TWELVE

MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN

Automation and the changing economy have already transformed millions of families and relationships across the country—and not for the better.

Five million manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States between 2000 and 2014. Almost three-quarters of manufacturing workers are male, so these changes disproportionately hit men without college degrees. The decline in opportunities for men has made working-class men less likely to marry. A study by MIT poverty researcher David Autor showed that when manufacturing work becomes less available, the proportion of men who get married in an affected community declines. Average male wages have declined since 1990 in real terms. A Pew research study showed that many men are foregoing or delaying marriage because they do not feel financially secure. The same study said that, for women, having a steady job was the single biggest factor they were looking for in a spouse.

Getting married is an act of optimism, stability, and prosperity. It also can be expensive. If you don’t have a stable job all of the above becomes more difficult. Marriage has declined for all classes in the past 40 years, with the decline being most extreme among the non–college educated. The proportion of working-class adults who get married has plummeted from 70 percent in 1970 to only 45 percent today. The decline really accelerated in 2000, around the same time as manufacturing jobs started to disappear.

There are a host of reasons for the decline of marriage. Some cite increased labor force participation and more options for women, who are now less reliant on men. Others discuss it in light of shifting cultural norms. However, the reduction in opportunities for working-class men is doubtless contributing to fewer people getting married. The problems among men have been well documented. An Atlantic article in 2016 called “The Missing Men” noted that one in six men in America of prime age (25–54) are either unemployed or out of the workforce—10 million men in total.

What are these men missing from the workforce doing all day? They tend to play a lot of video games. Young men without college degrees have replaced 75 percent of the time they used to spend working with time on the computer, mostly playing video games, according to a recent study based on the Census Bureau’s time-use surveys.

Women are now the clear majority of college graduates—in 2017 women comprise 57 percent of college graduates, and the trend is expected to continue in the coming years. By the time you read this, nearly three women will graduate from college for every two men. Women also go on to get a majority of master’s and other graduate degrees. This is an international phenomenon: women are the majority of college graduates in most developed countries.

Fewer men in the workforce means fewer men who are considered marriageable. A working-class woman asked about marriage by journalist Alana Semuels said, “I haven’t run into someone I’d consider doing that with.” For women who don’t have college educations, their male counterparts can’t find jobs and don’t seem like stable partners.

Lower rates of marriage mean that the proportion of children raised by a single parent is rising dramatically; though fertility is declining, people don’t stop having children just because they don’t get married. The share of children born to unmarried mothers more than doubled between 1980 and 2015, from 18 to 40 percent.

Single mothers outnumber fathers more than four to one. Of the 11 million families with children under age 18 and no spouse present, 8.5 million are single mothers. Most of the time, single parent means single mother. If you send uneducated men to the sidelines and turn them into nonproviders, you wind up forming many difficult family situations and parents who then are hard-pressed to raise their kids. “We see a decline in fertility, a decline in marriage, but a rise in the fraction of births that are disadvantaged, and as a consequence the kids are living in pretty tough circumstances,” said poverty researcher David Autor, commenting on a study on how the decline of manufacturing affected men and women.

Boys raised in single-parent households seem to suffer more than girls. A study showed that growing up with stably married parents makes one more likely to succeed at school, but that an absent father had a bigger impact on boys. Boys without fathers are more likely to get in trouble from elementary school onward, and appear to be “more responsive to parental inputs (or the absence thereof) than are girls.” As the authors of one study put it, “As more boys grow up without their father in the home, and as women (especially in… working-class communities) are viewed as the more stable achievers, boys and girls alike come to see males as having a lower achievement orientation and less aptitude for higher education… college becomes something that many girls, but only some boys, do—the opposite of the earlier cultural norm.”

J. D. Vance made the same observation about school being something boys were supposed to ignore: “As a child, I associated accomplishments in school with femininity. Manliness meant strength, courage, a willingness to fight, and later, success with girls. Boys who got good grades were ‘sissies’… studies now show that working-class boys like me do much worse in school because they view schoolwork as a feminine endeavor.”

