The Boys Initiative is excited to share the 2023 update of “For Every 100 Girls.” This awareness campaign is contributing significantly to the broader conversation about gender equality and highlighting the importance of addressing issues faced by boys and young men in the United States. Created initially by TBI Board of Advisor member Tom Mortenson, this update was completed by Professor Mark Perry, using irrefutable national data covering 70 areas where boys and men face challenges and disparities compared to girls and women. These categories are: (1) Birth and Death, (2) Educational Attainment of Young Adults, (3) K-12 Education, (4) Special Education, (5) Higher Education and Labor Market, (6) Crime, Incarceration, Alcohol and Drugs, Homelessness, and Wounded Military.
Above is a graphic displaying 37 of the 70 areas. When taken together, the implications of these negative outcomes for boys and young men are troubling. It’s clear how boys and men have fallen behind in positive outcomes, such as earning only 73 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 that women do, and outpaced women in negative outcomes, including the staggering figure of 1,371 men incarcerated in state and federal prisons for every 100 women.
Click here to download a PDF containing the full list of outcomes and links to sources of the data.
Interview: Tom Mortenson
“For Every 100 Girls” is a comprehensive initiative started in 2011 by Tom Mortenson, a Senior Scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. Mortenson’s primary mission was to address the challenges faced by boys, particularly those from lower-income backgrounds and advocating for greater opportunities for boys in higher education. He also emphasizes the need to examine and report on gender-related data, as he believes this issue has been largely overlooked.
Mortenson says the publication was a “sneaky attack below the radar” to get people to look at data across categories and was intended to illuminate a major problem that was so opaque to a larger discussion of gender issues in higher education. That list of 70 measures has since been updated several times by Mark Perry, emeritus professor of economics and finance in the School of Management at the University of Michigan-Flint.
Mortenson’s work is rooted in a deep concern for the well-being and opportunities of boys and young men. He highlights that over the past 40 years, there has been a consistent imbalance in higher education enrollment, with women outnumbering men. In the 2020-2021 academic year, 58% of college admissions were women, while men constituted only 42%. “Gender imbalance in higher education is a global problem. It’s a Y chromosome problem that the modern world has not dealt with very well.” Mortenson emphasizes the importance of not creating a zero-sum game where opportunities for one gender come at the expense of the other.
He also points out that the higher education system in the U.S. has faced challenges in recent years, including declining enrollment, campus closures, and reduced funding. Mortenson believes that affordability is a significant barrier, particularly for low-income students who may not have access to resources like Pell Grants. He said since 2010, the number of undergraduates with Pell Grants is down by about 3 million students and this keeps the poor out of higher education. Further identifying the problem, Mortenson admits great frustration with lack of leadership in our country to deal with the boy problem in higher education. “Higher education is leaderless and there is no one to talk to about these issues. No one responds.”
Mortenson attributes part of the disparity between boys and girls in higher education to shifts in the economy since World War II. He points out at one point about 48% of jobs in the economy were in goods producing industries like manufacturing and agriculture. Now it’s down to 15%. These traditional male-dominated industries have declined, while service-oriented sectors that often require different skill sets have grown. This transition has left many boys at a disadvantage.
He also underscores the importance of father figures in a boy’s life and points out that many boys from low-income backgrounds do not have this support. This absence of paternal influence can lead to increased incarceration rates and hinder a boy’s path to a successful and productive adulthood. “The best break for a boy is to be born into a rich family–that’s the best chance for them to go to college.” Mortenson pointed out he was a single father to his daughter for a period of his life and admitted to being a “pretty good father, but a lousy mother.” He says boys and girls need both a father and a mother. “We are all better off together when we are all better off.”
Mortenson advocates for early intervention in the K-12 system to motivate and prepare boys for higher education. He believes that affirmative action efforts at the college level are insufficient and that the groundwork must be laid earlier.
In terms of solutions, Mortenson calls for a paradigm shift in thinking about education. He suggests delaying kindergarten for boys by a year, increasing the number of male teachers, establishing more single-sex schools, and creating more initiatives to give boys role-model fathers, especially if they don’t have one. Additionally, he emphasizes the need for higher education financial support, proposing higher Pell Grant awards to remove barriers for low-income students. Mortenson says we need to find ways to make the K-12 system as good at preparing boys for college as they are doing to make sure the girls are prepared. “We also need to train teachers to teach boys as boys and not as defective girls. Girls are not better students. Boys are just different and can’t be taught like how girls learn.”
Overall, Mortenson’s work and advocacy aim to bring attention to the challenges facing boys in higher education and to prompt meaningful, systemic change to support their success. He calls for a shift from a feminist agenda to a more inclusive gender agenda that benefits both boys and girls. Mortenson expresses a desire for greater awareness of the issue, strong political structures and a concerted effort to bring together stakeholders, including philanthropic women like Melinda Gates and MacKenzie Scott, to address the educational disparities affecting boys.
At 80 years of age, Mortenson acknowledges he is in the last years of his life and keeps looking for that person who offers ground-breaking, trajectory changing insights that will somehow get more boys into college to get training for better paying jobs out in society, but there just aren’t that many ideas. In terms of the future of this movement, he is seeing fresh advocates with youth and enthusiasm who are coming at the issue from a progressive perspective. Mortenson hopes they are able to move the needle in what has been a challenging endeavor.
Interview: Mark Perry
Mark Perry is a prominent advocate for addressing gender disparities, particularly focusing on Title IX gender discrimination in higher education programs. He has also been involved in and instrumental with updating “For Every 100 Girls” multiple times since Mortenson began the project in 2011. Perry uses data and graphics to highlight the areas related to gender disparities in education and other key data points. Perry’s work has gained recognition from figures like Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk.
His primary goal with the project is to create awareness among the public, educators, and politicians regarding these disparities. Perry hopes that this increased awareness will lead to the establishment of a council on men and boys, similar to what exists for women and girls, to address gender-related issues comprehensively, stating “All the sympathy goes to women and never goes to men without any acknowledgement or recognition that there are some serious issues facing our boys and men.”
Perry emphasizes the importance of using irrefutable data, often from sources like the CDC, to shed light on the challenges faced by men, especially in education. He points out that despite data showing a trend of more women graduating from college with associate’s or bachelor’s degrees for the past 40 years, there is still a perception that women face significant discrimination in education. Perry’s work aims to challenge these misconceptions.
While the 2023 update may not capture the immediate impacts of Covid-19 on gender differences, he anticipates that these effects may become more evident in the 2025 update of his project.
In addition to his work on “For Every 100 Girls”, Perry is a passionate advocate for equal attention and resources for both men and women based on the Title IX rule, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in education programs and activities. He has filed 864 complaints with the Office of Civil Rights regarding Title IX gender discrimination, and most recently Perry’s 400th federal complaint was opened by the US Civil Rights Office of the Department of Education. The first complaint was filed in 2016 against Michigan State University for having a “women’s only lounge” without a corresponding lounge for men. After Perry filed the complaint and it garnered national publicity, MSU closed down the lounge, remodeled it, and reopened it for both men and women.
Perry acknowledged that although 40 years ago tides began to change in education for women, women’s programs are still advantaged well above programs for men, and he will continue to file complaints as long as this discrimination continues. He has continued his work on the “For Every 100 Girls Project” as one way of advocating for gender equality in education.
We thank both of these men for their unwavering dedication to this project.