Nobody predicted that once girls and women caught up with boys and men that they would keep going and that we would now have a bigger gender gap in higher education than we did 50 years ago, just the other way around. So we've flipped the inequality now and it's actually wider now than it was when I was... That's an extraordinary fact that no one predicted. What do you think about the term toxic masculinity? I think it's a toxic term.
It escaped from the margins of academia in 2016, not coincidentally, and just became a term that was used to apply essentially to any behavior by boys and men. disapproved of it's rarely defined without any specificity at all and so it's a in a sense is completely vacuous term
But it's worse than that because by putting those two words right next to each other, it actually repels a lot of boys and men from a conversation about what it means to be a man, what it means to be particularly mature. I think to talk about mature masculinity and immature.
masculinity is quite useful but the idea of toxic it's like puritan it's like it's idea it reminds me of the idea of original sin in christian theology is right and and you need these exorcisms you need someone to come and exercise if you just weren't so male you'd be okay and having raised three boys to adulthood i gotta tell you that idea that there's something toxic in them that has to be expunged
is not a helpful way to raise them. So if we could just consign that particular term back to the obscurity of academic journals, that would be great. Where did it come from? It was originally from work that was being done with very violent incarcerated prisoners. And so there are a couple of academics that were using it to talk about ways in which very violent men who were serving long prison sentences, how their views of masculinity had become intertwined.
with ideas of expressed violence and dominance and so on too. And so it was a concept that was being used by a few psychologists. But I think it had sort of it was mentioned five times a year in academic journals until 2016. And then overnight, it was on the front page of every newspaper. And so it escaped. So, you know, I think it did have some value in the sense that there may be a group, very small group of men for whom.
actually their sense of what it means to be male has in some ways become toxic. But it was always this tiny minority of men for whom it was ever useful to apply it. And then suddenly Donald Trump got elected. Me too. Etc and you know, there you go
I've heard you say that it's a catch-all term to use when one finds the behavior of any man offensive or unpleasant. And that's so correct. It's gone from being something that's an aberration, a complete outlier, to anything which is just... slightly objectionable yeah that's the problem with it is that there are many problems with it but like any of these terms if it just expands and expands and expands so
everything you know i think i i i just did a quick search around and discovered that everything from climate change to covid to war to you is the result of toxic masculinity and you know if there was resistance to getting vaccinated it was toxic masculinity if you make a pass it's toxic masculinity and and it was just like being and actually there was this i talk about this in my book there was incident at my kids high school
uh that got international attention as an expression of toxic masculinity which really woke me up to the way this term is being sort of thrown around uh and used indiscriminately um but as i say it's not just it's not just It's actively harmful and interesting a lot of feminists will say that now, too There's a lot of people Helen Lewis who writes the Atlantic and so on. They're just saying look this term is not helping us
It's actually pushing men away from a conversation about masculinity and can we please stop using it. And so this is not a right wing view at all. It's actually one that a lot of feminists are just looking at the data and saying. if the goal here is to have a good conversation with boys and men about what it means to boys and men this is not the way in it's a terrible frame for that conversation
It seems strange to me. There's something odd happening in the modern world at the moment because the male default, it looks like, has become sort of the preferential life path that's being pushed on to, especially women, that sort of... lean in boss bitch career woman with the ability to have no strings attached casual sex and high financial independence without family but this is also while typically masculine values of things like
aggression or emotional control or conquery or mastery have also become demonized. So it is this very strange situation that's going on at the moment. And I've been asking a lot of people about why it is that women... are being told to be more masculine in a way. Why would that be seen as something that's preferential? Why is that something that's pedestalized in a way?
Well, I think that there are certain virtues or traits or strengths that may be traditionally associated with one sex or the other. And to make the boring social science point up front, these are averages. The distributions overlap. Can we just edit that into pretty much every sentence we're going to use? Because otherwise people think that it's a dimorphic distribution.
not a binary one. And I do think there are some elements of this that like to the extent the kind the aspiration leadership ambitions on it, to the extent that those were previously seen as quotes masculine, if women are now being encouraged to
express those, that's a good thing. I mean, that's what liberation is about. That's what equality is about. Without anybody, male or female, being forced into a box, whether that's the old box of stay at home wives you know don't trouble yourself with the labor market love approach or a new box which is this is how you must be you know everyone has to be like jeff bezos instead we want a world that allows us to flourish in our own way um
I will say some of those terms you've just used about sort of female aspiration. um are important not to kind of misunderstand because they are against the course of history of lots of women being told the opposite right so there is something empowering about women saying you can be everything and it's also important to note that whilst there is a bit of a panic about fertility are in a lot of countries right now. I don't share that panic, really. Most women are having children.