I have two young boys at home, and I’m not surprised that boys who get less attention as children struggle. ADHD is two to three times more common among young boys than girls, with one 2015 U.S. Centers for Disease Control study finding that as many as 14 percent of boys received a diagnosis. Whereas some of my friends’ daughters seem like little adults, my boys do not. Boys and girls mature differently, with the latter doing so faster and earlier. There is significant evidence that their relative maturity leads girls to be better at school. In 2012, 70 percent of U.S. high school valedictorians were girls, and girls attend college at higher rates in most developed countries.

At the high end of the spectrum, college-educated women don’t like to marry non-college-educated men, quite understandably. As the gender ratio of college graduates becomes nearly three women for every two men, this means that almost one in three college-educated women will not find a male partner to marry if they want one, even assuming ideal matching. Thus, among educated women, an increasing number of women will either raise children without a partner or won’t have them. I see this in my social circles; I know many successful professional women in New York City who either don’t have families or are raising children as single moms. Many of them are brilliant, beautiful, amazing women. In a way it’s fine, but in a way it’s far less than ideal. One mom who attended Harvard Business School confided in me that she constantly feels guilty that her daughter will be an only child, but she can’t imagine trying to raise more than one child on her own.

I understand: having and raising children has been the hardest experience of our lives for both my wife and me. I was cocky going into it; I thought to myself, People have had children since the dawn of time. How hard could it be? Now, I try to caution new parents that whatever they go through it’s perfectly normal and to expect to have their lives changed and their spirits stretched. Having children has tested my wife and me as individuals and as a marriage. Both of us agree that we have no idea how any single mom or dad can make it happen unless they have incredibly supportive family members around.

Data bears this out—outcomes for children raised in single-parent households are significantly more adverse in every dimension: education, income, rate of marriage, rate of divorce, health, and so on, even controlling for income of the parent. It also explains partially why 50 percent of Americans live within 18 miles of their mothers—after you have a child you scramble for family.

Frederick Douglass wrote that “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” What he left out is that it’s also very hard to build strong children. I thought starting a company was hard, but being a parent is as hard or harder. I realized that there are many similarities between being a parent and being an entrepreneur. Here is a partial list:

• Everyone’s got an opinion. But no one knows what they’re doing.

• The first two years are brutal.

• No one cares as much as you do.

• On its best days it fills you with meaning and purpose.

• People lie about it all the time.

• Choose your partner wisely.

• Heart is more important than money. But money helps.

• It is very, very hard to outsource.

• You find out who your friends are. And you make some new ones.

• Occasionally the responsibility blows your mind.

• If you knew what it entailed you might not get started. But you’re glad you did.

• There will be a thousand small tasks you never imagined.

• How you spend your time is more important than what you say.

• Everything costs more than you thought it would.

• Most of the work is dirty, thankless, and gritty.

• You learn a lot about yourself. You get tested in ways that you can’t imagine.

• When you find someone who can really help you’re incredibly grateful.

• You have to try to make time for yourself or it won’t happen.

• Whatever your weaknesses are, they will come out.

• You think it’s fragile. But it will surprise you.

• You sometimes do things you weren’t sure you were capable of.

• When it does something great, there’s nothing like it.

• You start out all-important. Yet the goal is to make yourself irrelevant.

• People sometimes give you too much credit.

• There is a lot of noise out there, but at the end of the day it’s your call.

• It gives your life a different dimension. You grow new parts of yourself.

• It’s harder than anyone expects. It’s the best thing ever.

Entrepreneurship is defined as pursuing an opportunity without regard for resources currently under your control. Every parent pursues the best possible opportunities for his or her child while climbing over obstacles and limitations each day. So in a way, all parents are entrepreneurs.

My mind almost broke trying to build Venture for America and raise children (and stay married) simultaneously, despite my wife doing most of the hardest work. You never rest. Basically, being a parent is a ton of freaking work, and doing it alone seems inconceivably difficult. That’s what we’re setting up more and more people, most of them women, to face alone. At a time when raising and educating children and forming our human capital is of the utmost importance, we’re heading in the other direction.