Jobless, isolated, exploited by misogynists... where is the love for Britain's lost boys?

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.

- Sonia Sodha

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.