The Devastating Cost of Empowering Girls While Abandoning Boys

By Halima Layeni

Over the last three decades, the global development community has made a clear and often admirable choice to invest in girls. The results of that choice are visible, measurable, and worth acknowledging. What has been far less examined is the cost of the assumption that came with it: that boys would be fine without comparable attention.

The scale of the investment in girls is considerable. Entire organisations, campaigns, and funding streams now exist for the sole purpose of keeping girls in school and moving them towards leadership. Scholarship schemes at secondary and university level are routinely reserved for girls.

Governments, foundations, and multilateral agencies attach gender equality targets to education grants, and a large share of development aid now carries a stated gender objective.

Conditional cash transfers reward families for keeping daughters enrolled. Mentorship networks, coding academies, science fellowships, and leadership programmes have been built specifically for young women. Girls entering school today find a world that has been intentionally constructed to welcome them.

Boys find nothing comparable. There is no parallel global campaign for their retention, no ring-fenced scholarships for the ones who are slipping, no funding category that recognises them as a group with distinct needs.

In most grant frameworks, boys do not appear at all. Because programmes follow the categories that funders recognise, boys are absent from the work by design rather than by accident.

Meanwhile, the data tell a story that should have prompted a response years ago. International assessments of reading among fifteen-year-olds have found girls outperforming boys in every participating country, with an average gap that amounts to roughly a full year of schooling.

Across much of Latin America, the Caribbean, North Africa, and parts of Southern Africa, boys are more likely to repeat grades and to leave before completing secondary school. In the United States, women now earn close to sixty per cent of bachelor’s degrees.

Similar patterns appear across Europe, where young men from low-income households are among the least likely of any group to enter higher education.

These figures come from the most widely used education datasets in the world. They are not obscure, and they are not disputed.

What makes the gap so serious is how it compounds. A boy who falls behind in reading at ten is statistically more likely to be held back at twelve, disengaged by fourteen, and gone from the classroom by sixteen.

Each stage makes the next more likely. By the time he leaves, he carries not only weaker skills but a settled belief that school was never meant for him. That belief shapes everything that follows, including how he approaches work, authority, and the idea of seeking help.

The advancement of rights tells the same story in policy form. The rights of girls are now defended through dedicated laws, ministries, treaties, monitoring bodies, and international days of observance, and rightly so.

The rights of boys have no equivalent architecture. Their protection is assumed rather than secured, and when their needs are raised, the response is often discomfort, deflection, or the suggestion that the subject is a distraction.

Boys have quietly become an afterthought in the very systems that claim to serve all children. They are the last to be consulted in programme design, the last to be named in national strategies, and the first to be dropped when budgets tighten. A group that is never named in policy cannot expect to be counted in practice.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the support offered to victims of abuse. A girl who discloses violence or exploitation will, in most countries, find a recognisable path: dedicated shelters, specialist hotlines, trained counsellors, awareness campaigns that tell her she will be believed, and professionals who understand her situation.

A boy in the same position faces a very different reality. Services built for him are scarce or non-existent. Shelters often have no provision for him, helplines are rarely designed with him in mind, and the adults he turns to may doubt his account or minimise it.

Many boys learn that the safest course is silence, and that silence leaves abuse unreported, untreated, and unrecorded. Because it goes uncounted, it is then treated as if it does not exist, which is used to justify the absence of services in the first place.

The labour market then delivers its own verdict. Young men without secondary credentials face narrower options, lower wages, and longer stretches of unemployment.

In many countries, the proportion of young men who are neither working nor studying has climbed, and those who drift into that category are notoriously difficult to bring back.

Informal and unstable work, which offers little protection or progression, absorbs many of them. A young man with no credentials, no mentor, and no clear path is not a neutral figure in a community. He is an unclaimed resource, and someone will claim him.

Too often, the ones who do are gangs, extremist movements, online communities built on grievance, and criminal networks that offer belonging, status, and income where institutions offered none.

The pipeline from educational failure to antisocial involvement is well documented. Communities that cannot offer young men a legitimate stake in the future should not be surprised when illegitimate ones fill the vacuum.

The personal toll is equally severe. Boys who struggle are far more likely to be disciplined than supported. They are suspended and expelled at higher rates, and they are diagnosed and treated for emotional difficulty at lower rates.

Distress in a boy is read as defiance, and defiance is met with punishment. Over time, he learns to conceal rather than express what he is carrying. Rates of loneliness among young men are rising, and the number of lives lost to despair among males across many countries is a figure that no society should accept as normal.

The consequences for society as a whole are now taking shape. A generation of young men who feel unseen by the institutions around them is a generation with weakened trust in those institutions.

Disengagement from education becomes disengagement from work, from civic life, and eventually from family. The mismatch in attainment between young women and young men is reshaping marriage, household formation, and community stability, leaving many men isolated and many women with fewer partners who share their aspirations.

Economies that leave a large share of their young men underskilled pay for it in lost productivity, higher public spending on welfare, health, and justice, and weaker civic participation. Social cohesion suffers when one half of a generation believes the system was built without them.

These are not sentimental concerns. They are fiscal and structural realities that eventually reach every household, including those that never noticed the neglect while it was happening.

The remedy begins with something simple: counting boys. Education and wellbeing outcomes for boys should be tracked, published, and tied to funding decisions as rigorously as they are for girls.

Scholarships, mentorship programmes, and retention initiatives should be designed with boys in mind and resourced accordingly. Services for male victims of abuse should be built, funded, and publicised so that a boy who speaks up is met with belief and a clear path to help.

More male teachers, counsellors, and youth workers are needed, particularly where role models are scarce. Educators should be trained to recognise distress when it appears as withdrawal, irritability, or defiance.

A society that has proven it can lift one group deliberately has also proven it can do the same for another. The knowledge and the machinery already exist. What remains is the willingness to apply them to the boys who have been waiting, quietly and in growing numbers, to be seen.

Halima Layeni: Speaker | Global Voice For Men’s Mental Health & Policy Reform | Author of Dear Man | Executive Director, Life After Abuse Foundation | Mental Health Coach For Professionals | U.S. Consul General Award Recipient