When the words “gender inequality” are spoken, we assume that it’s women who have got it worse.
Take today, International Women’s Day, as an example. Across the UK and the world, people are dedicating 24 hours to argue that women are still disadvantaged.
And there is no doubt that, in some parts of the world, they are. But in the UK today, it’s a very different story.
We are battling a new form of gender inequality. It is one that, unfortunately, isn’t represented by today’s equality movement; one that sees young, working-class boys fall behind.
Last August, only 24% of white British schoolboys from low income families gained five A*-Cs, compared to 34% of girls from the same social bracket.
In the following months, research by the Sutton Trust revealed a “double disadvantage” for white working class boys from poor areas – only 29% of them continue in education after 16.
The injustice extends beyond the classroom. According to the NSPCC, boys are six times less likely to talk about their suicidal thoughts than girls. In 2015, the Office for National Statistics recorded that 4.4% of 10-19-year-old boys tried to take their own life. For girls, it was 1.8%.
Such desperation extends beyond childhood. This week, the charity Samaritans released a report outlining how men in the lowest social class, living in the most deprived areas, are up to 10 times more at risk of suicide than the best-off.
Contemporary feminism regularly advances the idea that young women are under unprecedented pressure to look, feel and act a certain way. But our inability to understand that this can, and does, happen to young boys too has brought forth a whole new form of gender prejudice.
While we distort gender wage gap stats to obscure the fact that young women now out-earn men, we have ignore that working-class boys are one of the least likely ethnic groups to go to university.
We are so obsessed with challenging non-existent misogyny in children’s cartoons and trying to find some sort of gender bias in children’s toys that we turn a blind eye to the fact that 10-19-year-old boys are nearly two and a half times more likely to commit suicide.
In our overzealous attempts to reckon with the sexual injustice of a bygone era, we have manufactured a contemporary sexism of our own.
Disregarding the performance of young British boys, particularly those from working-class homes, in favour of demanding more for women, flies straight in the face of what feminism nominally seeks to do: safeguard equality and opportunity for all.