Most women do want children. And so if you look beyond the pages of a few elite media outlets that are catering to a very small group of highly educated 30-something men and women, most people are having kids. And so, you know, the 35 year old in New York or London or is not necessarily the median person we should be worried about. And so I don't share this view that, you know, all of a sudden we're surrounded by childless women. That's just.
not true there is a rise in childlessness but we shouldn't freak out about it in the way that i see some social conservatives doing interesting yeah that's an interesting input i think One of the things that I found very interesting after I spoke to a friend, he said, my current belief is that male self-improvement sees the person as mutable and the world as immutable. So you need to be the best person possible while accepting the rules and environment you are in.
This is in contrast with female self-improvement, which sees the person as immutable and the world as mutable. So women are taught to accept yourself and try to change the support structures and society that's around you. I'm not sure that that's true across
every situation, but there's something similar where you talk about the problems of boys and men are structural in nature rather than individual, but are rarely treated as such. The problem of men is typically framed as a problem of men. It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy. at the time yeah and i i think it's a really interesting and well observation but uh i think in some ways it it's important to get a bit of history here so i think right now there is a focus within
the women's movement, using that term broadly, around structures. So structures of care, child care, health care, workplace flexibility and so on. But it wasn't that long ago. that it really was much more individualized. It was about empowerment. You know, remember assertiveness training?
I mean, that was a huge thing in the women's movement for a while. It's like what women need to do is be more assertive. So we need to send it for more assertiveness training. And if you're not getting a pay rise, it's because you're not being assertive enough. And even today, you've got the whole power stance thing, you know, like. which I think has been now completely debunked. The revocation crisis came and decapitated. Just completely debunked. But like all things that...
get headlines and then get debunked. No one knows about the debunking. We could have a long list of things that people still believe. Everyone stood like this. I've been doing it. And then you read the debunking. god i just wasted you know a year of my life standing like an idiot but so i do think like this this balance between is this about you or is it about society is important when your friend really kind of captures that well
And I do think the women's movement has moved on towards more structure. But I, I also think that it's true to say, and you just kind of quoted me on this, that as far as men are concerned, Pretty much everyone seems to agree that it's about the individual, that men need to fix themselves in a way than in a way that kind of older style feminism did for women.
and not try and change the world around it. And what that results in is a sort of unholy alliance between a progressive left that says it's toxic masculinity that's to blame for all men's problems or, you know, rear guard misogyny. and a populist right that says it's because men aren't manly enough anymore. And so...
The left essentially says you just need to be like your sister and you'll be OK. And the right says you need to be like your dad and you'll be OK. And meanwhile, us men in this world of more gender equality are trying to figure this out. And neither of those messages. are very helpful so the structure of the education system which we might get to is definitely less friendly to males structurally
The labor market has changed in ways that structurally have had a disproportionate effect on men. You know, it's not deindustrialization, free trade, automation, etc. Those are. gender neutral changes on their face but they've had a much bigger impact on men and that's just a fact and then
The shift in the economic relationship between men and women has significantly changed family structures in a way that's challenged what it means to be a father. So in various ways, those are structural challenges. Those are the environment, to use your friend's terms, the environment.
isn't immutable. In fact, the environment's been, I mean, it's just been like a kaleidoscope around men and women for the last few years, right? It's just been this dizzying cultural change. And so recognizing that is part of, I think. uh is a necessary step to making progress which is not to absolve individuals of responsibility for what they do with their lives certainly not a message i've sent to my boys i do want them to be counted and be responsible but
It's crazy to imagine that people are learning, working and living in some kind of vacuum. What's happened to males in education then? What's happened is that males have fallen. rapidly behind females at every stage of the education system and in every advanced economy in the world. So if you just take all the OECD countries.
pretty good proxy for a decently economically advanced. There are more young women with a college degree than young men in both the UK and the US. It's 60-40 now on college campuses. And that's happened incredibly quickly. When I was born in 1969, college campuses were about 70% male, 30% female. By the time I went to college in the late 80s, it was about 50-50, and now it's flipped to 60-40.
the other way and so on pretty much every measure you can look at girls are ahead of boys and that's increasingly true even in subjects like math and science so one of the ideas people have in their head is like oh we always knew girls were better at english and women better at english and those sorts of subjects but aren't boys much better at math and science but the answer is not really anymore
In most places now, the girls and women have caught up in math and science as well, and in some cases overtaken, and still have this huge lead in literacy and English. And literacy and English turn out to be more important for what happens to you after that. So there's been this huge overtaking, which, by the way, no one predicted. It's really interesting to go back and you read the stuff in the 70s when we were really pushing for gender equality.
in education to get more women into college and especially into more male-dominated subjects. And everybody was pushing towards parity. Nobody predicted. that the lines would keep going. Nobody predicted that once girls and women caught up with boys and men, that they would keep going. And that we would now have a bigger gender gap in higher education than we did 50 years ago, just the other way around.
