UK: 'The trouble with boys'

Article here. Excerpt:

'In the next 10 days getting on for half a million boys across the country will receive, from the school office or by text or in the traditional brown envelope, their GCSE or A-level results. In our secular culture it is about as close as most of them will get to a public rite of passage. The facts of the grades will invariably come accompanied by a sentence that many of the boys may well have spent much of their lives up to this point trying quite hard to avoid. The sentence, or a variant of it, will be delivered by a parent, or a teacher, or by a sly voice in their head: "So, son, what are you thinking of doing with the rest of your life?" Twenty-five years on, that question still can bring a cold sweat to the back of my neck, a rush of unfocused and competing possibilities, and the echo of a reflexive response: "Christ, I dunno. Don't ask me…"

One of the headlines that will no doubt accompany this year's results, as it has for results of the past decade or more, is the fact that boys have performed in these exams less well than girls (or conversely that girls' grades have tended to rise, while boys' have marked time). That trend has lately seen 64% of girls achieve five A*-C grade GCSEs while only 54% of boys reach that benchmark. It has also seen half of young women participating in some form of higher education, but only 37% of young men. These trends are being felt in the (ever shrinking) jobs market, where even among recent graduates men are 50% more likely to be unemployed than women; that, in turn, is reshaping domestic arrangements across the county. More than a quarter of British men aged between 25 and 29 currently live with their parents (the figure for women is 12%), and a tenth are still in the family home at 35.'