The boys are not all right. That’s the message from a new Centre for Social Justice report, Lost Boys, published last week. It surveys how boys and young men are faring in Britain and finds that in several areas there is now a reverse gender gap, with boys, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, struggling to keep up with girls.

When it comes to education, girls outperform boys at GCSEs and A-levels, and the ratio of women to men at university is 60:40. Boys are more than twice as likely to be excluded from school, with rates of exclusion particularly high for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is all feeding through into labour market outcomes: in the 00s, women aged 16-24 were more likely to be not in employment, education and training than young men; in recent years, that has flipped, with young men also significantly more likely to be unemployed than young women. The pay gap for young people has also become a more complex story: for 21- to 24-year-olds, median earnings are now higher for women, but this has been driven by a stark drop in earnings for non-graduate young men, with graduates still earning more than their female equivalent. What’s more, boys are more likely to be obese than girls, and rates of suicide are three and a half times higher for boys aged 15-19 than girls of the same age.

None of this is to deny the many inequalities faced by females in a patriarchal society. But neither should a focus on women’s equality crowd out discussion of the problems being experienced by a minority of boys; improving their lot would do a huge amount to make life better for both sexes.

But we have struggled to have a constructive conversation about the specific issues facing boys, with a tendency for all sides to slip into polarised, zero-sum framing. For some on the left, there is an implicit fear that focusing on boys might distract from the challenges facing girls; and certain sections of the right wrongly regard boys falling behind as a product of important feminist wins of recent decades.

This new report is a healthy corrective, and follows similar work in the US by thinkers such as Richard Reeves, who recently set up the American Institute for Boys and Men. Reeves’ diagnosis of the problem is part institutional, part cultural. We today have an education system better suited to girls, but a labour market still structured around the needs of higher achieving men. And the positive shifts we have seen in the cultural script about successful womanhood have not been accompanied by changing narratives about what it means to be a flourishing man, a vacuum that has enabled misogynist influencers such as Andrew Tate – the third most Googled person in the world in 2023 – to seed the idea with some young men that women are to blame for their ills.

Reading Lost Boys made me feel as though there’s a long way to go in properly understanding what’s going on with young men’s wellbeing. Convincing hypotheses abound. Boys get conflicting messages everywhere, from the violent, aggressive pornography to which so many young people are exposed, to important societal conversations about male violence, to the harmful stereotypes found in books and toys and on clothes. Adverse childhood experiences and mental health issues tend to manifest differently in boys – in externalising bad behaviours, rather than internalised feelings of depression or anxiety – and are seen much less sympathetically in society, playing into higher school exclusion rates and higher rates of autism and ADHD diagnoses.

Men tend to be more socially isolated – data from the US highlights they have fewer close friendships and that young men are twice as likely to be single than women. They are also much more likely to live in the parental home for longer. And Laura Bates has documented how social media algorithms target young men with extreme misogynistic content, with increasing numbers suffering from body dysmorphia or eating disorders, and taking steroids to bulk up.

Some of the differences between boys and girls will be driven by biology; much will be socially constructed. In terms of the violence gap between the sexes, for example, the average man is not much more violent than the average woman, but there are many more very violent men than women. That is partly a product of higher testosterone levels, but also how some boys react to negative childhood experiences, such as domestic abuse or an absent father. On the friendship gap, one ethnographic study has found that in early adolescence, friendships between girls and between boys are not that dissimilar, but in later years boys learn to become more detached through “macho” culture.

Nature or nurture, these differences exist, however, and while some solutions, such as improving online safety and tighter regulation of online pornography will benefit boys and girls, the former also need solutions tailored to their needs. In the US, Reeves has called for boys to start school a year later, better vocational and technical education, and more male teachers. These are worthy of exploration, but it is striking how little we know about what might work in improving boys’ outcomes.

Redressing this is vital to improving the wellbeing of all young people. Failing to do so could also have political consequences, further opening the door for the far right to play on young men’s grievances, as we have seen across Europe. In the last election, young men were twice as likely to vote for Reform as young women, with the latter twice as likely to vote Green, reflecting a growing attitudinal gap.

The ubiquity of social media and the grim financial climate into which young people are maturing – a growing number of gen Z will never be able to afford their own home, and will spend most of their working lives paying off tuition fees – bring a unique set of challenges for this generation. But young men are no less deserving of a specific policy and cultural focus than young women; and to deny them this is to the detriment of everyone.