Why We Must Save Our Boys
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I'm Mary Katherine Hamm, in for Barry Weiss. This is Honestly. Having daughters, I have three of them, I have plenty to worry about. Will they be bullied by mean girls? Will they survive the awkward braces and acne phase of puberty? Or be influenced by dangerous TikTok diet trends? And when they're older, will they be able to balance the demands of both motherhood and career? Yes, there's still plenty to worry about for our girls. But I'm about to have my fourth child, a boy. He's not even born yet.

And I'm already worried about him. There's a growing but silent epidemic affecting middle-aged adults that has debilitating mental and physical effects. And that's emotional isolation,

And those effects are being felt by men most of all. I'm worried about him keeping up in school and whether I should hold him back a year before starting kindergarten. According to some experts, the trend begins in junior high. Men are three and a half times more likely to commit suicide than women. 60% of the homeless are men. The prison population is 93% male. Can we be surprised?

that after years of being told that they are the problem, that their manhood is the problem, more and more men are withdrawing into the enclave of idleness and pornography and video games. As he grows up, will his nature and behavior be judged according to the standard that all men possess toxic masculinity that has to be trained out of them? Toxic masculinity, what does that mean? The message of toxic masculinity is not only in the academy, it's also in our grade schools where boys are increasingly treated like an illness

In search of a cure. I mean, if you're made out to be

part of toxic masculinity, if your competitive drive is regarded as part of a tyrannical impulse, if the heritage to which you belong is regarded as an oppressive patriarchy? How in the world are you going to step forward with confidence and shoulder that burden? Why would you? Why wouldn't you just step aside? I'm worried about what work he might find in a digitized and globalized world. We're facing an automization crisis.

which is going to sweep away millions of jobs, that's not going to be pretty. Although the formal unemployment rate for prime age men in August was a mere 3%, there's another 11% who are nilfs, N-I-L-F. Not in the labor force is what it stands for. Dropouts who are neither working nor looking for work.

what his relationships will look like, and if they'll be fulfilling. We are seeing a rise in lonely single men. Dating opportunities for straight men are diminishing. My guest today, Richard Reeves, shares those worries about boys so much that he wrote a whole book about it, of boys and men, even though basically everyone told him not to. Reeves is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and he was warned that to talk about men's issues, that would open him up to a kind of scrutiny and pain that just wouldn't be worth it.

But he decided to talk about it anyway, because the more he researched, the more he realized the truth. Boys and men are falling behind in education, in the labor market, and in the home. And if we're genuinely worried about gender equality, then we can't just fight for women. We have to fight for men, too. So on today's episode, why boys are in trouble, why you should care, and how we can help them. We'll be right back. I got gas in the tank. Lose me, baby.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Richard, welcome to Honestly.

Thank you for having me on. I'm really looking forward to it. Let me ask you this. You're a Brookings Institution wonk with a good life, and you think to yourself, you know what debate I'd like to jump into? Gender politics, neuroscience of biological sex differences, and structural disadvantages of men? Why go there, Richard? Well, I suppose one answer is, like, somebody has to.

And if it's not a Brookings scholar with the research facilities we have at my fingertips and with some of my own experience, a father raising three sons,

a strong commitment to equality of all kinds, including gender equality, seeing this issue and honestly feeling like, well, if you can't do this, Richard, then who the hell can? And that's a really, that's a difficult voice to get out of your head once it's in your head. And so I did feel like partly, honestly, because of the current weirdness of the debate, that there was a space for this kind of book. And I thought that the fact that it was difficult to write

and the fact that it was so challenging was probably a sign that I should write it. In the epilogue, you note that so many people you spoke with feel this problem in their lives. So this is one of those conversations that it feels like everyone feels like they know that this thing is happening, but they feel uncomfortable talking about it. And the supposition in your book that gender equality of both kinds matters and we should strive to fix it

feels controversial, even though we think it's the right thing to do. How do we wrestle with that? Why is there this big difference in the public and private conversations?

Well, that is the bridge that I was trying to create with the book is between the public and private because I would have these conversations with very, very feminist, lifelong Democrat moms who are just incredibly worried about their sons. But more generally, I think this growing sense that there's a lot of boys and men out there who aren't doing very well and that's a problem. But then publicly, of course...

that's hard to say because you're being forced to make this false choice. You're being forced to say that because I care about boys and men, I care less about women and girls. So you create this false binary. And honestly, that was one of the reasons that I decided to engage in this particular book to try and cross the bridge that you've just described. And it was striking to me just how many people

were willing to talk about it. And I think sometimes these things, if they're not addressed publicly, they can really fester in private. So it's one thing for upper middle class mums in Bethesda to be saying, oh, I'm really worried about my son. But actually, meanwhile, in a lot of particularly less economically advantaged areas, the problems of boys and men are really acute.

and people are feeling them very sharply. And if they don't hear responsible people dealing with them publicly and intentionally, then I think they do fester and they can get weaponized in ways that we'll perhaps get into on the populist right.

And I do want to talk about that. There's so many issues that you outline in your book with tons of data. What felt like the most urgent issue to you? I know you have three boys in raising them. What was it that propelled you into this? Maybe you saw it in their own lives.

Well, I think the starting point really is in education. I think that we're seeing such wide gender gaps in education in particular and seeing even kids with all the resources and advantages that my sons had

in terms of the background of their parents and so on too, just sort of feeling that the education system wasn't structured in a way that really suited them. And I think that we're seeing that playing out in the huge gap in college campuses where it's three women now for every two men, huge gaps in high school too, which is a sort of, ironically, one of the results of the women's movement and feminism has been to expose the extent to which the education system is actually more female-friendly than male-friendly. We couldn't see that under conditions of sexism.

Because women weren't going on to college. They weren't going into professions. And so now we've taken the brakes off the women. What we're seeing is this enormous overtaking. And it's worth saying that nobody back in the 70s, you know, Title IX was passed in the 70s. Men were about 13 percentage points more likely to get a college degree than women. It's now 15 percentage points the other way around.

So there's a bigger gender gap now than 72. No one expected that overtaking. Everyone was focused on parity, but no one thought the lines would keep going. And I still think we're struggling to update our priors to deal with this new world of gender inequality in education, which is the opposite to the ones we're used to dealing with.

Right. You made a bold statement in The Atlantic last week that, as you say, the earlier education system is actually tilted in favor of girls and that perhaps the solution to that is that we hold boys back a year. The term is red-shirting. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah. So that's based on a few things. One, we do see just these glaring gaps. I've just referred to a few of them. But you see like in high school, the highest performing high school students in terms of GPA, two-thirds of them are girls.

And so these are big gaps, they're not small. And the question is like, why? What's going on there? And there's a lot to talk about. But as I looked at the headline facts, it became clear to me and also watching my own kids grow up, that what everybody already knew to be true, which is girls and boys mature just developmentally, neurologically at different paces, is now affecting these educational outcomes. And so we're treating girls and boys as if they're developmentally the same

at the same chronological age when they're not. And so in adolescence in particular, there's something about a year and a two-year gap in the development of certain skills. The prefrontal cortex is the technical term for this bit of the brain. Every parent knows which bit of the brain I'm talking about because it's the bit of the brain that means you remember to bring your school book home, you turn your homework in, you plan ahead, you don't go to that party, you finish your chemistry homework instead. All of that stuff. And sometimes called the CEO of the brain because it's the bit that like has its act together.

And basically girls' prefrontal cortex is developed just much earlier than boys'. One short definition of raising a son is being a substitute prefrontal cortex for about 10 years, right? You don't have it yet. And that plays out in the education system. The miracle is in some ways that girls aren't even further ahead given the difference in brain development. So why not be more equitable about this? And by equitable, I mean take into account differences in development and just start the boys a year later than girls and that will make them developmentally a little bit closer and then the boys won't be behind the whole time.

