Richard Reeves: Why working-class men are facing the sharpest decline

Richard Reeves argues that this quiet male crisis has been decades in the making, and it’s not the simplistic story most people assume.

From collapsing educational outcomes to shrinking roles in the labor market, men are struggling in ways that challenge our cultural narratives about progress.

RICHARD REEVES: It’s certainly clear that the issues of boys and men haven’t gone away in the last few years. If anything, they’re getting even more attention, which is good when it’s the right kind of attention. And what I’ve noticed is that, perhaps as a result of videos like this and of the broader conversation, is that the permission space to talk about the issues of boys and men seems to have broadened, whereas it felt like a very difficult thing to talk about. It was controversial. You were treading on eggshells all the time. Now it feels a little bit more straightforward. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t still a difficult conversation. I think that a conversation about the challenges of boys and men should be difficult. I think that if you don’t find it an uncomfortable conversation, given some of the challenges that we still have to deal with for women and girls, then maybe you shouldn’t be in that conversation. So it’s still a difficult conversation, but it’s a possible conversation. And I’m really pleased to see many more people now being willing to say, “Okay, we should address this issue.” I think the key to that is to make sure that it’s not seen as zero sum. As soon as people are reassured that looking at the challenges of boys and men, trying to fix those problems is not at the expense of continuing to do work for women and girls. So everyone sort of starts to breathe more easily. Once you get past the “or,” it’s women or men, and you get into the “and,” that we have to rise together, then that’s a big unlock. And what I’ve really noticed is that, once you make that move, once you’ve unlocked the conversation, everybody wants to talk about it. It’s like, you know, you’ve undamned the reservoir. It’s just everybody has sons they’re worried about, husbands they’re worried about, brothers they’re interested in. If you set the stage in the right way, then everybody wants to talk about this issue. I’m Richard Reeves. I’m President of the American Institute for Boys and Men. I’m also the author of the book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why That Matters, and What to Do About It.”

– [Narrator] Chapter 1. “The Abandonment of Men.”

– It’s obviously true as we look around that many men and boys do feel somewhat lost. They don’t quite know their place in society. They don’t quite understand how they’re supposed to be. They very often know how they’re not supposed to be. And so this sense of, “What’s my place in the world, why am I needed, what’s my role going to be going forward?” that’s a very real question that many men and boys are genuinely struggling with. That’s not a confected online idea. That’s a real challenge, and it’s a real question that men have to ask themselves today in a way that they didn’t a few decades ago. One barrier to talking about boys and men is this fear that it’s going to be zero sum, that it takes away from the correct attention we pay to women and girls. But another problem is that as soon as you start to say, “Well, boys are a bit more like this, girls are a bit more like that,” or, “Men are a bit more like this, women are a bit more like that,” people will immediately say, “Well, I know a woman that’s not like that,” or, “a man that’s not like that.” And I’ve come to believe that a huge problem with this whole debate is the unwillingness or inability to imagine overlapping distributions, to say that there can be a difference on average between males and females on whatever we’re talking about. But that doesn’t mean that all women are like all women and all men are like all men. So the analogy is perhaps with height, if you think about the statement that men are taller than women. Very few people would interpret that to mean all men are taller than all women, right? But what it does mean is that about one in seven men are over six foot compared to one in 100 women and the same at the bottom below about five two. So there’s a big overlap in the distributions of height between men and women. And very few people would say that the statement, “Men are taller than women,” is disproven by the fact that you’re walking along the street and you see a woman that’s six foot three or a man that’s five foot two, right? We all know what we mean, that it’s on average. And so when we get into questions around differences in learning style or risk taking, risk of addiction, competitiveness, emotional vocabulary, et cetera. And if you say that there are these differences between males and females, which might matter, we shouldn’t immediately assume that we’re stereotyping every man and woman into that role. I get why people are worried about it because, let me give you a personal example. My son is a fifth grade teacher, and my sister-in-law is an engineer. So even if it’s true that on average some of the preferences that men and women will have might lead them overall to have more men interested in engineering and more women interested in being elementary school teachers, that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with my son or my sister-in-law. There are always going to be people on the other end of the distribution. But it does mean that we should respect and acknowledge where there are these differences on average between the two if it matters. So for example, the greater risk taking that we see among men, especially young men, that really does matter. Understanding that is important for all kinds of things, including public health and public safety. One of the things I’ve noticed is that people are quite quick to blame if young men are struggling, if they’re not in the labor market. There’s the eye roll, and there’s the, “Well, if they could just get off the sofa and stop smoking so much weed and playing video games all day, maybe they’d make something of themselves.” It’s interesting that that instinct to blame is really not as common for other groups as it is for young men. And there are some challenges there for sure, but I’m pretty convinced that it’s not that young men are making this kind of deliberate choice to be kind of video gaming. So like teen boys are like three times as likely, roughly, as teen girls to be playing video games. I’ve raised three sons, all in their twenties now, and actually it can be quite socially connecting in the right way if it amplifies and adds to in real-life relationships. So I am not convinced at all that this is a choice on the part of young men, which could be described as just kind of selfish or weak, which is sometimes this sense, just get this sense of frustration among them. Then they pull themselves up by their bootstraps type thing, you know, “Man up, get off the sofa.” And of course, it’s true that people should take responsibility. Of course, I wanted my sons to have agency and get into the labor market and have their own lives, for sure. But we are too quick to just point to something like video games and say that that’s the cause of the detachment of men. I’m more inclined to think that it’s the consequence of the detachment of men. And it is true that it gives you somewhere else to go. I would say that gaming and to some extent pornography and some other online activities, what they do provide for young men is a place to retreat to, which didn’t exist before. I think it is fair to say that if things are kind of tough and there’s an easy and comfortable place to retreat to, then you’re gonna see more people doing that. But it’s a mistake to blame those places for the retreat. It is not that these young men just lack responsibility, they don’t care anymore, they’re just feckless, to use that great old word. They’re feckless, and so that’s why they’re wasting their lives away. My experience of this is that if you enter into this conversation with a young man, with the mindset, “What’s wrong with you? Why are you wasting your life away?” that is not an effective way into the conversation. That is a way of blaming men for their problems and just saying it’s down to an individual lack of character rather than some structural issues in the labor market, in the education system, and possibly in the dating world as well. It’s a very difficult balance there. It’s one of these areas where it’s just much easier to take a strong line one way or the other, right, between individual responsibility and structural problems. And of course, the challenge lies in the middle. But I have noticed that perhaps more socially conservative people are at least consistent about this. They tend to point to individual responsibility regardless of who it is, whereas on the political left, I would say that men are perhaps the only group that they’re quite as willing to point the finger at and blame for their own problems. I really welcome the rise in attention being paid to structural challenges for various groups. And I think that that’s one we need to apply to the issues facing young men as well. One of the most important things for anybody is to be connected and have purpose, to be doing something that they value and other people value with their lives. And what we’ve seen is a decline in the share of men in the labor force, and the decline has been perhaps most worrying among young men. Now, you might say, “Well, fewer men are in the workforce doing the kind of traditional male thing,” which is being the breadwinner, but that’s great because they’re now raising the kids, and maybe their partners or their wives or girlfriends are in the labor force, and it’s been a swap. But that’s not what we see. Women who are out on the labor force are pretty likely to be caring for a child, especially if they’re young. But men who are out on the labor force, very often honestly the answer from economists and social scientists to the question, “What are those men doing?” is, “We don’t know.” And sometimes we don’t even know where they’re living. And so it’s a much deeper kind of detachment. We’re not just talking about non-employment. We’re talking about a break from society more generally. And we see that in all kinds of other areas too. The best way I think to think about some of these men is lost. And I mean that in two senses. One is like lost to the social scientists in the sense that some of us can’t find them, we can’t quite work out what their source of income is, don’t know who they’re living with sometimes, just hard to get at, and the data’s just hard to find. In the data, they’re lost in that sense but also I think probably in the cultural sense too of feeling somewhat lost in terms of not having a clear anchor in the workplace or family or community. And so there’s this sense in which many men, perhaps especially young men, are lacking a bit of an anchor, and that means you drift. In terms of getting more men into work, there’s two sides to that. One is better training and skills. So it is honestly shameful how little the US invests in apprenticeships and in vocational training, which skew very male. And I now see that as a feature, not a bug. If actually it turns out that those more vocational tracks are just a bit better, work a bit better for more men than for women, great, ’cause the mainstream education system is skewing much more female. And so we’ve got to do better at the way we spend our dollars and our time in terms of those skills, specific skills. The other big thing we can do is to encourage more men into these growing fields like healthcare. So it’s a problem for the healthcare profession if it doesn’t have any men in it ’cause representation matters, and they need workers. We have big labor shortages now and bigger ones coming in areas like nursing, potentially even teaching. And you can’t solve a labor shortage with half the workforce, or at least you shouldn’t try to solve a labor shortage with half the workforce. But it’s also a problem for men because these professions, the ones that we call heal professions, particularly in health and education and requiring more literacy, they’re growing fast, especially in healthcare. There are jobs coming, and they’re gonna grow. And so for men who are looking for jobs, that’s where the jobs are going to be found. And so finding ways to make the jobs we