So we've flipped the inequality now and it's actually wider now than it was when I was born, almost. And certainly the US is wider and I think in the UK it's getting close. So that's an extraordinary fact that no one predicted and can only be the result of structural factors if it's happening everywhere. And every level is not the kid, right? It's not Chris's problem in secondary school in a particular education system, you know, or my son's problem in the US K-12.
It's a structural problem with the education system that's just not male-friendly enough. Structurally, what's changed then? Because just that more women are going to college and more women are performing better doesn't mean that... men should be doing worse no and it's important to distinguish of course as you imply that between relative and absolute right so if if one group is doing better than another then by definition
that the other group's doing relatively less well. It's like a gender pay gap, right? So the fact that women are earning a huge ton more than they were 50 years ago, but that doesn't mean they're caught up with men yet. Absolutely, wages have gone up. But in some cases, the absolute educational performance of boys has flattened.
or has dropped. And so if you look at white working class boys in the UK, for example, or black boys in the US, actually in many areas, they're actually sliding backwards. But you're right to kind of point to the distinction between relative and absolute. What I think has happened. is that the education system is just structured in favor of women and girls because it rewards certain kinds of behaviors.
At critical ages, in particular, turning your homework in, being planful, being organized, being committed, sticking on the task, being future oriented about the age of 16. which is when the gender gap in those skills is at its widest. And so what happens is that girls' brains just develop earlier than boys. It's just a biological fact.
And in particular, in the prefrontal cortex, there's a bit of the brain that's the CEO of the brain. It is the bit that turns your homework in that that says it's the bit of your brain that stops you going to the party and makes you stay in studying chemistry. Right. It's the bit of the brain that every parent waits to develop in their sons. Basically, parenting is like a 10-year process of being the substitute prefrontal cortex for your boy. Have you got kids? Have you got sons? No, not yet.
All right. Well, trust me, that's what it is. You're basically just going to be their prefrontal cortex until when is it coming? When is it coming? And the answer is much later than in girls. And so it's no surprise that girls are doing better. The surprise is that they weren't doing better before.
why weren't they doing better before because of sexism the truth is that girls were always at a structural advantage in education but we couldn't see it because it was never expressed in things like college going exam taking and so on because they were preparing for a life of being a wife and mother As soon as we took the braille women, the structural advantage that women had was exposed. So in a sense, by leveling, apparently leveling the playing field in education.
what we revealed was that the women are much better players and they are as a result largely in my view of It's also true that we don't have enough male teachers, that the pedagogy is not male friendly and so on, too. There's a whole bunch of things going on. But taken as a whole, you look at the school system, it's impossible to come to any conclusion other than that this suits girls better than it does boys.
That's fascinating, the fact that this has always been, looking below the surface, this has always been the way that the population within schools has been performing, but because of... lack of access, lack of encouragement, gendered discrimination that has restricted women from being able to reach their full potential in the education system, it's only when you've been able to...
open up those doors, that the underlying disparity has been able to fully show itself. And I suppose that it's difficult because if that was the case previously... The assumption now is that the only reason there could be a disparity between boys and girls performance is now due to some other type. of restriction or sexism it's by boys being told something restricted in some way so using the previous model of what was the solution to the problem for women and now mapping that onto the issue that
Men are facing, or boys. So it seems like it's more deep-rooted than that. This isn't the sort of thing that is occurring in the culture. This is something which is occurring in biology from a very early age.
Yeah, it's happening in the system itself. That's a great distinction. So I think that the main problem that women and girls faced before was they just had brakes on. They just had barriers. It was like... didn't go to common like my my dad went to college because you know that was way he was gonna hopefully earn more money and be able to raise family my my mom was basically encouraged to leave high school at 17 and said do you want to be a nurse
The idea that she would have gone to college just didn't happen. you know, and so you don't have to go and it's so quick, this change that's taken place, but you're exactly right. And it's hard, I think, for people to get their head around that because it's happened so quickly that the idea that people it's tough to get people to
to get their head around the idea that boys could be a structural disadvantage in the education system, which until incredibly recently seemed to be serving boys and men much better than girls and women, like literally in the blink of an eye.