Yeah, as a mom who had to take some missing homework up to the school today, I feel this very deeply. In my case, I have three girls and about to have a boy in January. And so I'm dealing with different things here. But I actually redshirted a summer baby who was a girl, my first. And I'm wondering, does it matter in relative terms that boys are older in their grade or is it just an absolute number? Yeah.

It looks like it's much more an absolute number. There was a spike in interest in this. Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, had this famous study of people who are old relative for their year. And they particularly looked at things like athletics and so on too, and confidence, etc. But it really looks as if it's just the absolute age that's really driving it here. And so my policy proposal is designed to just make the boys absolutely a year older. And

which means that developmentally they'll be a bit closer to the girls. And it shouldn't have any downward effect for any of the other kids in the class. But just being that much older, it's just allowing your brain to develop more. And it is important, I think, to state that it's not so much about smarts, you know, cognitive ability, how smart you are. There aren't really any gender gaps there. And there aren't such big differences in the kind of age of that. It's really what social scientists call these non-cognitive skills, turning your homework in. And of course, all kids have to develop them. It's just that they develop earlier.

and more profoundly in girls than in boys. And so Margaret Mead, I think, had this great line, which is, "If you go into a classroom of, I think, first year of high school, girls and boys, you'd think you were in a classroom of very young women and little boys." And anybody who's raised kids and seen these differences knows exactly what we're talking about in those critical years.

And it's like a well-duh finding, but it's well-duh except we run education policy as if we didn't know that to be true. Right. We hear a lot in education talk these days, especially now that we're dealing with massive learning loss from the years of the pandemic.

We hear about disparities between white and minority students or rich and low-income students. We don't hear as much about this. And as you note in the book, problematically, sometimes the statistics are not even being taken as far as the sex differences in learning. Where should disparity between the sexes be on our concerns list when we're talking about this? Where does it show up in the sort of ranking of severity?

Well, I think it's worth saying that many of those other gaps are wider. So in terms of gaps between, say, rich and poor kids and in particular between black and white kids, if you just use those categories, they're wider than most of the ones we see for gender. So I think that is important to state. But...

They're very often in the same ballpark. So let's take graduating high school on time as an example. Just over 88% of girls do that, about 82% of boys do that. So there's a six-point gap nationally. This is one example, actually. It was a huge research effort at Brookings to discover that because the federal government doesn't actually collect data on high school graduation rates by sex.

It does by race and foster care. So we had to go to all the states and get the data. This is an example of what you were just talking about, actually. So there's a six-point gap. Now, that's close to the gap between white and Hispanic kids. The 82% graduation rate for boys is just above that for kids eligible for free school meals, which is at 80%. So we're in the same ballpark.

And the other thing then to say is what really starts to help us understand these differences is when you do both at the same time.

So when you're able to look at, for example, race and gender, then what you're able to see is there's a huge difference in educational outcomes between black girls and black women and black boys and black men. So you can only get at that by looking at it through both lenses. And in particular for black Americans, the education gaps, the gender gaps are much wider than for other racial groups. And so it's incredibly important to look at both of those things at once, which you can only do when you've got the data. So the story gets more complicated the longer you look at it, but that's true of most things in life.

Well, and so much of that holds true not just in early education but into higher ed. You mentioned that for every 100 bachelor's degrees awarded to women, 74 are awarded to men. And you also mentioned –

How quickly this has happened. It struck me while I was reading the book. Almost all of this is in the span of my own life, give or take a decade. Give a decade, really, if I'm honest about it. And so that is a very accelerated timeline to this sort of polar flipping of the outcomes in college in particular. What does that mean for us?

Well, you're right. Of course, I suspect I'm a little bit older than you. And so it's definitely happened in my lifetime. I'm 53. And so, you know, when I was born and I was raised and educated in the UK, it's like 30% of college students were female. By the time I got there, it was about parity. And now it's 60-40, close to 60-40 the other way. And so...

What that means, I think, is the speed of the change has been so great that it's incredibly hard to update our view of what the world is like. When you see an inequality not only get closed but reverse, really just in the blink of an eye, it's incredibly hard for us to update our priorities. It's incredibly hard to persuade people. There is a big problem with gender inequality in education.

against boys and men, right? They're like, wait, wait, what? And especially if they're a little bit older, honestly. Right, we spent 30 years switching our thinking. Because it was literally yesterday. And the fact that you were talking just within lifetimes here, it's interesting there's a generational gap here. So because my kids are in their 20s, of course, they grew up in a world where women were ahead.

And so for them, it's sort of in the water. They just know. I mean, the schools they went to, the girls are twice as likely to do AP classes, twice as likely to go to good colleges, always in the top of the class. So that was the world they grew up in. The world I grew up in was one of, you know, I would say rough parity. And the one my parents grew up in was one where it was unthinkable my mom would go to college, right? So it depends which generation you're talking to. And actually talking to those who are like perhaps even a generation above me, trying to persuade them, right?

The situation now is really hard. And then, of course, we have a whole institutional structure that's designed to keep our attention on the gender inequalities that run one way, right? We have a National Coalition of Women and Girls in Education formed in the 70s. We have a lot of organizations who've literally whose job it is is to keep up this drumbeat of concern about girls and women, including in education. And to be clear, there are still some issues there. But there's no institutional architecture and indeed almost no incentives to do the opposite.

And so the story actually that's told about what's happening in education is quite hard to get out there because it's literally no one's job to wake up in the morning and try and draw attention to how far behind boys and men are falling in education, where it is hundreds of people's job to do the opposite.

Yeah, there was one amazing stat you mentioned. There was one group that does do some scholarships for young men in certain areas of learning that they haven't been in traditionally. And the total of scholarships was something like $10,000. And that pales in comparison to what might be available for women going into STEM. And we'll talk about that some more. But it's not just education where men are falling behind. In the book, you argue there are three major areas.

education, the labor market, and the home where they sort of lost their moorings. So let's talk about the labor market.

You write that labor force participation among men in the U.S. has dropped by seven percentage points over the last half century, and that even before COVID, there were 9 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 who were not employed. What do we think is the biggest culprit here? Is it automation? Is it globalization? Is it motivation? Or the age-old question, Richard, is it the video games?

It's not video games. I appreciated that debunking. I can confidently say that because that is such an easy place for people to go. And it's not marijuana either.

But it's mainly structural. And I think this is a broader point that I try to emphasize in the book, is that by and large, these issues being faced for boys and men are not the result of individual failings. There's not sort of some kind of mass psychological problem that suddenly afflicted men. I do think there's some real cultural issues which we can get to. But this is structural. And you've mentioned, I think, a lot of them. I mean, the move away from manual labor, which tended to disproportionately benefit men,

And the combined effect of automation and greater free trade, which has been net positive for the economy for sure, has disproportionately affected traditionally male jobs. And so you've seen those industries being hit hard, which has in some cases led to this drop in employment you've just talked about. And that's worldwide, by the way. I mean, this is like a lot of these trends, including in education, these are not US specific, which I think should point us towards more structural explanations. But same like labor force participation dropping, right?

is largely the result of these shocks to the labor market that we've, which have disproportionately affected men. It's not the rise of women in the labor market that's in any way sort of displaced men. It's not a zero sum. That's the old lump of labor fallacy that economists a long time ago used to believe. It's more just there's been this differential shock

shock to those industries, and particularly in working class jobs and working class areas. Men have been hit particularly hard by these economic forces. And I hear all that about the structural disadvantages. Does individual agency factor in here at all? I mean, there was a lot of discussion in the book about the motivation of men. And I guess perhaps that's a structural problem as well. But are there things that the boys themselves have to work on here?

Yeah, sure. I do emphasize this structural element to the story in part to try and redress what I see as the kind of individualization of the problem on all sides, actually. In different ways, everyone seems to agree that what's happening with boys and men is a problem. The problems of boys and men are problems with boys and men.