stereotypically now see as female in areas like healthcare and education and opening them up to men is a win-win-win. It’s a win for those professions who need more workers. It’s a win for the people using those services, the students or patients who would like representation. But it’s also a win for men because that’s where the jobs are coming from. A lot of the trends in the economy, in family life have just been much harder for working class men. So if you think about men without a college degree, for example, their wages are no higher today than they were in 1979. That’s almost half a century of stagnant wages for most men without a college degree. Among men without a college degree in their thirties and forties, only about half of them are living with children. That’s a significant drop from just a few decades ago. And so you’re seeing this disconnection from family life. You’re seeing stagnant wages. And men who are born into lower income families, they are worse off on most measures than men who were born just 15 years earlier into those families. So we’re seeing a declining economic social and family trajectory for men who are working class or towards the bottom of the economic distribution. For men at the top of the distribution, men who’ve got college degrees, who are in the labor market, you know, they’re doing better, that you continue to see their wages rising. And that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still challenges for those men, but the sharp edge of the issues facing boys and men is absolutely being felt by the men with the least economic power. I think that’s part of the problem with this conversation. If you have this conversation in more educated or more affluent circles, if you’re having this conversation with people who they’ve all got college degrees, they’re all working and you try to persuade them of the problems of boys and men, that’s much harder than if you go into a lower income community or to a working class community, where everyone’s like, “Yeah, well, duh,” because there is a huge class element to this, which is very often missed in the debate. And of course, there’s so much more to do for women at the top of the distribution. There aren’t enough women CEOs. There aren’t enough women politicians. We still don’t have enough female representation in those senior positions that you can very often just be looking up and seeing the lack of women. But if you just pause for a moment and look down or look at those who are in less fortunate economic circumstances than you, that’s when you really see the struggles of men becoming most acute. It is true that only 10% of CEOs from the fortune 500 are women. It is great news that that’s more than the zero that it was actually just as recently as the seventies, but it’s still only 10%. But there are also only 500 fortune 500 CEOs. So we are talking about a tiny percentage of the population. It is a huge issue that we don’t have enough women in those senior roles, but there are tens of millions of working class men and women struggling to figure out this new labor market and this new economy. And the changes in the economy have been particularly brutal for working class men, and there we are talking in order of magnitude of tens of millions that we’re talking about. And so it’s really important to be able to hold both of these thoughts in our head, which is that of course it matters that we need to do more for women, close the gender pay gap, more representation of women in those senior positions. But I think it’s a general point that it’s been a problem for too many people that they focused almost exclusively on the kind of elite part of the problem, the apex of our society. And that has meant that there has been a really dangerous neglect of many of the problems of people who are not worrying about who’s gonna be CEO. They’re worried about who’s gonna bring home enough money to feed the kids this week. It’s pretty early days in the online sports betting world, but this is a huge change in our culture, no doubt. I mean, anybody that hasn’t noticed the explosion in online sports betting is living under a rock, frankly. And we do now know that in states where you see sports betting online going legal, an increase in bankruptcies, reduction in credit score, and general economic difficulties, especially for young men and especially for the lower income young men. And so there’s pretty good evidence that, wherever we end up, we have to work much harder to protect the most vulnerable from these potentially addictive behaviors and these really kind of economically very damaging behaviors, including sports betting. Gambling is a great example of an area where there is a real gender difference, and on average men are much more likely to become addicted to most things actually but especially to things like kind of online gambling. And there are all kinds of reasons for that about the dopamine system, especially among young men, et cetera, and this kind of high that you get from the reward of kind of a bet paying off, et cetera. And so that’s just, there’s a reason why this is predominantly a problem among men, which is men are more vulnerable to that particular kind of risk, that particular kind of addiction. There’s something else going on here too, which is the get rich quick thing as well. And online there’s a bit of a culture around like men need to get wealthy, they need to do it quickly, they’re not gonna work, you know, they’re not gonna do it slowly through the labor market. And that actually isn’t just about gambling, that sort of thing like crypto, it’s things like, you know, day trading, et cetera, which is this sense of wanting to get wealthy fast. And of course, almost nobody can get wealthy fast. That’s incredibly unlikely. If you are going to get any kind of wealth, it’s gonna happen slowly through working and saving. But I think there’s a real problem among young men, which is like they don’t wanna work for like corporates. They don’t wanna climb their way up a labor market. They don’t wanna start in an entry level job and work their way up, not when there are these sort of very shiny objects online, especially that could make you rich quickly. And it is a little bit like a fish hook. It’s some like it’s a shiny object kind of in the water, and you go, “Oh, oh, and that’s gonna make me wealthy, that’s gonna solve my problem,” and you grab it, and then you are hooked. And those algorithms and those online platforms are just very good at playing into that higher risk appetite among young men, especially risk taking, but also into this cultural sense that a lot of young men have of wanting to get rich quick. And of course, there are examples online of men who’ve done that and who’ve managed to get a lot of wealth very quickly. They are the exception that proves the rule, but it’s a beguiling story, for sure, and I worry a lot actually that we have overdone the importance of entrepreneurship in recent debates. We’ve got entrepreneurship. That’s how you’re gonna… We need more entrepreneurs, and that’s how you get out of poverty if you’re a young man. And that is almost certainly not true. What will get you out of poverty is a good education and then steady rising up a career ladder. But nothing I’ve just said sounds exciting to a young man, and I understand why it doesn’t. And then along come the the shiny fish hooks that can catch them in the waters that they swim in now, which is obviously online. It is surely no coincidence that it is poorer young men, those living in the poorer parts of our country who are most at risk, and that should send some alarm bells ringing. One area where men are clearly at greater risk is of being unsheltered and without a home. So men account for 70% of those who are without a home and are unsheltered. Actually, the main reason why men who are unhoused are more likely to be on the streets, to be unsheltered is ’cause they’re not with children. If you look at those who’ve got children, whether they’re men or women, they’re much more likely to be in some kind of accommodation. And that’s a really good example of ways in which kind of family connections can affect men and women differently. Men who aren’t living with or in touch with their children are much higher risk of all kinds of things, suicide, drug use, but also of having to end up living on the streets. And so men who are disconnected from children are the ones we should very often be most worried about. There’s been a big increase in the homeless population generally, more than 1/3 since COVID. But within that, most of that rise, more than half of that rise is actually accounted for among men. And it’s very important that, as policy makers, people are willing to acknowledge that gendered element to that particular problem. In some ways, being homeless and particularly ending up on the streets is the most acute sign of being disconnected, being socially disconnected, economically disconnected, maybe separate from your family. It then gets wrapped into other issues around drug addiction, et cetera. And so I think the fact that we see that population skewing much more male is for all kinds of reasons. But one reason is because it both reflects a lack of connection to family, to friends, to the labor market. But it also, of course, creates that lack of connection because then it gets harder to find a job. It gets harder to remain in your children’s lives if you’re struggling with living on the streets with drug addiction and with everything else that goes along with that. But I think it’s particularly protective for men because they’re very often likely to find themselves in situations where they actually genuinely don’t know if they’re needed. They don’t know if their kids need them anymore. They are pretty sure that the labor market doesn’t need them anymore. And you can start to doubt whether anybody really needs you. And that, of course, is fatal. You can get this downward spiral that sets in where one kind of disconnection, say from family, leads to another one, say, from work. So you’re unemployed, not in touch with your family, which might then make you more vulnerable to addiction, which it does, drug addiction, which might make it harder for you to have a home, which means that you’ll end up homeless. And all of those things make each of the previous disconnections more likely, right? It’s much harder to remain in your kids’ lives if you’ve got huge drug problems and you don’t have a job, for example. One of the things we know is that when men are in their children’s lives or maybe when children are in their dads’ lives, if you wanna think about it both ways, those men are more likely to work, they’re more likely to be healthy, they find it easier to stave off addictions. So at some level feeling needed and having that sense of being needed, being part of your daily life is very protective for everybody. And so there’s something about the structures of daily life and the social connectedness that comes from feeling needed that I think is really incredibly protective for men, especially. I have to caveat anything I say about this with the fact that I am 55 years old and have been married for 25 years, but I have sons in their twenties at various stages in terms of their relationships. I do think that it’s a challenging time for dating, and that’s for some good reasons and for some bad reasons. I think the good reasons are that we’ve really broken down some of the kind of stereotypes around what men and women are supposed to do in the world, right? Women’s rising economic independence gives them much more freedom and choice, and that was the point of the women’s movement. Gloria Steinem, one of my heroes, famously said, “We are going to make marriage a choice rather than a necessity.” That is huge liberation, arguably the biggest economic liberation in human history, still ongoing, still unfinished, but the economic rise of women has completely changed the economic relationship and therefore the social relationship between men and women. And I think we’re all still struggling to kind of come to terms with that tearing up, honestly, the old scripts. And what does that mean in terms of what are you looking for in a partner? What I have discovered, though, is that both men and women want someone who will be with them in the partnership shoulder to shoulder and someone who has agency. They’re not necessarily looking for exactly the same things in each other, but they are looking for someone who’s with