Mark Brooks has a history of being politely ignored. “Ten years ago, there wasn’t really any recognition that men and boys had problems,” he says. “Now the environment has changed.” That change was signalled earlier this month by health secretary Wes Streeting, who declared there is a “crisis in masculinity”. “Society has been slow to wake up to the fact that a lot of men and boys are really struggling today,” he said. “The truth is it can be quite tough to be a young man in today’s society.”
Streeting was speaking at the launch of The Centre for Policy Research on Men and Boys (CPRMB), a new organisation that seeks to produce actionable policies to tackle a decline in men’s health, employability and life expectancy that has crept up on the political class. Brooks – their policy adviser and a lifetime campaigner in the field of men’s health – has overseen the release of the CPRMB’s first report. Missing Men outlines the challenges facing men and boys, and comes hot on the heels of another report by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) – Lost Boys – which paints an equally stark picture of male outcomes.
Over the last year, politicians have grappled with the changing status of men. A group of Labour MPs has formed to brainstorm ways to appeal to boys amid rising support for Reform among Gen Z males. In November, Streeting commissioned the first ever men’s health strategy, observing that the number one killer of men under 50 is suicide – “a fact so shocking that I nearly fell off my chair,” he said (although one that has been true for men aged 20 to 34 since 2001). Netflix’s fictional drama Adolescence, which pondered whether dispossessed schoolboys can be radicalised to commit femicide, drew the attention of the prime minister, who called for it to be shown in schools.
“Adolescence has been very helpful in one respect,” says Brooks. “We’ve seen this political mainstreaming of the need to actually start looking at the challenges and barriers that men and boys face.”
One of the many findings of the Lost Boys report is that for those working full-time between the ages of 16 and 24, the gender pay gap has reversed. This means that for much of Gen Z – including those who have recently left university – women on average are slightly higher paid than men. In later life, this is expected to reverse and widen in favour of men, a gap that is usually attributed to greater male participation in higher-paying fields and the “motherhood penalty”, which reflects the disproportionate share of childcare undertaken by women. But this subtle shift in the fortunes of Gen Z men and women is regarded by the paper’s authors as a bellwether. “In some ways the gender pay gap is fascinating, but not really the point,” says Luke Taylor, a researcher at the CSJ. “It’s kind of a symptom of a wider change.”
Much of that wider change is the collapse of work for men with lower education levels, and the educational underperformance of boys relative to girls. “There has been a long-term hollowing out of work in the industrial sector for men with lower education levels. And the expectation of that kind of work has very much changed, because there are fewer of these jobs, and now you might need a degree,” says Taylor. Women aged 20-24 in the UK are now slightly more likely to be employed than men, while the share of young men not in education, work, or looking for a job is climbing.
In education, trends over the last 30 years have culminated in overall better outcomes for women. Women outperform men, on average, at every level and every age group of the education system. Women perform better at GCSE and A-level, outnumber men at university and receive more first class degrees than men. They comprise a slim majority of Oxbridge admissions, although men still have the edge in firsts from these universities.
Women tend to take on more degrees that lead to lower-paying fields, like education, psychology, nursing, and social work, while men hold a majority of degrees in subjects like engineering. But women have increased their share in some higher-earning occupations. There are now twice as many female law school applicants as male, and almost twice as many female medicine and dentistry grads. These have relatively high starting salaries (£25,000-50,000), although they involve much more time at university.
“That was sort of confusing to me, because my understanding was that you get more women going to university than men, but they tend to gravitate towards lower-paying fields,” says Taylor. “But they’re actually now far, far more likely to be doing things like medicine and dentistry or things like law as well. And then you get quite a significant number [of] men doing things like PE and political sciences, which are not the most highly paid occupations.”
Boys, meanwhile, are nearly twice as likely as girls to be suspended, and more than twice as likely to be excluded. Their problems look even worse when you bring class into the mix, and white British boys on free school meals are the worst-performing demographic, according to a parliament research briefing.
“When it comes to education, we either need to accept that boys are more stupid or it’s the system setting them up to fail. Whichever one it is, we need to recognise that boys are in need of a bit more support than they’re getting,” says Taylor.
Brooks thinks that boys may benefit from a different culture. He examined the habits of schools where there was no gender attainment gap. “What emerged was a boy-positive environment that really pushed the boys, had a fair and equal discipline process, made sure it dealt with problems around bullying, and also made sure that the boys understood the point of learning.”
He recalls a conversation with a headteacher who wanted to understand why boys were falling behind in her school. “One of the things she noticed is that when she walked around the corridors, nearly all of the posters and celebration pictures of success were featuring just her female students, so she was looking at that and saying, well, boys are not seeing themselves as being educationally successful.”
Boys are not underperforming in all schools, which suggests that there may be lessons to be learned about culture. And there is one particular niche where boys continue to dramatically outpace girls. This is among top performers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM subjects).
The British Olympiads are a group of nationwide competitions in STEM subjects. The smartest boys and girls in each subject are encouraged to apply, and they have to solve problems relevant to each subject under strict exam conditions. Participation in an Olympiad is voluntary, but there is a strong incentive to apply because awards strengthen applications to elite universities. The British Olympiads don’t report gender distribution data, but the names of the six winners are posted online, because they go on to represent the UK in the International Olympiad. What is clear from this data is that at the top level, female participation is often extremely low. For instance, in the British Maths Olympiad, just four women out of 60 have sat on the UK team in the last 10 years (2016-2025).
Similar trends can be seen in the British Physics Olympiad, which appears to have had no women on its international team for each of the years 2015-24. The Chemistry Olympiad has had at least one woman on its international team over the last 10 years (she competed twice – in both 2023 and 2024).
Records for the Biology Olympiad are more incomplete, but a partial analysis of awards over the last 10 years reveals a more balanced gender distribution, and even an all-female team representing the UK at the International Olympiad in 2024.
The Olympiads are not like GCSEs or A-levels. Only about half of UK schools offer their students the opportunity to participate, and this includes a high proportion of grammar schools and independent schools, which have a slight male bias – possibly impacting female representation. Other systemic factors like sexism and stereotype threat have historically played a role and probably still contribute to lower female participation and performance – although this is a position that is becoming trickier to defend given women’s overall academic dominance and the presence of all-female initiatives like The European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, established in 2012.
One inference from this data might be that boys with potential who are well-supported by their schools (and independent or grammar schools are more likely to have the resources to do so) are capable of runaway success in certain academic fields. Another might be that women require more support at the top levels, because they remain male-dominated. It’s possible for both of these things to be true if boys are more likely than girls to be found at the top and bottom extremes of ability. The concern for some is that any new efforts to support boys do not come at the expense of unleashing potential in women.
“The next phase around boys’ education is far more evidence-based research – looking in depth about what works best for boys in school in a way that doesn’t negatively impact women and young girls’ education performance,” says Brooks. “Tweaking how you view and support boys in school does not need to have a negative impact on the educational performance of girls.”