They lack motivation. They go to the sofa. They're smoking weed. They're just spending their whole time in video games. Why can't you be more like your sister? To some extent, what happens is on the left, they think, well, it's just these men are still too masculine. They're clinging to these old models. They're toxic, whatever. And on the right, it's like they're not masculine enough. You know, be more like your dad. Be a sort of traditional breadwinner and so on. None of which is of any help whatsoever to young men who are actually trying to negotiate a good life for themselves in a world of gender equality. And so I do emphasize the structural problem.

It's quite hard to see where the distinction is between the two when you get to areas like motivation and incentives. And so the women's movement has done an amazing job of giving a new script to women.

Right? Get educated so that you can get a good job so you can be economically independent, right? Economic empowerment through education and independence. You go girl, you make sure you can be self-reliant, you know, make sure you're not dependent on a man. You might choose to be with a man, but it should be a choice. That's incredibly powerful script, which completely replaced the earlier script. But it's not exactly clear what the script is for men now. It used to be clear for my dad, he went to college because that would get him to come and get a better job and earn more money so that he could support the family.

Right? Very clear male script for him. But it's not really clear what we've replaced the old male script with. And without that script, it's kind of not clear, like, what are the signposts here? What script am I supposed to be following here? What am I supposed to be doing now? Who's going to need me? And it's that failure, I think, to replace the old male script with a new one, which has, I think, to some extent undermined maybe the direction, motivation, incentives, whatever word we want to use around men. But it's easy to see that as an individual problem.

but miss the cultural context within which those individuals are making those decisions. And so it's a little bit of both. And I think to ignore the cultural shifts that have taken place around men. The image I have is of a man thrown into the middle of a stage and then at the last minute you take the script away from him. You tear it up and so he has to improvise. And now I see a lot of men doing now is trying to improvise a new way of being male in this new world. And improvisation is really, really hard. And it's no surprise that many of them are struggling.

Yeah, I think you touch on this sort of feeling of purposelessness. You know, you have to be motivated to do a thing to play a part, as you note. And if you have no script, what is that part?

There's a stunning statistic from the UK that suicide is the biggest killer of British men under the age of 45, or here in the US, they account for 70% of opioid overdose deaths. I mean, that's shocking. And that sort of comes from this purposelessness that you're talking about. It looks like it. The risk of suicide is at least three times higher among men than women. And interesting, the highest rates of all are middle-aged white men.

And so it's very important to sort of just dig into some of this. And there's a very nice study by Fiona Shand that I quote in the book, which looked at the last words that men used to describe themselves before suicide or a suicide attempt. The top two most commonly used words were useless and worthless. And so that's very different actually to kind of for women, which is much more about relationships as well, being disliked and so on. For men, it's just a sense of cultural redundancy. It's kind of a sense of what am I good for? A sense of not being needed.

And I think it is a truth about human nature that kind of being needed is very important to our sense of flourishing and well-being. And so it's incredibly important, and we perhaps get on to talk about fatherhood in particular, where this has created a sense of purpose, is that we don't, as a result of the wonderful liberation movement that we've seen for women, I think it's the greatest liberation movement in human history that we've seen over the last few decades, that we don't, as a result, end up benching the man.

We don't want to make the men culturally or economically redundant because that then can lead to many of the problems that we're seeing now. We have to reinvent modern masculinity in the same way that we have femininity. And we haven't really even begun on that task. And that's partly because there aren't a lot of people yet who think it's a task worth undertaking, whereas I think it's perhaps the most important cultural task that faces us right now.

Some point to the idea that the labor market right now favors skills that are more, shall we say, inherent to women. What do you think about that idea? I think there's some truth to that. We are shifting towards services and more relational type jobs. And to the extent that there are differences between men and women is that the way this is put very simply in the literature is boys and men a bit more into things.

women a bit more into people. The guy is tinkering in the garage with something while his partner or wife is having coffee with a friend and chatting. And there's some truth to that. The distributions overlap, like most distributions. There are lots of women who don't fit that mold and men the other way. But on balance, that's true. And so to the extent that jobs have moved more towards relational jobs, and David Deming has very good work looking at the number of jobs that were

require those social skills now and how that's rising much more rapidly than require STEM skills, actually, for all emphasis on STEM. So to the extent that that tends to advantage women, that's another reason for their success in the labor market. So there's some truth to it for sure. But I also don't want to fall into the trap of assuming that these skills can't be developed.

and that we can't all kind of change because there's pretty good evidence actually that they really can develop in men and women too. And we don't caricature men as, well, they'll never be able to do this. Men can't be social workers, which they used to be, almost 50% of social workers. It's just not true. It may be that when things pan out, the occupations will be a little bit gendered if preferences are being honestly genuinely expressed. But on balance, I don't want to overweight that argument because it's in danger of running into stereotypes. Yeah.

Well, and now we've come to the moment where as a modern lady, I must step in and say, look, men still make up the majority of boardrooms and government bodies. Just one in five C-suite company directors is a woman. You know, some 3% of venture capital money goes to female founders. So how can we say men are at a disadvantage? Yeah, well, actually, that last figure, I think it's actually down 2%. And I get that figure regularly updated because my wife is trying to raise money.

for a startup business. And so that particular number is very, very highly salient in our household. I'm reminded of that particular figure, I would say on a daily basis. So I'm glad you mentioned it already. You will not forget that data point. I'm not allowed to forget it.

And it is a huge problem. I mean, the way that VC works is, I mean, if there is an all boys network still around, then wow, I think it's probably in VC. So look, at the apex of society, there's still a huge amount to do. So what is it like 44 out of the Fortune 500 now run by women? That's a lot better than it was in 95 when it was zero.

but it's clearly quite a long way to go. Only one in four members of Congress, women, etc. And so a lot of these very senior positions we asked, we do still see some quite big gender gaps and quite consequential ones, I think, ones we should worry about in things like politics and corporate leadership. And there are huge efforts ongoing to try and address them, some of which I've been involved in myself. But there's a bit of a problem here because when you look down...

and you look at what's happened to working class men, you know, it's most men earn less today than most men did in 1979. So if American men were a nation, that nation would be a little bit poorer today than it was half a century ago. That's an extraordinary economic fact. Men at the top, meanwhile, they were earning more than men at the top were 40 years ago. So we've seen this huge rise in economic inequality, which means that the men at the top actually aren't doing badly.

My fear is that, and you use Sheryl Sandberg's famous phrase, is that at the top, we're so busy leaning in that we forget to look down. And we mistake the world that we live in

right in these kind of elite circles as the world as experienced by most men and women that's a profound error because that's absolutely not the world that most men and most boys are living in and we should be able to think two thoughts at once here and continue to push for more gender equality in the space you just identified and help the boys and men who are now definitely on the other end of the inequality lower down the socio-economic spectrum

Right. To put it in terms of my own household, it would be like telling all three of my girls they get this constant message that they can be Sheryl Sandberg, right? I'm worried about turning them into Sheryl Sandberg. Whereas the boy, it's like, hope you can get a job, kid. Yeah. I actually think we did it at the American Family Survey a little while ago. And now slightly more parents are likely to say that their daughter could grow up to be president than their son, which is really amazing when you think we haven't had a female president yet. But it's tipped slightly more that way. I think even Republicans think that now.

Interesting. I do want to talk about the home because this is one of the places you talk about men sort of losing their bearings. You write, the economic reliance of women on men held women down, but it also propped men up. Now the props have gone and many men are falling. I think there was this idea that things would equalize and women would have jobs, they would work outside the home, and then men would contribute more atomically.

home. And yet what's, you talk about what sort of ended up happening is women go to work and then they sort of work a double shift coming home and doing a lot of work at home as well and childcare and on all those things, the lion's share of that. Where are men in this picture and what does that change look like? Yeah, you're right. There was this idea, I think it was a

Michael Young and Peter Wilmot had this book in the 70s called The Symmetrical Family, which is where everything would be exactly equal. And we'd see this shift in both directions, both women into more breadwinning roles and men into more caring roles. And thus far, we've seen a huge amount of the first and almost none of the second. And so women are now the breadwinner in more than 40% of US families.