them, someone who will work together in a genuine partnership. So for example, there’s a question that asks young women what they’re looking for in a potential marriage partner, and breadwinning potential is always pretty high on the list, top three in the list, not so much the other way around, but having spoken to a lot of young women about this, I’ve become convinced that that’s just a proxy question for, “This guy has his act together.” The labor market’s a really good signal, right? If you can do well in the workforce, that probably means you’ve got a whole set of skills and habits and disciplines that will also make you a good father. And so I think that’s what’s going on here, and what women are looking for, by and large, isn’t a trad husband so that they can be a trad wife to that trad husband. Of course that’s true for some, but what they are looking for is someone who has agency, who has skill, and who has commitment. And he may well end up applying that as a stay-at-home dad for a while or in the community in some way rather than in the narrow economic role of breadwinner. But they do want guys who’ve got some mojo. They do want guys who’ve got some skills. They do want guys who’ve got their act together, and good for them. And men want that from women too, but many young men I think are struggling to find the ways to develop all of those skills and that agency and feel somewhat thrown around by the current cultural environment. And I think if you can’t have empathy for a young man who feels like he genuinely is being told contradictory things all the time about how he’s supposed to be in the world, too masculine, not masculine enough, et cetera, then I think you lack some sort of basic empathetic impulse because I do think that’s a difficult set of rapids that young men are now navigating. And as I said, that’s for both the good reason of the rise of women, but I think the bad reason is ’cause of the kind of cultural noise now, which has led in some cases to this overreaction now that you’re seeing in some circles and in some parts of the internet, which is a reassertion of a very, I wouldn’t even call it traditional masculinity, I would call it reactionary in the sense of just reacting against the rise of women and wanting to go back, right? The solution to the problems of men is to go back. And so if you’re a young man right now, I think it would be fair to feel like the message from people on the cultural left is kind of, “We’re turning our back on you.” And the message from the cultural right is, “We’re trying to turn back the clock on women.” And something usually beats nothing, both in politics and in culture. And so the difficult task of positively talking about the role of men and the need for men in our families and our communities, even in some ways, especially in this world of greater equality, is just a task that I think too few people are willing to undertake. They fear that if they talk about why we need men, if they’re more from the left, that somehow will betray them as an anti-women or wanting to go back, right, that saying there’s something special and needed about men, that can make some people feel uncomfortable. But what that does is it just creates this huge vacuum. And I think that vacuum can then be filled by more reactionary voices who say, “Yeah, we need men to be real men again,” implicitly or sometimes explicitly saying, “And we need women to be real women again,” by which they mean more of a trad wife model. And so we have to go back, and we are not going back. We just shouldn’t wanna go back, and we don’t wanna go back. We have to go forward. If you’re a young man and your dad knew what he was doing and he had a clear role, clear place in the labor market, clear place in the family, you’re poorer than him, you’re struggling to figure out what it means, someone coming along and saying, “Well, why don’t we go back to the world of your father or grandfathers?” You can totally see the appeal of that, and we need a better appeal. I worked at the Brookings Institution before, which is a venerable century plus old think tank. But I came to believe that the problem with the whole debate about boys and men wasn’t just a lack of facts and understanding and awareness. It was that there were no institutions whose job it was in a very straightforward and an empirical nonpartisan way to basically wake up every day and focus on these issues and do research and put out high-quality data. There just wasn’t. There were lots of institutions doing that work on behalf of women and girls and doing really good work on behalf of women and girls, but there just weren’t any institutions doing that on behalf of boys and men. And that created an asymmetry, an imbalance in the debate, which I thought was really unhelpful because what that meant was the people who were noticing some of these facts, some of these trends were very often people online, maybe amateurs, and that’s fine. I’m a big believer in people being able to get their own facts and discuss them online, but it didn’t have the authority that I thought this debate needed. And so there was something of a gap between the reluctance on the one hand for people to even talk about this issue and then people who were talking about the issue, and they were doing so quite often with facts that weren’t quite right or that weren’t framed the right way. So they were cherry-picking their facts sometimes in the kind of online, more of the men’s rights movement, I guess. And so it just felt to me like a pretty big gap in the middle here, and I think that the interest in our work shows that there is appetite from serious people for high-quality information and research on what’s happening to boys and men. And for me, it’s also part of trying to move into solutions. One of the real issues with this whole debate is that it can become a bit like the secular equivalent of the “Book of Lamentations.” There’s just lots of teeth gnashing, lots of what’s going on with these guys, what’s happening to boys and men. And you can almost have like a competition for who can describe the crisis of men and boys in the most vivid ways. And I don’t want to deny, of course, that there are real problems. That’s why I’m doing this work, but I see a real appetite now for solutions and so saying, “Well, what do we do about it?” Let’s understand the problem for sure, but the reason to understand the problem is not just so that we can bang on and on about the problem. It is so that we can then start to find some effective solutions.

– [Narrator] Chapter 2. “Why representation matters.”

– I don’t like using the word “crisis” too often. I think it’s really overused sometimes. Like maybe I should write a book, “The Crisis of Crises,” ’cause just so many crises. But as far as mental health is concerned, I don’t think the term is inappropriate. I’m really troubled by a lot of the trends we see for both men and women, boys and girls. I think it’s true to say that a lot more attention is being paid particularly to the mental health of teen girls and young women than is often the case for teen boys and young men. And both men and women, teen girls and teen boys, are really struggling with mental health issues but in somewhat different ways. And so the mental health crisis is playing out differently for young men and for young women. And that’s very often I think lost in the general debate. And so we see a huge decline in the share of male therapists and counselors. We see a lot of attention going to the issues of teen girls, in particular, and that’s important, but we don’t see enough attention being paid to the equally-deep problems of the mental health of boys and young men. One of the things that I’ve discovered recently is the huge rise in deaths from drug poisoning among men that has increased sixfold since 2001. And the increase in deaths from drug poisonings among men means that this century we’ve lost an additional 400,000 men. That’s the difference. The increase is 400,000. 400,000 men is exactly the same number that we lost in World War II. And so just since 2001, the rise in drug poisoning deaths among men has meant the loss of the equivalent of a world war in terms of the deaths of men. Drug poisoning deaths are up. It is already the case that men account for the majority of those deaths, so men account for 70% of drug poisoning deaths. They account for 80% of suicides in the US. And one of the most troubling things that we found in our work is that since 2010, the rise in suicide has been almost entirely driven among young men. So among young men below the age of about 30, the increase in suicides has been almost 1/3, whereas up until 2010, this was the period of great recession, huge economic problems, we saw a really big increase in the suicide rate among middle-aged men. But since 2010 something’s happened. The nature of the suicide crisis among men has shifted, and we don’t really know why. I think representation really matters, and it matters in mental health. So it matters that only one in five psychologists, one in five social workers, and lower numbers of counselors are men, and all of those numbers have more than halved just in the last few decades. And so just as I think it’s a problem that we have this huge decline in the share of male teachers, now down to 23% in K12, it is a huge problem if the mental health professions become female professions, which is what is happening. In front of our eyes, those professions are becoming female professions, and that matters because, for many men, boys, depending on the nature of their issue, they may well find it easier to talk to a male therapist or a male psychologist. I really worry that the whole field of mental health ends up being coded as female. We have a lot of attention being paid to the problems, particularly of teen girls in mental health terms, that’s great, but less attention being paid to the huge rise in suicide rates, for example, among teen boys and young men. So if you’re a young man, say, and you’re struggling with a mental health problem, and you go to a website, and you only see images of women, you go to a counseling place at school or a college, and they’re mostly female providers, and just the whole vibe around it just feels like this is something that women are more comfortable talking about, and they’re more represented in. And it’s already difficult to get many men to come forward and get help for mental health problems. They are much less likely to do so than women. So we should be redoubling our efforts to reach those men and make it easier for them to come through the door, easier for them to put their hands up and say that they’re struggling. And one way we can do that is by at least reversing the decline in the share of men in those professions. I would be the first person to celebrate the fact that we have seen a tripling in the share of women in STEM professions, but that has to be combined with getting more men into these traditionally female professions, especially in the care economy, especially mental health. If we do think that representation matters in professions like teaching, like mental health, by race but also by gender, then it is astonishing to me that we can watch the line, the share of men drop from roughly half men in social work and psychology just a few decades ago, down to one in five now and continuing to fall, and you see it in the classrooms now, fewer and fewer and fewer men. I just was at an event where a young man who was in a psychology classroom dropped out, and one of the reasons he dropped out was ’cause he was the only guy. And it is hard to be the only guy in a psychology classroom, just as it’s hard to be the only woman in an engineering classroom, right? And so we’ve got to work equally hard to break down some of those gender stereotypes around those professions. In 1971, men accounted for slightly more than half, 56%, of people doing a psychology undergraduate degree. Now it’s 20% and falling. In the space of a really short period of time, we’ve taken an area like psychology, which used to be pretty gender balanced, it was neither a male nor a female profession, and now it’s becoming a female profession. And I’m gonna risk saying that the psychology profession cratering the share of men is as big a problem as the lack of women in, say, areas like tech or engineering, where we’re working very hard and we have to make more progress. And maybe it’s even more important, maybe that some of these professions like teaching, like