Man (Dis)Connected

Chapter 1 «Educational Disappointment» opens with David Brooks calling the information age liberating, but the authors reply: this «outsourced» memory makes us not smarter but more superficial. Seventy-six per cent of Americans say they follow the news daily, while only 41% read beyond the headlines. The authors then show young men's decline in education with statistics: a meta-analysis of 300 studies shows girls getting higher grades than boys in all fields; for the first time in US history men are getting less education than their fathers; a quarter of 13–14-year-old boys are not proficient in writing or reading, while 41% of girls are proficient in writing and 34% in reading.

The authors then refer to international data (OECD, PISA): in some countries girls are one to one and a half grades ahead of boys in reading scores. According to Christina Hoff Sommers girls do more homework and read more books, while boys are more often suspended from school. In 2002 three in ten boys «often» came to school unprepared; for girls it was one in five. ADHD is diagnosed two to three times more often in boys; the proportion of women receiving university degrees is higher than that of men (in the US, by age 27 a third of women and a quarter of men). The authors' conclusion: «it is time for a wake-up call».

Chapter 2 «Men Who Give Up on Work» says that between 2000 and 2010 the labour-force participation of US youth fell by 42% and unemployment among men aged 25–34 is more than double that of 1970; the 2009 recession hit men harder than women because most workers in manufacturing and construction are men. The authors stress separately the question of «entitlement»: some men feel entitled, «simply because they are men», to be supported by women without working; this is compared with «old-fashioned gigolos». Two examples are given: a physiotherapist who divorced a husband who quit his job, and an academic who went on supporting a partner who ran up $100,000 of debt but did not work.

In these examples the authors ask why women stay with such men and answer: «otherwise there would be no men at all» — they will return to this in chapter 20. Then a young man's research comment is cited: «The key to being a man lies in responsibility; the responsibility of looking after yourself and not harming yourself, and of thinking of others and not harming them». The authors agree, but link the «new male entitlement» to the fact that it envies the symbols of success (David Beckham, Michael Phelps, Mark Zuckerberg) and does not see the hard work, the failures and the deferred reward behind them.

• Each chapter is built from statistics, research and the comments of young men
• The book is divided into three parts with the logic «symptoms → causes → solutions»
• The authors give the reader a «real voice» by quoting from their own research surveys
• The language is plain and conversational; scientific concepts are briefly explained