And that's just extraordinary economic change just in the space of a few decades. But still very few men who are, as I was for a while, a stay-at-home dad and kind of caring for kids, almost none. And it actually looks, if you dig really hard into the data as well, of those, a disproportionate share of them are men in same-sex relationships.

And I think what's happened is that there's a lag here. Women have expanded their role, but haven't expanded the male role. And I think that's kind of everyone's fault, honestly. I think it's the fault of men, I think it's the fault of public policy, I think it's the fault, and sometimes it's the fault of women. But by fault, what I mean is it's just really, really hard to update our cultural expectations of each other and what motherhood and fatherhood looked like as quickly as possible.

as these changes have taken place. We just can't do it, right? It'll take a generation or two to do it. But it'll take quite a lot of intentional effort, I think, to rebuild and reinvent the institution of fatherhood for a world of gender equality because, as the quote you just gave, it was really me trying to show is that, like for my dad...

He was the breadwinner. He was lots of other things too. When he lost his job, he was out of work for quite a while in the recession of the 80s in the UK. We actually used to get up every morning, come to breakfast, and he had his tie on. I remember asking him, I was guessing my early teens were like, Dad, why are you putting a tie on to go into the spare room and bash out on a typewriter as it was then kind of resumes? And he looked me in the eye and said, because my job now is to get another job. And it was very clear what his script was to do that. And obviously it's very, very different now. And so what it means to be a successful father is,

is no longer synonymous with being a successful breadwinner, especially as women can now do a lot of breadwinning for themselves. And so that's left a potentially difficult vacuum for a lot of men. And I think that's the vacuum we're seeing a lot of them fall into. Reframing that is very tough. There was something you reframed for me, and it has to do with this expanded role. For women, sometimes...

And I do it myself. You can complain about sort of the mental load and I'm working two different roles that are distinct. But you pointed out some of the advantage of that can be the, you can take solace in your motherhood role if something professionally is not going so well. Whereas men, if they only have the one thing and we have not yet expanded that and nothing's working for them, perhaps, where does that leave them? Yeah, it's a really interesting area of study. There's this idea in psychology of self-complexity.

Self-complexity is really a term that just means that there are different elements of your identity that you have more of like a plurality of identities.

And what that means is exactly what you just said, you can sort of switch between one and the other. And there are stresses and strains that come with that for sure, right? And that's what you will hear a lot about. But as you point out, there are some advantages too, right? You have a terrible day as a mom, maybe you're going to kill it at work and vice versa. I'm not saying that's a painless process at all, but women are doing that. And women have much higher levels of self-complexity than men on almost every measure. In other words, more of these domains of life where they're finding identity and meaning.

Whereas for men, more of their eggs are in the basket of work and breadwinning, which means a few things. It means that first of all, men get hit much harder by unemployment than women psychologically because it's just a bigger deal for them because it's still so wrapped up in their identity. But it also means that if they are unemployed or they're struggling at work, they don't have these other strong areas of meaning and life to fall back on for their own sense of flourishing in the way that women do. And again, I think it's just a lag. It's why I've pushed so hard

to give better rights to fathers and really try and, I think, shore up the institution of fatherhood as an independent institution separate from marriage. And we can maybe get into that because it's where the conservatives really recoiled from my argument. But I think we have to free fatherhood from marriage if we're going to make progress here. But central point is dads matter even when they're not breadwinners. In fact, arguably, especially when they're not breadwinners.

Let me ask you a little bit about that. Sort of upper class and educated folks are sort of considered the statistical category where you have the most choices. So the choices you're making might be the ideal ones, right? And in the case of sort of upper class educated men and women, they end up getting married and staying married because presumably part of the advantage is that their children end up

doing fairly well, right? So is there room for preserving that and arguing to preserve that and encourage that instead of freeing fatherhood from marriage? What do we lose by doing that?

Yeah, well, interestingly, I think those marriages are actually the result of freeing fatherhood from marriage, which sounds like a very paradoxical way to put it. But let me see if I can work my way back around that circle. So when you see these, you know, upper class, highly educated folks getting married and staying married, right? And that's true. So for your generation, if you're college educated, you're more likely to get married and stay married than your mom was.

And marriage has declined only very slightly at the top of the distribution, right? Marriage is unbelievably strong among highly educated Americans. And I do mean unbelievably. That is not what anybody expected back in the 70s. If you read, particularly a feminist sociologist in the 1970s, once women get educated and powerful, they won't need marriage anymore. So there's going to be this massive flight from marriage. And of course, the feminists were all getting ready to cheer that. And the conservatives were all terrified of it. And guess what? It didn't happen.

And so why is it that the most economically powerful women in the history of the world, i.e. college-educated American women, why are they the ones most likely to get married? It's not because of economic dependence. It may look traditional from the outside because it's marriage.

But on the inside, it's been fundamentally revolutionized because it's chosen. And it's largely, in my view, a co-parenting contract. It's largely about we want to raise our kids together. Let's have a contract that binds us to that shared co-parenting commitment. Oh, here's one. Here's marriage. And what that means is that even if the marriage gets dissolved, the parents continue to co-parent very strongly. And that's one of the reasons why

you'll see much better contact now from divorced parents with their kids because the kinds of parents who are choosing to marry now are the ones who are most committed to raising their kids in the first place. So I think it's a model of a wholly new relationship where the role of the father is not confined to breadwinner. It's absolutely co-parent. And that means both breadwinning and potentially caring as well. But it's a co-parenting one and it's not based on economic dependency. Quite the opposite. It's based on choice. In this case, the choice to raise our kids together.

It seems to me, though, that if upper-class couples are choosing that, clearly there's an element of the marriage part of a co-parenting agreement that is helping them. So is that reimagined co-parenting marriage something that can work for other classes? Instead of saying the ship sailed. Yeah, I mean, I guess here's what I think. I actually wrote a piece of The Atlantic about this years ago, and I called them HIP marriages, High Investment Parenting Marriages.

And my view is that these college-educated Americans are actually pioneering their way to a new kind of marriage, which is based more on co-parenting and a commitment to do that than it is on economic dependency. So the old model is economic dependency of women on men and emotional dependency of men on women. She raises the kids, he makes the money, they're bound together in that, but through the chains of dependency.

That's not true anymore. And so I think it is more now about this joint project of raising kids. And interestingly, I can't remember the name of the author now, but it's a really interesting study of what happens in states where in the event of divorce, all the wealth gets shared equally. So in other words, it's like an insurance contract, right? It means that she will get, let's assume the man's got more of the wealth, she'll get half the wealth, right? In states that have done that, moms are more likely to stay at home for longer with their kids.

Right. That's a really interesting finding because what that suggests and the author who's done the work I think absolutely nails it which is there's a commitment device there. The contract means I can afford to take time without worrying about losing economic power. And so there's a great example of marriage as a commitment device to enable co-parenting. And I think yes,

If that's the direction, great. But that's based on this fundamental equality between the mum and the dad. And it's based on, I think, a complete reinvention of fatherhood as not just confined to breadwinning. And certainly both parties have exit power. And let's not forget, women file for divorce twice as often as men now. So women have exit power from the marriage now in a way they never did before, which is what we all wanted all along.

So what does that reimagined fatherhood role look like if it's not in a commitment of marriage and it's a non-resident? And this is conceding, of course, that this happens all the time. What would the ideal form of that look like that would benefit the children that those two are raising? I want to make it really clear that the model I'm describing here, and I'll say a bit more about, is entirely compatible with marriage. And in fact, I would say it's probably the model that my wife and I have lived by.

within a marriage contract. But the marriage is sort of like the second order element. The marriage is the expression of

and a device to enable this rather than the driver of it. And what it's based on I think is a move from an indirect relationship between fathers and kids to a direct relationship between fathers and kids. So if the old model was mom raised the kids so had a direct relationship with them, dad had a direct relationship with the mom and he was the breadwinner. And he maybe had, if you think of an org chart, he's like a dotted line.

report to the kids, right, from the kids to the dad. Most of his relationship with the kids was mediated largely through the mom, right? So it's like half a T with a dotted line. And actually now I think it has to be found on direct relationships between fathers and children. So both parents have direct lines to the kids and perhaps a direct line to each other. Although you could argue that it's now become more of a dotted line between them because even if they're not together, and remember 40% of kids now are born outside marriage in the U.S.,

And most kids in the US won't go through their entire childhood with both biological parents. So this is the world we're living in, whether we like it or not. And in that world, I think it's incredibly important that fathers have this direct relationship with their kids that's not conditional on the relationship with the mom. If we think the relationship between fathers and kids is dependent on the relationship between fathers and the mom, then in the event of separation or divorce, or maybe not even being together at all, it benches the dad.