mental health, maybe those are professions where representation matters even more, representation of all kinds. And so the alarm bells should be ringing very loudly when critical professions like teaching, psychology, and social work are becoming gendered right in front of us, and we’re not doing anything about that. And I don’t think we would be as sanguine about those trends if it was the other way round. I think that if a psychology profession was emptying out women and becoming an all-male profession, I think that there would quite rightly be real concerns. But I think that the concerns should apply either way. One of the things I think about is how to have impact in a space like this, and you have to start by making people realize there’s a problem. So there is a raising an awareness issue. And then in this case, you have to build a permission space. It has to become safe to talk about, especially if you’re a policymaker. And then you have to start thinking, “Well, what should we do about it?” And so I’ve been very pleased recently to see many governors, in particular, so Governor Wes Moore in Maryland, Governor Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, and Governor Spencer Cox in Utah, really making some pretty big announcements about their commitment to doing more for boys and men without in any way backing away from their ongoing commitment to work for women and girls. So you’re starting to see people wanting to govern around this issue, wanting to make policy around this issue. And some of the things that they’re looking at are things like increasing the share of men in their mental health workforce, having more targeted outreach programs to do suicide prevention of very specifically targeted men who are at four times of risk of losing their life to suicide, especially young men, and a big push around getting more male teachers into our classrooms. One of the wonderful things about male teachers is that they’re also coaches. So about 1/3 of the men who are teaching K-12 are also coaching. So the school bell rings, they keep working, they keep doing coaching, and that’s a great additional benefit we get from getting those men into teaching. And we actually see a decline in the share of boys doing sports. And one reason for that may well be the decline in the share of coaches who we used to get just as a result of getting those more men into teaching. So there are some programs, but I think we also have to realize that this takes time. And if you think about any kind of movement to raise awareness, then it takes time to increase the awareness, in this case increase the permission, and then actually try to understand what’s going on. One of the most difficult things about my current role is I spend some time persuading someone, a policy maker, a governor or someone who works in a school, school district, mental health care professional, persuading them that this is an issue. And then when they get it, they sometimes get it really fast. They’re like, “Okay, I got it. What should I do?” And sometimes my answer is, “I don’t know.” We don’t know enough yet to know how to tackle this problem. We have to do more research, and more research required is the least sexy sentence probably in the English language, especially to policy makers who are frustrated, and they wanna act. That’s what they’re wanting. They want to act, and there are some things where I’m pretty clear we should be doing more, like more vocational training, more male teachers, et cetera. But there are many other areas where I think we have to be honest and say, “Look, we’ve gotta figure this out. We’re in the early days of this.” The danger is that a lot of money can be spent very quickly on things that turn out not to work. And so it sometimes feels like a difficult balance here because, on the one hand, I’m trying to sort of almost like shake people into awareness and say, “This is an issue,” but then also say, “Oh, and by the way, we have to do a lot more research. We have to do a lot more to figure out what to do about it.” And that’s a really difficult balance, but I think that’s true of a lot of these kinds of fields. Certainly, there is a lot more awareness and willingness to talk about this issue of boys and men than there was before. I think part of that is just because it’s true. These trends are real, and people can feel them in their own lives. And so then if you get data that comes along and it confirms your personal experience, then I think that it can actually happen quite quickly. A big part of my role has been to try and take private concerns and point out that they’re public issues. And so it’s not just that your son struggles at school. It’s that the education system isn’t serving our boys well enough. You’re not alone. There’s also growing concern about young men and how lost many of them feel. That has been sharpened particularly among folks on the center left by the results of the last election, in which young men swung pretty strongly towards the Republican side, much more so than previous elections. Of course, there was a general swing towards the Republicans in the ’24 election, but it was particularly marked among young men who actually broke slightly for the Republicans. And it’s very unusual for young voters to vote for the more conservative party. And so that caught a lot of people by surprise. It shouldn’t have done. It was well signaled in the polls running up to the election. It’s made a lot of people realize that there are a lot of young men out there who are up for grabs. And I mean that not just in the political sense of like their votes are up for grabs and I think could easily be up for grabs in both directions, frankly, but what I mean is that up for grabs more culturally. There’s this kind of general sense of a lot of young men feeling a bit caught in a pinball machine almost, like being told, “You’re too masculine,” on Tuesdays and that, “You’re not masculine enough,” on Wednesdays and that you’re supposed to say this if you listen to one podcaster and say that if you listen to somebody else and just this sense of confusion that I think a lot of young men feel and to some extent rejection. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it’s the youngest of the young men who are most likely to move towards the Republicans in the last election because they are the men who grew up in the era since 2016. 2016 is a notable year for many reasons, But one thing it’s notable for is for the invention and popularization of the term “toxic masculinity.” And that’s been a frame through which the gender debate has actually been played out ever since then. But like if you were 10 in 2016 when toxic masculinity was born, you were voting in 2024. And so there’s a whole group of young men who I think have been through quite a turbulent time in terms of this debate about gender. And a lot of that debate was necessary and good. For example, I’m a huge supporter of the Me Too movement, but I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job of calling men in as well as calling them out. And that has become an issue, particularly on the center left. I think that on the progressive side of the political spectrum, it was very difficult until recently for many people to accept that men might have problems because they were convinced that men were the problem. And if you can’t get past that idea that men are the problem, then it’s difficult to accept that they have problems to address. One of the things that really worries me is the way in which young men and young women have been increasingly persuaded that their problems are the fault of the other side. So on the right, there’s a strong tendency, I think, to say to young men, “Yeah, you’re struggling,” which is true, and you know why? It’s ’cause of all those women taking jobs, taking positions, feminism’s gone too far, et cetera, and almost blame women or the rise of women for the problems of men, which is very reactionary. But I would say it’s true the other way around too. I think that many people on the political left have said to young women, “Sure you’re struggling. You’re not gonna earn as much, and the labor market, it doesn’t work as well for you.” And you quite rightly may have some fears for your own prospects. And you know why? Because of those men, because of patriarchy, because of toxic masculinity. And so weirdly, both sides have managed to politicize young men and young women almost against each other just at a moment in history where you’d want young people to be arm in arm against the structural problems that they’re facing in the economy. I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy, but if it was a conspiracy, what you would do is you’d find a way to persuade young men and young women that what was happening was the fault of the other side of the gender divide, rather than the fault of the economy or our healthcare system or the labor market, right? And so I think in different ways, the politics of gender have ended up becoming really way too personal and not structural enough. If we’re not careful, these conversations can shut the conversation down with boys and young men, rather than opening it up. And so when we’re talking about online influencers, we’re talking about some of the kinda more reactionary figures online, sometimes parents sort of react to discovering that their son, for example, is consuming video content from somebody like Andrew Tate, pretty well known misogynist influencer. It’s almost like they’re watching hardcore porn. They slam the laptop with the same kind of moral fervor as if they caught them looking at some pretty kind of horrible porn. And that’s the wrong response. It’s a natural response, but it’s the wrong response. Instead, you’ve gotta have curiosity. You’ve gotta figure out like, “Well, why are you interested in this?” Let’s have that argument because one of the things that the most successful reactionary online figures say is, “Nobody will want you to talk about watching my stuff or listening to my stuff. If you even mention to somebody that you’re interested in this, watch how they react. Watch how your mom reacts. Watch how your school reacts, and see how they react.” They said it as a test, and then so sure enough, if you raise this issue, you say to your mom that you’ve been consuming some of this content or you’re doubting some of what you’ve been taught, and if the reaction is immediately, like, “How dare you watch that ,” you’ve just proved the point that the reactionary was making. And this is one of those moments where it’s hard, but I’m speaking here as a parent as much as a policy wonk, is that you take some deep breaths, you try to be open-minded, you don’t in any way compromise your own values, and you have some curiosity, and you try to become an ally and a partner to your son as they navigate this difficult online world and offline world. And I worry sometimes that the uninformed, frankly, reaction that many middle-aged policy makers are having to some of these issues online, A, they look out of touch and they sound out of touch, but it also, it has this really chilling effect on an open conversation about what’s really going on. And that then just drives these boys and young men even further into the recesses of what’s online. The question is, who’s having an honest and good faith conversation about this? And I don’t think that forcing boys and girls to kind of watch a fictional drama in schools, which is by definition fictional and, no, not true to life in many ways, is going to open up that conversation. At least it won’t open it up for most boys. So I worry that it will actually backfire and be unhelpful. There’s a big difference between a show like “Adolescence” becoming a big Netflix hit for people watching it, and governments, as the UK government has, proposing showing that in in every secondary school. Then it’s a matter of policy, and therefore I think it becomes an issue that we should pay more attention to. And there’s a real danger that you take something that’s fictional and assume that it’s more true to life than it really is. It can create a moral panic. It can make many parents fear that they’re kind of inadvertently raising a monster, which is almost certainly not true. So the good news about something like a show like “Adolescence” is that it draws attention to some of the kind of risks online, some of the more reactionary figures online. It’s good. It’s good. Parents should be thoughtful about that, but the downside is that it can run into this common problem we have when we’re discussing the issues of boys and men, which is that they’re just, you know, a couple of clicks away from becoming kind of an incel, violent criminal, and that’s just not true. And the presumption that that might be about to happen can actually shut the conversation down. I think the idea that you can somehow just invent like a progressive version of Andrew Tate or somebody and just throw them online, add water, and here’s this new, suddenly globally famous alternative, that’s not how online influence works. It grows organically. It grows through algorithms. It grows through clicks. And so I think it’s just unrealistic to think you can somehow just create these. Things don’t get created that way. So first of all, it’s very naive, I think, but the bigger issue for me is that the best antidote to an unserious online male role model, I’m using that term advisedly, is an in real life flesh and blood actual man in the lives of boys. The way to beat the online version of it is by having male teachers, male coaches, fathers, uncles, neighbors, et cetera, just being a living and breathing version of what it means to be a man. I continue to believe that in the long run, boys, young men will believe their eyes more than their ears. And so if there isn’t enough of a sense of, “What does it mean to be a man in my community, in my home, in my school?” et cetera, if there’s a lack of real life men showing what it means to be a man rather than telling you how to be a man, then I think that creates a vacuum, which then gets filled by online figures. I honestly believe that the way to beat the online world is offline, is in real life. