Why society offers less sympathy when men fall behind

This is a summary of an article published in the Journal of the European Economic Association by Alexander W. Cappelen (FAIR, Norwegian School of Economics), Ranveig Falch (CREATE, University of Oslo) and Bertil Tungodden (FAIR, Norwegian School of Economics). You can read the full paper here.

For decades, policymakers and the public have worried about gender inequality—particularly the barriers holding women back in education, careers, and politics. And with good reason: women still face wage gaps, underrepresentation in leadership, and cultural stereotypes that constrain opportunities.

While women have been breaking glass ceilings, many men—especially less-educated men—are slipping through society’s floorboards.

In the United States, wages and labor force participation for men without college degrees have declined, particularly for minorities and low-income households. When it comes to education, boys are 71% more likely to fail baseline proficiency in core subjects than girls and are less likely to graduate high school and college.

How does society respond when men fall behind?

In our recent study, published in the Journal of the European Economic Association, we show that people respond differently when men struggle than when women do. Using large-scale experiments with more than 35,000 Americans, we find evidence that when men fall behind, people are more likely to blame them for not trying hard enough, and are less supportive of government policies to help.

Figure 1

To begin, we conducted a large-scale experiment with a representative sample of 22,000 Americans aimed at understanding how gender shapes perceptions of disadvantage. Participants were asked to evaluate two online workers (recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk), a man and a woman, who had completed the same task. Based on actual performance differences, one worker was more productive and earned a full $6 bonus, while the other was less productive and earned nothing. Most of the participants were then asked whether they wanted to redistribute some of the earnings from the high performer to the low performer, knowing their choices would determine the workers’ final payments.

Importantly, we randomly assigned the gender of the low performer: for some participants the low performer was a man, for others a woman.

When the low performer was male, 38.4% of participants chose to redistribute nothing, compared to 31.1% when the low performer was female. This 7.3 percentage point difference, roughly equivalent to the gap between Republicans and non-Republicans on redistribution, appeared consistently within subgroups including men and women, Republicans and non-Republicans, young and old, and high and low income.

Figure 2

What drove this gender bias? Within the same experiment, we tested whether participants blame male and female workers differently for poor performance. An independent sample of participants was asked to evaluate scenarios where one worker had performed poorly and earned nothing while another performed well and earned more, and to indicate whether they believed the low-performing worker had exerted less effort than the higher-earning one.

When the low performer was male, 53% of respondents blamed lack of effort. When the low performer was female, only 44% made this attribution. We also find that people’s beliefs about effort help explain this bias. Once those beliefs are taken into account, the gender gap in refusing to help a low-performing worker falls by about half.

This suggests that participants are less likely to redistribute earnings to male workers when they fall behind because they perceive the shortfall as a lack of effort. This mechanism, which we call statistical fairness discrimination, provides new clues about how society perceives and responds to the growing number of disadvantaged males.

Figure 3

Finally, we tested whether these biases extend to real-world policy support. We surveyed over 13,000 Americans concerning their support for government programs aimed at helping disadvantaged men and women in education and the labor market.

Once again, gender matters. 54.2% of participants supported government assistance when the disadvantaged group was female, compared to only 42.2% when described as male—a 12 percentage point gap. The effort attribution gap was even larger: 46.7% attributed male disadvantage to lack of effort versus just 32.5% for female disadvantage.

This suggests that in the areas where male disadvantage is growing—such as education and some parts of the labor market—public opinion may be less supportive of policies designed to help because they perceive males’ disadvantage to reflect lack of effort.

A call for broader notions of fairness

Our study provides a sobering insight: society is more accepting of men falling behind, less likely to view their struggles as unfair, and less willing to provide help. This reflects a form of discrimination rooted not in outcomes but in beliefs about effort and deservingness. Importantly, many people may be unaware that they judge men and women differently in these situations, since these perceptions often operate unconsciously.

As boys and men face growing challenges in education and work, these biases may shape whether and to what degree societies respond—or whether male disadvantage is quietly tolerated.

If fairness itself is gendered, true equality requires not just closing old gaps, but questioning our hidden assumptions about who deserves help. Recognizing these unconscious biases is an important step toward designing policies that can respond fairly to disadvantage, whoever experiences it.