It says, okay, dads don't matter. And especially for unmarried fathers, that's a real problem. And so I think we need things like a much more equal child support system and equal leave for fathers and mothers that's independently attached to them, not transferable between the two, so that dads get the message and the support to be dads, period. Not dads as breadwinners, but just dads. And we haven't even begun to work on that yet.

And when it comes to benching guys, I do feel like, and this is some of the feminist narrative that makes me uncomfortable at times. It feels like it's shifted from we want equality with men, we want what men have to something else in the last 20, 30 years, more along the lines of, say, smash the patriarchy, which feels a little hostile to men, perhaps creates resentment for some of those men who aren't doing so well. What do you think about that shift and how it plays in all of these problems?

Well, I think it's part of a general shift within feminism towards more cultural discussion than material ones. I think that for a long time the women's movement was powered by the desire to get substantive equality of opportunity in education and the labour market and so on too. I think obviously it's shifted more recently to being much more about culture and to be an ideology. So the way I think about it is that feminism has morphed in its current

most obvious formation. I think this is why most women now don't define themselves as feminists, by the way.

is more from being an equality movement to be more of an ideology that needs an enemy, and the enemy is patriarchy. And patriarchy is defined culturally. It's as much about behaviors and messaging and narrative as it is about pay gaps and college entry and so on. And I think that is playing into this whole debate. And the problem with it, even to the extent that there may be some truth to some of those cultural insights, particularly the apex that we were just discussing, it doesn't feel true.

to most boys and men. If you tell working class or black boys and men that they are the head of a patriarchy, it doesn't feel true to them as they look around the classroom and look around the workplace at all. And the reason it doesn't feel true to them is because it's not true.

And it's become one of those terms that I think has become really unmoored from its kind of original meanings and therefore quite unhelpful to help people negotiate the world we're in. To the extent that, I know, patriarchy is a useful term. I think it best describes a society where women are materially dependent on men.

And I think that the main thrust of the women's movement has been to make that less true. And so the demolition of that economic dependency has been at the center of the women's movement. And it has been extraordinarily achieved, whilst not completed, over the last few decades. So to that extent, it's been great. But in demolishing, to the extent we have, patriarchy defined that way, we've also pretty much demolished the cultural molds in which masculinity used to be shaped.

And that was an inevitable consequence of that movement. And the conservatives were worrying about that a long time ago. And they were saying, that's why we shouldn't do this whole feminism thing. That's the wrong conclusion. But the molds have been broken nonetheless. And we haven't really made any new ones yet.

One of your thoughts in the book is that perhaps what the feminist movement and women's liberation revealed is that men needed women more than women needed men. And that was something maybe we weren't expecting. This is a deliberately provocative question, so take it in that spirit. As I was reading, I thought, well, if boys and men are suffering and children are sometimes suffering because of this lack of cultural script for men –

Does that mean that my flourishing meant that they were sacrificed at it?

I had to sit back and think about it for a while. What do you think of that idea? Which, by the way, I'm not giving up any of my flourishing. Nor should you. So I think largely I can put your mind at rest. I don't think you should feel any responsibility of this at all. I think it's basically just zero-sum thinking that's wrong. There is no reason economically or in the long run, I would say culturally, why the rise of women...

in any way necessitates the fall of men. I mean, of course, there's a relative rebalancing. And some of this, some of what we're feeling, I think, is just adjusting to this relative position of men and women. Like, if you really think that we can only have a good society if women are relatively always worse off than men in all key domains, then, of course, this equality movement is going to cause problems for you. But by and large, it's not zero-sum. I mean, the fact that men are struggling in the labor market is by and large, it's not because women enter the labor market and are doing well in the labor market.

The relative rebalancing, of course, you've only got so many managers. So more than 50% of managers are now women, which they are. Or more than 50% of scientists are now women, which they are. It means, by definition, only 50% of men can be. So if you persist in a zero-sum game, that's always going to be true. But overall...

There's no reason why men can't be doing much better economically. And it's because of trade and automation and stuff we've already talked about. And their failure in the education system that is crippling them in the labor market, not because of women. So there's just, we want a society where everyone can flourish. And the flourishing of one group does in no way undermine the flourishing of another group unless we've constructed society really badly, which we haven't. And so we can have our cake and eat it on this occasion. After the break, more with Richard Reeves. Stay with us.

Barry had Louise Perry on a few weeks ago to talk about the state of feminism and sex, and in short she said that the sexual revolution was a mistake. Do you see any truth to that or that playing in these discussions? I think Louise's work is super interesting and I admire her for taking this on, but generally speaking I don't agree for the following reason. I see the point of the sexual revolution as,

was not to say women need to be like men. Women are just like men. And until women are thinking about and treating sex exactly the same way as men, then we won't have liberation.

I don't think that is what it was really about. And so I think it's a mischaracterization. I actually think what it was about was saying, look, there's a whole range of sexual orientations, of sexual appetites, of interests and so on. And sure, in terms of like overall sex drive and variety and stuff, there are differences between men and women, right, on average. But the distributions overlap.

And so what you want is a world where, let's say, the woman who is more like a, quote, typical man in terms of her interest in sex, desire for variety in sex, can have a sex life that aligns with her preferences without being stigmatized, without being seen as a slut or whatever epithet you want to use, whatever, just because you do. That's the world you want.

What you don't want is a world that says, until we're all exactly the same, we don't have real equality, which respects and acknowledges that on average there are differences. And Louise is very good about this, right? On average there are, and she quotes some of the same work that I know on this. So there are average differences, which means on average we're going to see it play out. Where I think the real conversation then is, if you do see these differences between men and women on average in terms of how they think about sex and how sex plays into their lives, then you need institutions, right?

that help us to negotiate those differences. You need norms, you need institutions, you need dating norms, etc., which to some extent have the effect of helping us negotiate those. And it's one of my big frustrations with the nature-nurture debate is that the people who think it's all culture, it's all nurture, are actually missing the point because recognizing there are some natural differences doesn't make culture less important. It makes it more important.

If there is a tendency for men to be more driven by sex or more aggressive or whatever, it means that the norms around how do we manage those differences are even more important.

And we have to be very careful not to abandon them, like ideas of courtship, to use a word that makes me sound like something out of the 19th century. But there's something to that, which was a way, it was a script that we could both follow that would recognize to some extent that there were differences between us, but get us to an end that was going to work for both of us. You tell a story about something that happened at your son's school, that because of the internet and its sort of magnifying effect,

national news cycle tendencies, something I don't want to get too much into boys will be boys, obviously, but some activities or characteristics of teenage boys end up being pathologized and turned into something that might haunt them their entire lives. That seems to tap into what you're talking about a little bit.

Can you tell me about what happened at the school? Yes, this was the high school my kids attended. It was Bethesda Jeffery Chase High School. So it's an affluent, very, very liberal suburb outside DC. And a bunch of boys create a list of girls ranked by their attractiveness and shared this list with each other using some app. And then one of the girls saw the list, was horrified, reported the boys. The boy who made the list was, I think, briefly suspended and had the head teacher reprimanded him. But then things kicked off. There was a protest outside the head teacher's office.

media organizations were contacted and it ended up going national and indeed international. It was in the mail, but it was on CBS, ABC News, etc. And the typical phrase was like "toxic masculinity." In fact, the head teacher herself ended up on a C-SPAN panel discussing the culture of toxic masculinity at the school. And with sons at the school, I was like, obviously I'm talking to them, I say, "Are you being toxically masculine at school? What's your responsibility for all this?"