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be online. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t, of course, support the people who are, and there are lots of people in the so-called manosphere, a term I think is probably now redundant because I dunno who’s included in it anymore, but there are lots of guys online, lots doing fitness stuff, doing kind of motivational stuff. I really love, for example, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “Pump Club.” I dunno if you’ve seen any of that, and what’s great about that is that, like, and probably I sympathize with this, like somebody will show a video of themselves doing their first pushup, right? And they manage to do like one or two pushups, and then Arnold himself will come on and say, “That’s great, go for it,” et cetera. It’s incredibly warm, and it’s like welcoming, and so there’s a lot of really great stuff happening around this stuff online. But in the long run, you can beat an Andrew Tate video with a classroom exercise or a hike up a mountain with your scout group any day of the week. If there’s a young man, and he kind of watches some stuff online, and it drifts into kind of misogynist stuff or whatever, then first of all, which man is he gonna talk to about that, right? Maybe the father. Certainly, it’s something I spoke to my sons about, but like who are they gonna talk to about that? Who are they gonna test those ideas on? Probably a man. So is there a man in their lives they can test that on? But also then, they’re gonna look at the guys, and they’re gonna say, “Does my teacher or my scout leader or my uncle act like Andrew Tate?” No. Is he a good guy? Yes. Would I rather be more like him? Well, hopefully the answer is yes. Well, there is a big question. “Should we have any single-sex space?” Should we have male-only spaces or female-only spaces? Maybe we should just get rid of them all together. I think as a general point, we don’t want them in the workplace as places where power and favors are traded, right? There’s a reasonable suspicion of what was called the old boys club and the idea that kind of men were congregating in male spaces, and that power and influence were being shared in those spaces. We’ve quite rightly tried to turn against that, but that’s very different to the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. It’s very different to youth organizations, and I think it’s a mistake to move from the correct claim that we shouldn’t have an old boys club to saying that we shouldn’t have Boy Scouts or we shouldn’t have single-sex classes or even single-sex sports for both boys and girls. I’m quite angry at the scouts for giving up Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts of America no longer exists. It’s now called Scouting for America, and girls are allowed in. Girl Scouts remains Girl Scouts and single sex. And the reason I’m angry about that is because I’ve been a scout leader, I was a scout, et cetera, is I think for pretty progressive reasons, which is that single-sex spaces when done well, they don’t amplify the more stereotypically male or female characteristics. They help to balance them out. And so in Girl Scouts, for example, there’s a huge emphasis on things like leadership and going into STEM, taking more assertive positions, et cetera. So they’re kind of working. Girl Scouts don’t spend a huge amount of time with the girls talking about the need to be more caring or more nurturing or to open up emotionally to each other or be there for each other. They spend a lot more time on things like being more competitive, being more aggressive, being more assertive, right? And I think as a result of that, Girl Scouts has done a really good job of actually kind of helping girls to kind of balance out some of those perhaps more naturally occurring tendencies with others. In Boy Scouts, this is certainly my experience as a scout leader, you don’t have to typically work very hard with boys to make them more competitive. Boys will turn throwing trash into a trash can into a competition. You don’t generally have to go this idea of more being more aggressive ’cause that’s a little bit more on average baked in. But what you do instead is you work on teamwork. You work on how to care for the other people in your patrol. You learn how to love each other and to serve each other. And so you balance out so that hopefully as a result of those single-sex spaces, you actually end up with both men and women who are somewhat more fully filled out. There’s like a stereotype of like, boys’ spaces will make boys more boyish. But actually I think the opposite’s true. I think that boys’ spaces, whether it’s teams or scouts, actually help boys learn to love, learn to care, learn to be of service, think about other people. And the same with like girl spaces done well, they don’t make girls girlier. They actually help them to kind of develop other skills, and so done properly and in the right balance, I actually think that single-sex spaces make a lot of sense. I certainly don’t think we want to end up with a world where we think that it is necessary or good to have single-sex spaces only for girls, and we get rid of all of the ones that existed for boys. It’s pretty clear to most people that when boys are around girls, the presence of the girls affects how the boys behave, including towards each other and vice versa. It’s one of the strong arguments that’s been made, for example, for kind of single-sex girls’ schools, is to get girls away from some of the kind of presence of boys and what that means. In practice in an all-boys space, what it allows you to do is work more on skills around emotion, sharing, caring, et cetera. You may not use that language, particularly if it’s like a team sport or something. It’ll be more around, maybe use more masculine language, right, the other fellow first or the team first or whatever. But what you are really learning about is love and care and nurturing. I just think some of that’s easier to do if you’re not feeling the gaze of your female peers and vice versa too. And so if you’re trying to kind of incubate spaces where you can really kind of develop full human beings, there is something to be said for at least some spaces where you’re doing that in a single-sex environment. The share of boys playing sports is going down, and that’s for all kinds of reasons. But a big problem there is the loss of team sports. I think team sports for boys is a place and a space within which they kind of learn to think about each other, to be part of a bigger whole. They learn to love each other. There’s a real solidarity and camaraderie in team sports that I think is very good for girls and boys but looks especially good for boys, that that’s a safe space within which they learn a lot of the skills, including those social skills, those teamwork skills, those caring skills that they’re gonna need to be good fathers, to be good husbands, and to be good workers. I also think that coaches are mental health professionals in disguise. They’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on a bench or in a group. They’re working with boys or with young men, and they’re very often noticing that they’re struggling. And they can, in a very, very safe way, in a non-threatening way, they can open up a conversation with them. And there’s a reason I think why so many men will say that a coach played an hugely important part in their role, especially if they didn’t have a strong relationship with their father. It’s a trope at this point to say that coaches are father figures, but it’s also a truth that for many boys they absolutely do play that role for men. I’ve seen this. I have this image in my mind of a coach sitting next to a young man, a boy or a young man, and they’re just sitting like this shoulder to shoulder, and the coach is saying, “How are you? You seem a little bit off today. Everything okay? How’s stuff at home? How are things with your mom? Did you sort that thing out,” right? And they’re probably watching the game a bit too, and what’s really interesting about that is it’s beautiful, but it’s also they’re shoulder to shoulder. And one of the things we know is that men communicate more comfortably with each other shoulder to shoulder as opposed to face to face. When men are face to face with each other, that’s quite a threatening position. Now if I tell you this, you won’t be able to unsee it. Where every time you go to a social event, look at the way that the men are standing in relation to each other. They’re always slightly cattycorner with each other. They’re always at an angle because being face to face is a threat posture. And it also means that if you want to communicate with young men, go fishing, go for a drive, go for a hike. A lot of psychologists now will do the walk and talk therapy. Do not sit them down and stare them in the face. That is not a very comfortable way for most men to communicate with each other. They are gonna communicate much more comfortably with each other when they’re doing something else, when they are shoulder to shoulder. And so there’s something also about those activities, whatever the activity is, whether it’s sports or hiking or building something or hammering something or fishing for something, or… It’s the only explanation for golf that I’ve been able to come up with is this sense of like you’re doing something together shoulder to shoulder, but what you’re actually doing then is communicating. And I think that’s fine. You could roll your eyes at it and say, “Oh, well, why can’t men just sit in a coffee shop and stare at each other? Why do they have to go and do something? Why do they have to pretend to be doing something else or be doing something else when they’re communicating?” I don’t roll my eyes at it. It’s just true, and if it’s true, then we should create more and more spaces where men feel able to be shoulder to shoulder with each other, communicating each other in a way that is just a little bit more friendly towards men. And if that means Boy Scouts and it means boys’ sports teams, then good. I mean there are these groups now, the men’s sheds movement, which is basically just a bunch of guys that kind of get together. It started in Australia. They get together and kind of fix stuff together, right? So they’re fixing engines, or they’re doing something. And the guys are tinkering or whatever, and it just does seem to be true that, on average, men communicate a little bit more easily with each other when they are doing kind of something else, when they are in the shoulder-to-shoulder phase. And that’s what a coach will do. That’s what these activities will do, is create that space, which is actually incredibly therapeutic space but where there is no therapist to be seen, at least not officially. And so that’s also one