’ framing worsens the situation by encouraging young men to view themselves as victims of gender equality — feeding resentment and hostile views. Creating “moral outrage amongst boys that the world’s against them” can fuel frustrations, says Chambers, who founded a non-profit group called Male Allies UK based in Preston, UK.
Rather than focusing on boys’ troubles, say researchers, it’s important to understand the challenges that all young people are facing. “I think this failure to see adolescent boys as a vulnerable group has been problematic for both boys and girls,” Baird says.
She and others argue that studying and investing in all adolescents is crucial, especially now. “The world is quite challenging for boys when it’s not really clear what the future is going to be like or what’s always expected of them,” says Chambers. And, as his listening tour showed, they are trying to work this out in various ways. “Some were trying to change the world,” he says. “Others were wanting to burn the whole world down.”
Educational gaps
In 2022, a first-of-its-kind global data analysis on boys’ disengagement from education2 was published by the United Nations cultural and education organization UNESCO. Girls are more likely to never enter school, it said, but boys are more likely to not progress and not complete secondary school. (The binary terms ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ are used in this article to reflect language used in studies and by interviewees.)
The sizes of and trends in gender gaps vary from one country to the next, but some of the most consistent patterns favouring women are seen in higher education (see ‘Changing education gaps’). UNESCO estimated in 2025 that 80 young men were enrolled in university for every 100 young women in about 40 countries3. In the United States, men received 41.5% of bachelor’s degrees in 2021–22 compared with 57% in 1969–70.
Source: Our World in Data
Such data don’t necessarily suggest an educational crisis for boys. On many measures, girls have been catching up with and have overtaken boys. For instance, more girls were out of school than were boys in 2000, but this gap has since narrowed and then flipped alongside successful efforts to boost girls’ schooling. By 2023, 139 million boys and 133 million girls were out of school.
The education shortfalls for boys were previously clear in high-income countries, but the 2022 UNESCO analysis showed that “this has now shifted” to include several low- and middle-income countries, too, says Matthias Eck, an education and gender-equality specialist at UNESCO in Paris and lead author of the report.
Poverty is one of the main reasons that boys fail or drop out of school, education specialists say, because it creates pressure for them to get paid work. Another is that boys are more likely than girls to experience violence from teachers and peers at school; and gendered expectations can also undermine boys’ desire to learn.
But these difficulties do not translate into the job market, in which women experience lower employment rates and lower wages in most parts of the world.
Eck highlights the bigger picture. In 2023, only around 44% of students worldwide achieved a basic proficiency in maths by the end of primary school and just 59% finished secondary school3. “What we are facing really is a learning crisis,” he says.
Adolescent health
Concerns about a male crisis are not confined to education — they also centre on health.
The Global Burden of Disease study4, the largest analysis of health loss from death and disease, reveals a striking difference between the health of male and female adolescents (who it defines as spanning 10–24 years old). Injuries — including those from road accidents, violence, self-harm, conflict, falls and drownings — account for 33% of healthy life lost owing to death or disease for males and 15% among females.
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Injuries are “way higher among boys”, says Luisa Sorio Flor, a public-health researcher at the University of Washington in Seattle, who works on the Global Burden of Disease study. One reason, she says, is that boys are, in general, more likely to be overconfident and take risks.
“I’d say boys in general are more reckless than girls,” agrees 12-year-old Lucas, from Hertfordshire, UK, whose surname is omitted to protect his identity. And “occasionally there can be a bit of peer pressure,” he says.
Many researchers highlight the shockingly high levels of violence experienced by young people. Girls are more likely than boys to face sexual violence and violence in relationships, whereas boys encounter more physical violence from peers and adults, including homicide. Some of this is because boys are more likely to be recruited into conflicts. The Lancet commission on adolescent health, which Baird co-chaired, estimated in a 2025 report5 that the proportion of adolescents living in regions affected by war and conflict rose from 11% to 18% between 1990 and 2022.
For boys, violence experienced or witnessed at home, school and online, “is sort of the water that we swim in”, says Gary Barker, who runs Equimundo, an international organization based in Washington DC that aims to engage boys and men in gender equality and violence prevention. And experiencing violence often “converts into perpetration of some form of violence”, he says.
Crisis of connection
Another argument for a crisis among boys stems from concerns about their worsening mental health. This is not unique to boys: studies show that mental-health disorders are a large and growing health problem for all adolescents. The number of healthy life years lost to mental-health disorders among 10–24-year-olds globally rose from around 27 million to 47 million between 1990 and 2023, according to the Global Burden of Disease study4 (see ‘Mental-health trends’).
Source: Ref. 4
But data reveal differences in boys’ and girls’ mental health. Overall, more female than male adolescents have a mental-health condition, and the rates are climbing more steeply for girls. Anxiety and depression are more prevalent in girls, says Flor, whereas attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and conduct disorders, such as aggressive behaviour, are higher in boys6.
And many more boys than girls die by suicide. Among adolescents aged 15–19 in high-income countries, 9 in every 100,000 boys and 3 in 100,000 girls take their own lives7. “There’s no way for us to talk about boys and not talk about self-harm and suicide,” Flor says.
Some of the rise in mental-health disorders is probably explained by greater awareness and detection of these conditions. The COVID-19 pandemic sent rates spiking, and technology, isolation, poverty, violence and other factors could also be playing a part. Some people point the finger of blame at the increasing use of smartphones and social media, but research so far does not show clearly whether and how much this is affecting adolescent mental health on a population level, although social media has been linked to some individual cases of harm.
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For boys and young men, the problem might be exacerbated by what Barker calls a ‘crisis of connection’ — a lack of people they go to for support. In a 2024 survey of 13–17-year-olds in the United States by the Pew Research Center, a think tank in Washington DC, 38% of teenage boys said they were comfortable speaking with friends about their mental health, compared with 58% of teen girls8. “I‘d say, as a boy, it can be harder to open up to people,” Lucas says. “Girls sort of have the tools to find support or have people they can turn to,” says Kim Parker, who directs social-trends research at the Pew Research Center. An Equimundo survey in 2017 found that 66% of young US men thought that men should work out personal problems alone and not ask others for help9.
Englar-Carlson says these differences stem in part from the way in which boys and girls are socialized. Adults often acknowledge and empathize when girls express emotion, he says, whereas boys get the message to stop crying or be tough. “And so boys at a young age can learn not to put emotions into words,” he says.
Men on masculinity
Stereotypical ideas of masculinity are common among boys and men. Equimundo’s 2017 survey, which sampled more than 1,000 men in each of the United States, United Kingdom and Mexico, found that a sizeable amount of men (roughly 40–60%) felt under pressure to be a certain type of man: tough, self-sufficient, attractive, heterosexual, a financial provider, aggressive, ready for sex and in control in relationships. In 2025, another Equimundo study10 reported that 55% of US men of all ages said that a man deserves to know where his girlfriend or wife is all the time, up from 46% in 2017. For young men aged 18 to 24, 57% agreed with this statement. “If anything, we’re going backwards in terms of young men’s acceptance of more gender-equitable, less restrictive ideas about manhood,” Barker says.