Most of the kids, girls and boys were obviously skeptical about some of what was going on. It was more how it was taken up by the media under this label of toxic masculinity. And there's a few things there to unpack. One is just the label itself is toxic now.

and we should consign it back to the marginalia of obscure academic science from whence it sprang in 2016. It puts boys off, it pathologizes things that are in some cases natural, and it doesn't draw people towards it. So that's an example there of some differences that are on average different between boys and girls. One of which is around sex drive. It's not that girls can't create lists of hot boys, and did in the school actually, but...

But that's not toxic. And really for me, it kind of highlighted the misuse of this term, but much more deeply, I don't want boys who fancy girls to feel bad about themselves for that. Because that's a good thing. By the way, it's also something you can't really do anything about.

What you can do something about is how you express it. And clearly you've got these teenage boys that make a list, etc., right? Wrapped over the knuckles, should be the end of the story. It shouldn't be then elevated into this whole thing about this boy. The boy who made the list had to apologize to the school. He apologized to the Washington Post in exchange for them keeping his name out of the story. He was obviously, his parents could probably afford good PR, etc. And I think he lived to tell a tale. All the girls who were involved survived. And in fact, they're all at Ivy League colleges now.

So they'd done okay, right? It's just like I really, it did make me kind of worry about the message that we're sending to boys with that kind of language. Now, if I made a list of attractive colleagues at the Brookings Institution and shared it, I think I'd get more than a rap over the knuckles and quite rightly too, right? So, right, that would be fair because I'm not 16, right?

And so I actually prefer to think about mature masculinity and immature masculinity rather than toxic and non-toxic. Partly because no one can define non-toxic masculinity. It just doesn't exist, so it's meaningless. And so let's think about how we mature. And that's true for girls and boys, right? We have to grow up. And those boys, they were boys. And to a certain extent, I don't want to say that boys will be boys. But guess what I'm going to say?

Boys will be boys in the sense that there are some differences that naturally occur on average between boys and girls. We shouldn't deny them. The effect of puberty, for example, is pretty different for girls than it is for boys. And that's okay as long as we don't use it as an excuse.

Let me ask you a little bit about porn. You sort of, in laying out the biological differences, some of this is, look, the male sex drive is going to be the male sex drive in some respects. And we have to accept that fact. But what's changed is what's available in huge ways. And you call the Internet a force multiplier for porn. Tell me about how that affects men's role in society.

Yeah, well, I think it's important, as you just did, I put it in historical context. You know, porn has been around as long as men have been around. They keep uncovering these, you know, 30,000 year old paintings of things which are basically kind of primitive porn. There are, I think, 13 words in Latin for prostitute. And so this kind of fact about male sexuality is not new.

But as you say, porn is new in terms of its sheer accessibility and volume. So that's been a shock. And we don't yet know, honestly, what the outcomes are going to be. I'm not convinced by evidence that it's having kind of immediate negative effects for most men, including in their relationships. And here I disagree with people like Louise and Amir Shrinivasan and others. Because I just don't think the evidence is there. I went looking for the evidence. And honestly, I was inclined to think that there probably is going to be evidence for negative effects.

But it isn't there. And it's also a very difficult field because almost everybody researching the impact of porn is doing so from a position of wanting to find that it's having negative effects. There are very few pro-porn researchers out there. And I tell you, it's really hard to get research money. Now, there is a small proportion of men for whom it becomes a real problem of addiction, like most things, right? There's a small group, and that's true of all things we can think about that have addictive properties like this. But most men...

You look at the data, they go a couple of times a week. The average visit to places like Pornhub is like seven minutes. And then they're getting on with their day. And honestly, I think what porn does is it reveals some facts about male sexuality that are uncomfortable for a lot of women to get their heads around. And a lot of women are like, what, between meetings? Like, really? Like, at all?

You know, we are what we are to some extent. It's how we express what we are that really matters. The last thing I was going to say on porn is, like, it's not going to go away. I think what we need is porn ed in every school curriculum. I mean, I think boys need... This is probably one of the things I cut out of the book because I knew that people were going to react like that. But...

There's really interesting stuff where you can actually teach boys about dopamine and addiction and what's happening or how it's produced and all of that. So just actually get some literacy around this, right? There was a teacher that got into huge trouble at a private school in New York for having a porn ed curriculum. I looked at the curriculum and I thought, it's exactly what every school needs. And it's sort of just this unwillingness to confront reality that means that that kind of thing is dismissed because it's like, okay, all your boys are going to consume porn. And I will say the other thing, it's hard to research the impact of porn.

because every male is using it, basically. Or every male with an internet connection. And so it's hard to research it because you don't get... There's no control group. It's really hard to get a control group. When it comes to porn education, are you training to sort of tame this tendency or are you training to dip into this possible addiction area? I think it takes for granted that they're going to be exposed to it, that they're going to access it, certainly. Right? I mean...

Try and find me a teenage boy who won't try and find access to erotic material of one kind or another. I mean, back in the day, it was...

I was going to say the name of my friend, I'll just say David. My friend David, whose dad had copies of Penthouse, or whatever it was that people would do it. In desperation, if your parents get rid of all the porn, then your 14-year-old boy will steal your Bowdoin catalogue. And so accepting that it's there and it's going to be accessed. But I do think the really warning of the dangers of it and how it does play on these addictive parts of your brain, the dopamine, how the algorithm works,

So just, you know, Louise did have this nice line, you either live above the algorithm or below the algorithm, right? And I think that getting more boys above the porn algorithm so they understand why that's coming up next and so on, they understand how addiction works, they understand about dopamine, and they understand the risks of addiction, and they understand how it might play out into their real relationships and what's the difference. Now, I think actually humans are very good at knowing the difference between fantasy and reality. I think we've learned that from the feminist movement as much as anything else.

But I think that just looking at squarely in the face and helping young people to develop, you're going to need the skills to deal with this in your life if you're going to deal with it well. Like financial literacy, right? I see porn as as much part of life as 401ks. And we teach kids about financial literacy. I think we should teach them about porn literacy too. For me, it's just straightforward. And the fact that it's not seen as straightforward, I think belies some ickiness on one side and some deep conservatism on the other.

Well, what I've learned is I have to get the Bowdoin catalog out of my house now. All right. I want to move into some policy prescriptions because we want to talk about solutions. We've talked a lot about the problems. If you could wave a magic wand and enact three policies to improve the state of men in America, what would they be? Number one would be a massive recruitment drive of men into K-12 teaching. 24% of K-12 teachers are currently male. That's down from 33%.

in the 80s, only one in 10 elementary school teachers and there are no male early years teachers. Sorry, 2%. There are half as many men teaching kindergarten as a share of the occupation as there are women flying US military jets. I want women flying military jets. Honestly, I don't care who flies the military jets. I just want the people who are best at shooting down the bad people. But I want a lot more men in early years education. We have none.

And that trend towards the feminization of the teaching profession is continuing unnoticed, unremarked upon. So we need scholarships, we need subsidies, you know, soft quotas, whatever it will take to arrest the decline of the number of men in our classrooms will be absolutely number one. Number two would be equal and generous paid leave for fathers and mothers in a burst of radical utopianism I call for six months.

almost fully compensated paid leave for each mothers and fathers independently to be taken at any time during the kid's life. And now we just failed at the federal level to pass even the microscopic paid leave policy. So I'm aware of how utopian it sounds, but the principle of equality is hugely important to me that fathers get the same rights to leave as mothers because they matter as much as mothers do for sure.