of the reasons why I’m borderline obsessed with the share of men in mental health professions and in healthcare professions because they kind of know that naturally. I have a friend that volunteers in a school, and he goes into the school, and he says, “Which boy are you having the most trouble with?” They identify the boy, and he just takes him for a walk. He doesn’t sit down with him. He doesn’t pull up a chair in the classroom. He certainly doesn’t sit opposite him. They go for a walk, and he finds that they’re much more likely to open up. Say, “Oh, let’s just take a walk and then talk.” And again, you could roll your eyes at that and just say, “Oh, what’s wrong with men?” But we have to be really careful generally not to treat men like defective women or vice versa. It’s just that there are some of these differences between us that we don’t really think about until it becomes an issue and which should just be part of just a natural difference between us that doesn’t in any way trap anybody, right? I’m not saying that some women don’t also communicate better shoulder to shoulder, and many men probably are fine face to face, but overall, there is a pretty big difference between those two. And it’s one reason why the right kind of male-only space is a good thing and not just a good thing for men but a good thing for women because if men come out of those spaces with better relational skills, better soft skills, et cetera, that’s good for the women in their lives as well. And I think I’m seeing a growing sense among kind of women that they want their partners, sons, to have more opportunities to hang out with other men. And the reason for that is not just because they want them out of the house, although that may be part of it. I think it’s because they recognize that actually for men to be flourishing as men, it’s great for them to have time with other men, just as it is for women. Any spaces that have boys and girls in them, young men and young women in ’em should be safe. And Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, youth organizations generally have really done a very good job of ensuring that they’re doing everything in their power to make those spaces as safe as possible. We should continue to do that, but it’s a good example of a space where we can’t let the very, very small risk, even today, of there something bad happening in those spaces to blind us to the overall positive benefits of those spaces more generally. Look, there have been plenty of scandals in institutions, including Boy Scouts and others, where quite rightly the result has been to really be much more careful about the safety of kids and have the right rules and the right practices. So we have to acknowledge that. But we also, we don’t want to react in a way that just closes all those spaces down, any more than we want to say that, because there are tragically always gonna be some examples of kids being abused at schools, we don’t send ’em to school or that we don’t want any men in our classrooms. I’ve actually had people say to me, like, “Well, I don’t think we want any men in early years education,” right? I think there’s something a bit fishy about that, and, “Didn’t you hear that story of the male from state X where there was some horrific story?” And the danger with the argument is that it has no end. In the end, what we’re saying is that even the slightest risk of something horrific happening, such as something like abuse, then we shouldn’t have these institutions at all. It would be a tragic mistake to take the correct concerns of every parent, myself included, to want their kids to be safe and to be safe in whichever spaces they’re in and to say that the way to do that is to shut all those spaces down or to say that those spaces can only be co-ed. It’s always been true that men have been underrepresented in elementary school where it’s only one in five. And actually, there’s now been a big decline in secondary school where men have now dropped below half, and we see actually men actually make up the minority of teachers in basically every subject now, including career and technical education. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable question to ask, “Does it matter?” Would it matter if our entire K12 teaching workforce was female or male? Does it matter? I think it does matter. It matters because it sends a message that this is more of a female enterprise than a male enterprise. It codes education and educational success. Also, I think that the presence of men in schools and in classrooms acts as a way to have some actual role models that are a good alternative to the ones online, perhaps especially for boys who don’t have a father figure in their lives or a good relationship with their father. So my own son teaches fifth grade in Baltimore, and he’s doing great. He loves it, but also, this is probably something about the fact of him at the front of that fifth grade classroom, which is powerful, sends a strong signal. You don’t have to have a curriculum on positive masculinity if you’ve got positive men at the front of the classroom. There is something very important about boys and girls seeing education as something that both men and women value and do. And I really struggled in English. I was in remedial English for a while. I was the kid who would like never bring the book home, and my mom would march me back to the school to get the book and read it. But the whole words, writing, books thing, it just didn’t come naturally to me. And I had a teacher in secondary school, Mr. Wyatt, and he was a Korean War veteran and had been wounded in the Korean War. He was a part-time bus driver. I have no idea how old he was. He seemed like a thousand years old, but he was probably my age as I am now, a curmudgeon, real curmudgeon, like broody and amazing English teacher, and he had us reading poetry. He had us reading metaphysical poetry, Andrew Marvell and people like that. And he had these kind of mostly working class boys just totally engaged in poetry and actually being quite moved by some of it. He brought to life this idea that words and literature was absolutely not a female pursuit. Every English teacher I’d had up until that point had been a woman. I felt like it was very coded female, and who knows, who knows whether it was Mr. Wyatt that did it, but I think about him often, and I know that something happened to me in that class, which made me fall in love with words and writing in a way that I would previously have thought unimaginable. And I’m pretty sure that the fact that he was a guy helped me get through that. Now you could roll your eyes and say, “Well, what’s wrong with Reeves, that he couldn’t get that from a woman?” like what a trouble that he needed a guy to kind of, to make him think all of that. Fine, I’m just sharing that that was my experience. I don’t think it’s that unusual an experience. And I do think it was just as important for me to have an amazing female math teacher. And in the end, a good teacher is a good teacher, but there’s something very important about making sure that we don’t allow education itself or particular kinds of learning to just get coded. It is just as important that we don’t allow the love of language to become coded as a female thing as it was to really break down the idea that math or science was a male thing. We’re trying to get to a point where we’re trying to see them as just things that anyone can do, but that gets harder and harder if you don’t have any guides doing it. If there’s a gender gap in high school education, it’s one where boys are are behind. That’s a general truth now. If you take something like GPA, which is a pretty good measure of overall high school achievement, if you take the top 10% of students, 2/3 of them are girls. And if you take the bottom 10% of students, 2/3 of them are boys, pretty straight-line relationship between them. So in terms of GPA, huge gender gap. Interestingly, not really a gender gap on SAT, on standardized tests. So you see this very big difference between the gender gaps on something like grades and something like test results. What that tells us is that girls are just able to, let’s be blunt about this, turn their homework in, like do their homework, remember to do their homework, turn it in. There’s a set of skills where just girls are just more advanced than boys. They just develop a little bit earlier. They hit puberty earlier. That develops their frontal cortex earlier, which means they can turn in their homework. It’s a bit more complicated than that, the neuroscience, but that’s basically what it means. So girls aren’t smarter than boys or vice versa in case I still need to say that, but they are more equipped for the kind of coursework that high schools and college will require because they’re more mature. They mature a little bit faster. And we couldn’t really see that in the past because girls weren’t encouraged to do well in education. They were held back. They were discriminated against. Now that we’ve leveled the playing field in education, you can see those natural advantages that girls have really kinda showing up. In the average school district in the US, the girls are almost a grade level ahead in English. There’s no gap in math. In the poorest school districts, the boys are behind in both English and math. And so the poorer the school district, the bigger the gender gaps you see generally. But what you see is the boys are behind on everything in those poorer districts. In the average school district, just a kind of long way behind in terms of English and and literacy, and it’s basically a dead heat in math. I have this very vivid memory of walking with one of my sons into school actually to meet because he was struggling so much academically. And so he was very much head down, disappointed, a bit ashamed because his dad had to come in and talk to the teachers, and we’re walking down this kinda long hallway. And one side of the hallway is the place where they had all the notice boards for the things they were doing for the girls in the school. So there were girls on the run, girls who code. There was a women’s scholarship night coming up to kind of, you know, for women to go to college to get scholarships. There was a girls in STEM class, et cetera, just basically a whole bunch of things that were happening. And the opposite wall was, as it happened, completely empty. And I just had this real moment of trying to see this through his eyes and realizing that there is an implicit message here, which is we needed all this stuff for girls. “The future is female,” was one of the signs on that wall. And we don’t need to do anything for boys because the world is made for boys. Men are gonna be fine, and I really think that’s out of date and that inadvertently we’ve created a culture in our schools where we are so concerned, rightly in many ways, about the prospects of women and girls that we haven’t allowed the data to catch up with that and say, “Yeah, but boys are now way behind girls in school.” And so we just have to be careful not to inadvertently, and I wanna be really clear, this is not some deliberate thing or some conspiracy, inadvertently send the message to boys that they’re kind of just not as seen or they’re not as heard or they’re not as valued in the school setting if they do see all of this stuff that’s really aimed at girls, really aimed at women. And so it’s a really difficult thing to think about or even to talk about, but how do we maintain this really wonderful idea of like the empowering and uplifting atmosphere that I think we’ve had around women and girls in schools, but do the same for boys and, and try and create this sense of it being uplifting for both. I didn’t think about this at all when I was younger myself. Like, “The future is female,” is probably something I would’ve gone along with, like as a good male feminist or whatever. But actually, that’s a terrible phrase. Like, the future can’t be female or male. It has to be for everybody, and I’ve really tried to put myself now into the shoes, and I’ve had to in many ways of my own sons and realize that we have got to update the way we talk about this. We have got to update the way we think about this and to do so in a way that in no way puts the brakes on girls and women, but which doesn’t inadvertently, in our efforts to promote women and girls, send this message to boys and men either that they don’t matter as much or that they don’t need as much. And neither of those things are true.

– [Narrator] Chapter three. “The positive aspects of masculinity.”

– I’ve asked a lot of men and boys, “What do you like about being a boy or a man?” when I’ve been traveling around, trying to get a sense of like, “It’s great, isn’t it? What do you really like about it?” And it’s really interesting how hard it is to get people to answer that question. What’s happened is that a straightforward acknowledgement of the ways in which men can be good runs the risk of somehow being seen as a claim that they are therefore better than women. As a result, a lot of people have become reluctant to even admit the fact that there are any things good about men, which has created a huge vacuum into which a lot of more reactionary voices have come and said, “Men are great because,” and then they’ve listed all the very stereotypical things about men, and it presumes, whether they say it or not, that men are good in a way that is different to better than women. So how do you talk about this? The term “toxic masculinity” has a lot of problems with it, but one of the problems with it is, if you do like a two by two and you’ve got toxic, non-toxic, masculine, and feminine, and then fill in those boxes, people will say, “Well, not all masculinity is toxic.” There’s non-toxic masculinity. Well first of all, being not toxic is not a hugely aspirational goal for many of us. Like, I didn’t raise my sons and say, “Just think boys, one day you might not be poisonous. Imagine a world where you’re not toxic,” right? So first of all, horrible framing, non-toxic, but then you say, “Okay, so what does non-toxic masculinity look like?” And people will very often say things like, “Well, you know, that’s where you’re more emotionally vulnerable, you’re much more caring, nurturing.” Okay. And then you say, “And how is that different to stereotypical femininity, maybe positive femininity?” And then they’ll say, “Well, it isn’t really. It’s like, “Okay.” So the danger is that non-toxic masculinity is actually just an empty set in that two by two. And then what you’re doing is you’re presenting boys and young men with a choice between being toxic and being female. And that’s not a choice that many of us want to make. And it has created, I think, this cultural position we’re in right now. The really difficult challenge here, and I’m finding it even difficult to talk about now, is how to articulate positive aspects of masculinity without in some way coming across as seeing it as better than or as elevating it. But let’s be specific. It is true that men take more risks than women on average. Distributions overlap, but men have a higher-risk appetite or are less risk averse, if you want to put it that way. Is that a good or a bad thing about men? And the answer is yes, it is a good and a bad thing about men. It is good when it leads men to take risks to save the lives of others. And that is almost always something that it’ll be men doing. It is good if it means that men are willing to take, say, some risks around business, which leads to success, et cetera. It is good if they’re willing to sacrifice themselves from others. It is bad if it means that they blow all their money gambling or they take crazy risks and end up drowning or dying or ending up taking drugs in a certain way. And so is it better to have a more stereotypically female approach to risk or male? And the answer is neither. We need both. We need a society that actually recognizes and honors both. And the problem right now is that, even having this conversation and trying to in good faith articulate ways in which these underlying traits can be like good or bad on both sides, just immediately sends these little alarm bells ringing in your own head that someone’s gonna hear that and say, “Oh, well, that’s very deterministic,” right? “You’re saying all men have to be like this.” That’s not true or that you’re saying, “And that’s better, the male way of being is better,” or that the female way of being is better. And that’s not true either. And instead, the question we should be asking ourselves is, “If there are these differences, how do we all find ways to channel those differences in a way that’s good for all of us?” That’s the challenge, and that’s been the challenge basically of every kind of human culture. We now have a culture where, thank God, we’ve elevated the position of women and that we no longer, I think, instinctively assume that a masculine trait is better than a feminine trait. That’s great progress, but we won’t get to equality through androgyny. The differences will at some level remain. They’ll become less important, but we can’t airbrush the differences away. And unless we have a better story to tell, especially young men, about what it means to be a good man than the one they’re hearing online from reactionaries, if we’re not willing to tell that story at all, then we’re gonna lose them. It’s really important to start by saying that most of what parents do, moms and dads, is completely interchangeable, right? Most of it is just the work of raising kids, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some differences. And it does look as if dads really come into their own when it comes to helping their kids leave the nest, if we can put it that way. So again, running the risk of stereotyping with this safe audience, moms have a little bit of a competitive advantage, especially when the kids are young, around kind of building a nest and kind of caring for the kids in the nest. Dads can do that, too, but that’s where moms really, really seem to have a unique advantage. And dads are a bit good at helping the kids fly the nest, to kinda move out, especially in adolescence, especially in the kind of teen years. That’s really where dads seemed to come into their own in every human culture, which is kinda learning the skills and taking some risks, but learning to take risks in a way that is kind of manageable. And that just seems to be something that dads have a bit of a superpower around. And that’s great. And so what you’ll see is I have this memory of walking around my neighborhood and seeing this dad whose kids would jump off a wall, and he’d catch them. And every day they went a little bit higher, and I could see this every day. And they were getting higher and higher and higher until they were throwing themselves some distance, squealing into the arms of their father who would catch them and just didn’t see that many moms doing that. And that could be for all kinds of reasons we could get into, but it was just something really beautiful about that. I have learned that fathers get the same burst of oxytocin, the love hormone, that mothers can get, but they get it from something different. And so moms will typically get it from very close contact and especially with a very young child, and it will spike that love hormone. And so they’ll fall in love very quickly with this very, very new baby. For dads, the same hormone, the same love hormone, the same oxytocin spikes, but it spikes when men, they do something like throw their kid in the air, they do some kind of playful, maybe a little bit of risk involved in it too. They get the same spike. And so the reason I love that finding is that it says moms and dads are both hormonally engineered to fall in love with their children and to interact with their children. Mens’ brains change, too, as fathers, but it also shows that there are some slightly different ways in which we get that kind of parenting, love hormone injection. And so for the dad who’s throwing his kid up in the air and catching them again, he’s getting that same love hormone burst as maybe a mom who’s kind of cuddling with a child. I don’t think one is better than the other. And so I don’t think we should be in any way like pointing fingers at moms who don’t throw their kids in the air enough or pointing at dads who just don’t get as much of that boost from the kind of cuddling thing. I think the whole spirit of this is don’t treat moms like defective dads, and don’t treat dads like defective moms. Instead, recognize that they’re each bringing something a little bit different to the party, and that’s a wonderful thing. We can’t back away from the central cultural, personal, biological importance of fatherhood simply because we don’t want to in any way undermine the central importance of motherhood. We’ve gotta be able to do both at once. There’s some evidence that fathers and mothers just developed a little bit differently, kinda in ancestral times if you look at the work of people like Anna Machin and Sarah Hrdy who’ve really dug into, like, what was the invention of fatherhood, if I can put it that way. And what they find is that fathers basically saved humanity, to put it very bluntly, because we have our kids so young by comparison to other mammals that there’s a huge need for calories, which mom is providing obviously because she’s nursing the child and that the calorific requirements of the human infant now are just off the charts. And that could only be met if dads went out and kind of got more calories brought to mom. And so fathers really then were invented during that period where we had this huge burst of brain development. And what that means today is that we still need dads around in that kind of group setting and in a more of a, perhaps more of a group-based way and not just in the kind of one-on-one way that we see as more typical for the maternal relationship. And again, it’s not true for everybody, of course, is it gonna be different? But it does track with our history that we see when men engage with their kids and their brains light up, it’s the newer bit of our brains, the more recently developed bits of our brains, whereas when moms interact with their kids, it’s the most ancient parts of our brains that light up. So fatherhood is a more modern invention in the sense of only being a few hundred million years old than motherhood is, but it is no less precious and actually has been incredibly important for the survival of the human race. And so the nature of fatherhood changes over time, and it is going through a huge change now, given all the changes we’ve seen in the economy. But the central importance