And then the third thing I would do, and this relates a little bit to the teaching, but more generally, I think we need at least a $1 billion national investment in getting more men into the jobs of the future, especially in health, education, administration, and literacy, to match the similar investment we've made getting women into STEM. And I call them HEAL jobs, Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy, it's the opposite of STEM. There are fewer men as a share of those professions today than there were before. And in some areas in particular,

dramatic decline. So I'll take psychology as a good example. 29% of psychologists are men now. That's down from 39% in the last decade. Among psychologists under the age of 30, only 5% are male. So you can see where the trend line is going.

And so not only because psychology is a growing profession, but also because boys and men need psychologists too. And in many cases, they may be more likely to want to talk to a psychologist of the same gender. Let's say you're struggling with porn addiction, to come back with this conversation we were just having. Maybe you want to talk to a woman about that.

But for a lot of boys and men, that might be an easier conversation to have with a man who's just going to at some level maybe kind of resonate more with some of the drives that are kind of driving you back to the computer and logging on to the porn every time. Maybe, but if there aren't any male psychologists...

then you can't do that. And then there's a vicious circle. So for all kinds of reasons, we need more men in those professions. So those are my big three. Everything you're talking about, so we've got having boys start school a year later, reimagining fatherhood, these specific policies, they would be huge feats in a politically healthy society. And may I just say that we are in the US in 2022, when anything having to do with gender is completely politicized.

And it seems like the idea that gender is a fiction or not biologically related at all or influenced has become a fixture of how we talk about these things. It's taking a stronger hold in society. In the past month alone, I've seen the following headlines. The case for co-ed sports in the Atlantic. New York Times published the story with the headline, maternal instinct is a myth that men created. And Scientific American asserted that sexual dimorphism is an 18th century invention that

How do we get to the solutions if we can't agree that there are two sexes to begin with? One of the best outcomes from that New York Times story about maternal myth being invented by men was the tweet that generated from Caitlin Flanagan, where she just tweeted out, "If so, it's one of their best."

It was just great. Classic Caitlin as well. And the piece was horrible, by and large. And it's this dynamic, this kind of ratchet effect that you see what happens, which is that the more one side go to extreme, the more the other side almost go to an extreme, kind of in the hope, I think, that it'll kind of balance itself out. It's a bit like two people leaning on the side of a boat. The more leaning out, you have to lean out more. And so...

What happens around something like differences in sex and gender is that the more that some conservatives overweight the role of biology, and until very recently have been using biology as a reason to discriminate against women. You can't possibly have a woman president. What if she's at the wrong point in the cycle when nuclear war breaks out or whatever absurd example you want to take? Of course women can't be engineers. They can't think about...

you know repeat and so there has been this and even today you see this kind of overweighting of biology on on the right as in a way that does seem it's binary right we're designed to be like a

So the left has to deny biology altogether. And in fact, I have been accused of gender essentialism by even suggesting that there are some differences. Whereas of course the distributions overlap and sex and gender are complicated and there are some people who are in the middle and there are some exceptions to these rules. But the great thing about liberal society is that you can have exceptions and rules and they're both great.

You don't have to deny there are rules to honor the exceptions. And it's interesting, actually, I'll just share one, I won't name the publication, but I've just written a piece about education differences between boys and girls and some of the interventions we should have. And the copy editor got in touch with me and she said, I'm really struggling to edit your piece in line with our policy of using gender neutral language.

I said, "Yeah, I can imagine." She said, "Your whole piece seems to be based on the idea of separate boys and girls." I said, "Yeah." And I said, "Honestly, I don't see as many people complaining about using a gender binary when they talk about the pay gap. I think it's very useful to look at the pay of women and men and measure the gender pay gap." Now you might say, "That's absurd. You've assumed a binary."

Yes, and then recognize exceptions. But until and unless we think it ceases to be useful to measure the pay gap between men and women, then I don't see why we shouldn't measure things like education gap between boys and girls. Yeah, it strikes me that there's a lot of discussion in the news about how this new gender conversation can hurt or erase women. There's the discussion about the controversy over birthing people, trans sports, that kind of thing. There's not as much discussion about what...

this new way of talking about gender does to the men in the discussion. There's a great example in your book. It was a discussion of guidelines from the American Psychological Association, which described traditional masculinity as on whole harmful without noting any of masculinity's positive aspects. What do we do when this political discussion and its conclusions end up dictating these institutions that are supposed to help both men and women?

I think what's troubling about this is that there's an asymmetry in it because sometimes there is a willingness to recognize some of the needs that women might have, particularly as mothers and so on too, that are to some extent kind of biologically based notwithstanding that one New York Times piece.

but a reluctance to do it for men. And so my accusation about the American Psychological Association, that got lots of headlines because the conservatives attacked it and then they retreated and so on around this idea of masculinity as intrinsically bad. But what really struck me reading through the report was there was in these guidelines for psychologists, the majority of human women have just discussed this,

there's no mention of biology affecting male psychology. No mention of testosterone, no mention of puberty, no mention of any of the things we've talked about before. No, none at all. So everything's about socialization. And so as far as they're concerned, men are a blank slate and everything that's masculine is socialized. But the equivalent report on girls and women did have stuff on biology. It talked very usefully about puberty and menopause and birth and the effects that that can have on women, both physically and psychologically. And so...

quite a good toolkit for psychologists who are dealing with women but a terrible toolkit for me so what you don't want to end up the worst of all was is that you kind of accept and even honor the biological differences of women that might affect how they are in the world but deny them for men right that's that's implausible on its face but also incredibly unhelpful to men who are trying to figure out how to be good men in today's world

Well, and talk about the vicious cycle. If men would like help from psychologists to learn how to fit into a modern society, they have an army of female psychologists who only have guidelines about how biology affects females. Oops. That's when it becomes consequential, right? When it gets into these kinds of institutions. Look, a silly New York Times piece, that's not something to worry about. But when it's in the places like the American Psychological Association, that's when you have to, I think, start calling it.

I think there will probably be a bit of a course correction on talking about gender as separate from biology to some extent. Where there might not be as easy a reversal is in the labor market, which we've talked about, and the fact that traditionally male jobs that demand physical labor are being automated or shipped overseas, leaving, as you noted, some 9 million prime working-age men not in employment. That was before 2020.

You write about getting more men into HEAL, just name check that acronym, Health Education Administration and Literacy. How do we do that? And what does that look like for men, especially on the recruiting front? You had some interesting examples of what maybe did work and didn't work. Yeah, I mean, there's, I think a big question here is how do we take away what Claudia Goldin, the Harvard economist, calls the auras of gender that surround certain jobs. And so I think there's a few things here.

One is, I think, to be just very intentional about how those jobs are described and marketed and be attentive to making them appealing to men. But also, yeah, I think some pretty strong affirmative action, if I can use that phrase, is required in some of these areas too. So I want to see scholarships for getting men into some of those positions, especially things like teaching, because I think it's for men. Just the same way we have scholarships for women into STEM.

loads of them we should have the same to get men into these areas where they're underrepresented too and i also think in things like recruitment actually again you've got to be careful obviously there are laws and so we should be very very thoughtful about this but if you take something like faculty 95 of nursing faculty are women which is one of the reasons it's hard to get men to do a subject when it's all women doing it and only women teaching it in just the same way it was very hard to get women to go engineering when it was only boys doing it and only men teaching it

We know how important it is to have these kind of role models. And in STEM education now, there's a strong preference for hiring women in STEM. Two to one preference, everything else equal, for hiring a woman to teach a STEM course

course in universities and I think we need about the same for men teaching HEAL. The other side of the coin is a really significant investment in vocational education which could be for HEAL jobs. There's plenty of vocational like health administration and so on where you can get a certificate to do that but just more generally it looks like boys and men benefit from a more vocational approach to learning, technical high schools, apprenticeships and so on and it's really striking to me that there is a good apprenticeship bill in congress right now

to create a million new apprenticeships. 93% of apprentices are men, by the way. And it's been sitting in the Senate committee for a year, and it costs 1.5 billion. We're having an active discussion about spending 500 billion on cancelling student debt, which would...

disproportionately benefit women because women hold two-thirds of student debt because women go to college a lot more. But this is not to comment on the proposal itself, but it's just to point out that cancelling student debt would be a massively pro-female policy. Apprenticeships would be a massively pro-male policy. And as I say, it's been sitting in the Senate for a year. And I think it honestly is partly because it's so pro-male that it's harder to get it off, get it into the floor and onto the president's desk for signature.