of fatherhood, not just for kids, but increasingly I think for fathers too, for their sense of connection and neededness is something that we should be very, very careful not to dismiss. We need dads. And if we don’t find a way to signal that through, for example, paid leave policy, et cetera, then I think we’re in real trouble because if dads start to feel like they’re surplus to requirements that maybe we don’t even need dads, then I think we’re in a very dangerous place, culturally speaking. Everybody needs to be needed. That’s, I think, just a universal truth that, if you end up in a position where you don’t feel like anybody needs you, then that’s a very, very hollow way to live. And finding a way to make sure that men know that they are needed is incredibly important for any society. I think at some deep level we have to work a little bit harder to ensure that we’re sending the message and creating the structures within which men feel needed. Just because in terms of pure reproduction, we kind of know we’re going to need women. It’s no coincidence that in these science fiction stories where we have to kind of go and recolonize a new planet, any good writer has made sure that the colonists are mostly female and well aware that, just in terms of kind of population, you’re gonna need a lot more women than you are men. And so to some extent, this question mark over like what do we need the men for, it’s just always been more significant. Finding a way for men to learn why they’re needed is incredibly important. The anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote that “in every known human society we have relied on the learned nurturing behavior of men, and this behavior being learned can be fragile and can disappear quite quickly.” I think that’s exactly right. I think there’s something about the learned nurturing behavior of men. I think we’ve always had to find ways to help socialize and integrate men into our community and kind of family life in very different ways at different times. We’ve had to adjust and update our view about the role of men depending on the conditions of the society at the time. And I don’t think we’re any different to that. We’ve got to update our model of manhood, masculinity, whatever language you prefer, for this new and much better world of gender equality, but we’ve also got to make sure that we continue to send the message to men, “We need you. We need you.” So, “We, the tribe, not just anyone needs you, and we need,” not it will be nice to have you, we’d like you but need and not just anybody but you. So this is not the community would like some people to show up. This is “We need you,” and it’s a very specific call to men as fathers, as community members. And again, we can have a long argument about why that is, but it seems pretty clear now that, unless we can find a way to send a message to men that we need you, that they are much less likely to show up. We see that in the figures around volunteering. I just signed up myself for Big Brothers Big Sisters and there is a much longer waiting list for boys in Big Brothers and Big Sisters than there is for girls because about 3/4 of the volunteers are women, but they try and match. They just don’t have enough male volunteers. You see in the twenties and thirties, in particular, this huge gender gap in volunteering. You’re seeing just not enough men showing up in these civic institutions in a way that they did in the past, and that’s a huge problem for those institutions. Like, you can’t run co-ed youth organizations unless you have at least some males, unless you have some men. We need men, but it’s also, I’ve really come to believe there’s a problem for men too. So we have this weird situation where we have this huge lack of men volunteering, coaching, being a mentor, for example, on the one side. And over here we have a huge number of men who are a little bit lost and lacking a bit of purpose. And that has got to be a solvable problem. We’ve got to find a way to signal to those men, “We still need you. We need you to come do this. We need you to come do that.” There was a story a few years back now of a school, predominantly black school, where they were having a day where they were gonna teach the boys how to tie a tie. This feels very pre COVID now, but okay, that’s the thing you do as a boy, right? You learn to tie a tie. And so the dads were gonna come in and teach their sons how to tie a tie. And then what they realized was half the boys in the class, their dads were not around. And they realized this is gonna be a problem because it’s going to suddenly expose the fact that there aren’t enough men. So they did a call to the community. They just did outreach to the community and said, “We need men to come help these boys tie the ties.” They had so many men turn up, they didn’t know what to do with them. They had a TV crew there. It was absolutely beautiful, but they’d made the call to men. They didn’t say, “We need volunteers to come and help boys tie a tie.” They said, “We need men to come to this school and help our boys.” That’s when the men show up. There’s a really big difference between thinking about an issue that might break differently, say, along kind of gender lines and saying that that’s an identity issue, right? So for example, like saying that boys are struggling more in school and trying to figure out why that is. Is it the way we’re teaching? Is it something about the classroom layout? That’s not an invitation for the boys to think of themselves more as boys. The wrong way to think about identity is to invite people to lean more into that aspect of themselves, right? I’m not doing that. My goal here is not to make men out there think of themselves more as men and for masculinity to be kind of more of who they are. What I’m doing is I’m saying there are a bunch of issues and challenges and differences facing men and women, which we should have a good faith conversation about. Like, I don’t think you have to lean hard into identity politics, for example, to think that the gender pay gap is an issue. And I don’t think we have to necessarily have a huge kind of identity politics around that to just say, “Well, actually, there’s a whole bunch of things we can do in the workplace to reduce the gender pay gap.” Same in education. There’s a real problem now is that in the push against this idea of over-emphasizing individual identity, we’re gonna lose the idea that there are genuinely some issues that play out differently by race and by class and by gender. And we definitely don’t want to do that. I’m not arguing for masculinity. I’m not arguing for male identity. I’m arguing for us to pay attention to the issues that are disproportionately affecting boys and men. That is not as exciting a sentence. We do not want barricades. We do not want marches. What we want is policies and solutions, and weirdly, I think if we get better at having actual solutions and actual policies, that will de-emphasize identity. I think if identities start to feel threatened or pathologized, they get stronger, and so I’m just all about saying, “Boys aren’t doing as well in school. Let’s tackle that. What’s happened to male mental health? Let’s tackle that.” And in some ways, I think that a gender-sensitive approach to like policy and solutions is an antidote to an overemphasis on identity, rather than an extension of it. It should be obvious by now that a world of floundering men is not likely to be a world of flourishing women or vice versa. I think that’s for a bunch of reasons. Like, men are struggling economically. That means that almost all of the increase in the incomes of middle class households has been because women have worked more, and fortunately, their earnings have gone up. That’s great, but it would be great if men were able to contribute more so that less of the economic burden was always falling on women. If we had more men volunteering, more men in our communities, obviously that would help women too. But also there’s a hunger, I think, now for a real partnership between men and women, one that acknowledges the huge gains that women have made but which also builds men into family and community life. It’s not good for women, it’s not good for wives if their husbands are struggling with mental health or with a lack of purpose. There are so many mother about there worried about how their sons are doing in school. And so it’s very interesting to me how this idea that one gender can flourish while the other one is not flourishing, is something that only someone that doesn’t live in the actual world could possibly say because we all live together, and we’re raising our kids together and in the same communities together. And so I think it should be a point. So blindingly obvious as to not need to be said that if men are struggling, that will be bad for the women in their lives, bad for their daughters, their wives, their sisters. And if women are held back, if women’s opportunities are constrained, that is bad for their sons and their daughters and their husbands. And if we can’t get to a point where we recognize that in every actual family, in every actual community, we have to rise together, then I think we’re in real trouble. That’s a classic example of the kind of the zero sum thinking. Melinda French Gates has recently said like, she’s given support, she’s given money to me to spend on boys and men as part of her gender equality push. And she’s been asked, “I thought you were about women. I thought when you said ‘gender equality,’ you meant women.” And she said, “Well, I obviously do continue to support women’s causes,” but does anyone think it’s good for women if men are struggling? Does anyone think that’s gonna make men better partners if men are struggling? And so there’s this growing recognition, I would say, among those who have worked on behalf of women that we need men to do well, too, and that it’s not a choice. It’s like saying to someone who has a son and a daughter that they have to choose between the which one matters more, and that is just as crazy as saying that as a society, we can’t care about both our young men and our young women at that same time.