I wonder also, you mentioned in your book that we need to figure out what programs do work for men because there's Kalamazoo, Michigan, where they made college free to anyone who wanted to go. And this program ended up not benefiting boys at all. Is that true? Correct. Not at all.

That study was one of the things that led me to write the book, honestly, because then I started digging and finding other programs where that was true too. But very generous scheme. Full tuition, basically any college in the state for all kids graduating from Kalamazoo public schools.

So unusually generous, but also unusually it's been properly evaluated by Marta Wachowska, Tim Bartik and Brad Hirschbeim at the Upjohn Institute. They did a fantastic job of evaluating it. It's almost a 50% increase in female college completion, zero impact on men, which meant that from a cost-benefit point of view, it actually really was a pretty good deal for women because of thinking about the higher taxes and employment. But it actually was negative cost-benefit analysis for men because it cost quite a bit of money, but it didn't really...

you know, have much effect. Partly because the men were much more likely to just drop out. Even if they started, they were much more likely to drop out. So I actually went to Kalamazoo and talked to a bunch of them. And there was one guy in particular, Tyrese, who I spoke to, who just said, look, you know, they're just women. They've got more persistence. They've got more grit. They've got their act together, basically. And so I was going around chatting to these guys trying to get their sense of it. And these non-cognitive skills and motivation that we've talked a lot about just kept coming up over and over again. There's a bunch of policies where that's true. They're just...

seem to work for women and girls in a way they don't for boys and men. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't do them, but we might want to think about who we target them to. And we should look for interventions that do work for boys and men in education. And that includes vocational training is unusual in that it works for boys and men and doesn't work as well for girls and women. It doesn't hurt them, but they're unusual in that they stand out as the very few interventions, among the very few interventions that really do seem to work more for men. Should there be a male equivalent of the feminist movement?

Well, it depends what the feminist movement does. One of my colleagues said, "Wow, are you calling for a men's movement?"

I said, no, what I'm calling for is for the women's movement to become an equality movement again. Maybe become it again, honestly. Because I think at its best, that's really what the women's movement was about. And if we can have a movement, a gender equality movement, right, there's still to some significant extent a women's movement, but it could also be a movement that takes gender inequality seriously the other way, then we don't need a men's movement.

But if we continue to have an equality movement that is completely asymmetrical,

that's literally only one eye, that only sees gender and equality as one way and ignores the ones running the other way, well, you know that the populists are going to make hay with that unacknowledged problem, which they already have. And so I think it slightly depends. I think the idea of a men's movement is terrifying to me and would signal a huge failure on our part to just take the idea of liberal egalitarianism seriously, which I think we did in the feminist movement, and just apply it to boys and men as well.

Yeah, and I think you run into this problem again that we've touched on where there is virtually no incentive for man or woman to put social capital, political capital, or literal capital into this particular problem. And so...

you end up with those who get a different kind of payoff doing it, right? Yeah. Yeah, they get great audiences. I mean, anybody that ignores the audiences that Jordan Peterson's been getting is not paying attention to our culture, or indeed to others. Anyone's not paying attention to the gender gap. I mean, the fact that Trump won with the biggest gender gap in recorded polling history, they're not paying attention. Because that's right, it creates a vacuum. And the vacuum is created by the fact that the, to put it very crudely, the left...

don't want to acknowledge that we need policies that will specifically and deliberately help boys and men. And the right aren't interested in policy at all. They're just interested in soaking up this discontent, turning it into votes, and winning off the back of it with, if anything, just a sort of vague sense that we can bring back the 50s and that it was feminine and the left hates men and the left does just enough to justify that claim. But into that horrible political vacuum that's being created...

a lot of boys and men fall. And I think that is one of the things that's fueling the populism that we're also worried about. Yeah, I mean, I would push back a little bit in that I'm a right-of-center woman who just looks at so many of these things and says, one, when you talk about the left's rhetoric sort of making the rights more plausible, I'm the audience for that, right? And I just think, okay, there are these things that were sexual or cultural mores that are worth

and worth talking about and perhaps encouraging while we're also reimagining. But to your point about this vacuum, you know, there is this unserved space

population in some ways. And you mentioned Jordan Peterson. I think Joe Rogan comes to mind. I think even Mike Rowe with his message about vocational studies and hard work and physical work and valuing that. Jocko Wilnick as well. All these guys have huge audiences because I think men are looking for messages from fellow men. Who are some of the people you think are good

male role models, and they may include some of those guys, or those that you would like your sons to emulate or listen to. Well, I do think that Barack Obama was a terrific male role model who didn't really lean into that. And I think that was an opportunity lost. I think he remains one, actually, as the kind of father he wanted to be. I think especially as a black man and in doing his campaigns, he talked quite a lot about fatherhood. But then when he got into the White House...

And essentially, this is what happens to all Democrats, is they have to keep their base. They have to keep the feminists on side. And so they're afraid of even tiptoeing towards issues. And I know they think about it every now and again, and they get to the edge and then pull back. Trump couldn't do it for different reasons. Trump didn't want to stop talking about this stuff because he knew that it was going to draw attention to his own failings.

And so he couldn't do it for different reasons. But I would point to him for sure. And look, I disagree with a huge amount of what Jordan Peterson has to say. But I do think he's really providing a sounding board and a place for men to go and to learn from and he's fulfilling a very important cultural function. And so I don't think people dismiss him

I think very often unfairly, sometimes for things he said off the cuff or whatever. But he's speaking into these problems where he lacks, which is where I think most of these conservatives lack, is solutions and tends to individualize again. He's a psychologist, of course, but tends to get it back to like, make your bed.

stand up straight, respect your parents. I like all that, by the way. I think for my own sons, that's the bit of the 12 rules for life I wanted them to pay attention to, but the bits they apparently skipped. So I think there's some value in all sides in terms of what they're doing. The reluctance, I think, is not only that the left don't necessarily want to call out gender inequalities that run both ways, but even when they do do things that might be more pro-male,

They don't want to describe it that way. And so even some of these infrastructure things, which may help more construction jobs, expanding healthcare insurance helps men more than women because men are much more at risk of not having health insurance than women.

But the idea that you could say specifically, this is going to help everyone, that you know what, it's really going to help our young men. Even just saying that about existing policies would go such a long way to blunting the attack from the right. And I agree with you. You only need a few people saying birthing peoples or denying gender or talking about patriarchy to give enough veracity to the claim from the right that the left doesn't care about boys and men for that to become an effective political attack. But it's one that I think could be fairly easily blunted.

by those in the center and those on the left by just talking about these issues and reframing some of these policies. There's a huge missed opportunity here as each side just digs in into kind of, you know, the trench warfare that we've seen around all these cultural issues. But

I hope that we can move things on a little bit. And I think that if not now, after the midterms, that's clear. The midterms are going to be, both sides are doubling down on their base for the midterms, for sure. But maybe after that, we can have a better conversation. There's always the false hope of after the midterms. Thank you. Life is always going to be better after the midterms. Always. It doesn't matter what year it is.

Thank you so much, Richard Reeves, for being with us. The author of Of Boys and Men. I truly enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me on. Thanks for listening. Did you learn something from this conversation? Did you find any of your assumptions challenged? Did you hear things you disagreed with? I hope so. That's the goal.

If so, start a conversation with friends, share this with people in your community, have an honest debate. And if you want to support Honestly, subscribe to Barry's newsletter at commonsense.news. And I'm Mary Katherine Hamm. You can find me and my podcast, Getting Hammered, wherever you get your podcasts. Hope to see you again soon.