And then there's a mistake that's made along exactly the lines that you've just identified, which is that some people say, oh, there must be discrimination against boys in education. And you get books like The War Against Boys, The War on Men, etc. which is that there is intentional discrimination against boys and there's almost no evidence no evidence of that
like no one is saying to no one said to my boys when they're going through high school oh don't you worry about college just find yourself a nice wife and settle down no one was saying that they were saying for god's sake turn your homework in so that you stand a chance of going to college you idiot so It isn't discrimination, but it is instead the mixture of
The difference between the chronological age and developmental age of the average boy and girl, especially in adolescence, has been revealed by the women's movement. And also, progressively, teaching as a profession has become more and more female over time. And so we're a fewer and fewer male teachers in schools. And that does seem to affect male performance for reasons that are complex and so on, too. And there's been a bit of a shift away from styles of learning.
that seem a bit more boyfriendly and male friendly, like vocational education, for example, which does seem to suit on average overlapping distributions. seem to suit males more than females. So there's been a series of trends in education that have, I think, exacerbated this underlying structural problem, which is a 16-year-old girl is older than a 16-year-old boy. in terms of her developmental abilities. Just how big is the...
Did I hear you say that it was 2% of kindergarten teachers in America are male? Some insanely small proportion. Yes, it's about it's about 2%. Yeah. It's not going up either. It's similar in the UK. These numbers actually do map pretty well across US and UK. One in 10.
elementary school teachers a primary school teachers male and in in one of my one of my sons actually works in early years education so i get this you know a lot of this you know through him and he's one of the very few males of course working in that space And so when you dig into numbers, it's about 2%, which is very low number. And to put it in perspective, as a share of the profession, there are twice as many or even three times as many women flying US military planes.
as there are men teaching kindergarten and pre-K classes. So we have about three times, it's about 7%, 7% of US military pilots now are women. Now, I'm happy to have a conversation about whether that's too low. You know, what should that number be? And what's actually happening, of course, is that most of the air forces are doing this. They're redesigning the cockpits of planes.
So that they're not designed anymore around a presumed kind of male height, which will allow shorter men to be pilots do. But it also most importantly, so they're actively recruiting, they're changing the design of fighter planes to get more women. great what's happening to get more men into early education answer nothing and so that isn't even seen as a problem
to be addressed, let alone one that we're propering solutions for. And so it's one of the reasons I'm really emphasising this point. Why would that matter? Why would it matter to have male teachers in schools? There's two big reasons. One is because the evidence suggests that when there are male teachers in schools, especially in certain subjects like English, but even in early years, the boys seem to do a bit better.
in just the same way that girls seem to do better when there are female teachers. especially when it's in subjects that go against the sort of stereotypical grain. So girls do especially well when they have female science teachers, but boys do especially when they have male English teachers.
And in the early years, there's some evidence that a bigger mix will be good for boys in the long run. As to why, we don't really know. There's a whole series of theories. Could be role models. It could be that male teachers have a a more intuitive understanding of male behavior so we do know for example that male teachers and this is true at all levels they're less likely to see a boy's behavior as problematic uh kind of compared to a female teacher
they're more likely to understand it for what it is perhaps as intuitive we don't know but the other reason i think is that if we're trying to change gender stereotypes you know there's a nice line from the women's movement which is you have to see it to be it well I got to tell you, if boys don't see any men in any of those roles, then it's not surprising that it's...
tough to get men to think about changing their lives so that they fill more of those roles. Gloria Steinem said that the idea we get about what it means to male and female comes in our earliest years. And so you'd think in some ways, the feminists should be leading the charge. for more men in those professions because it helps to break down, reduce the power of gender stereotypes. I'm not suggesting for a moment we're going to get to 50%.
early years teachers are male, any more than we're going to get to 50% fighter pilots are female. There are some differences that are not going to disappear. Not everything we see in the labor market as a result of socialization, but 2%. is definitely fewer than the number of men who both could and would be willing to do those kinds of jobs. There was a reply to an article, I think you wrote in The Atlantic by...
Catherine Page Harden. Page has been on the show before, and she linked to a study, Sex Differences in the Developmental Trajectories of Impulse Control and Sensation Seeking from Early Adolescence to Early Adulthood. I really know how to name these.
journal publications they were they really do riveting stuff but i'll uh the graph will be up on screen and basically it shows that the Age that boys or men have to be before they have the same average level of impulse control as a 10 to 11 year old girl is age 24 to 25. It does dip. It does dip a little bit during puberty to give it its due. Yes, it does.
yeah it's interesting of course you know again all the caveats about means and so on too um these are these are averages um but for sure there's a huge difference in the development of impulse control and that's really this this concern about this prefrontal cortex so the way that psychologists talk about impulse control and the other side it's in the same paper actually so if we link to the paper the other side of it is sensation seeking so you've got impulse control and sensation seeking
And the way to think about that is, and this is how psychologists always talk about it, it's like the gas or the accelerator and the brake, right? And during adolescence, you get a whole lot more accelerator and not enough brake. And so that's when you do the crazy stuff. And then gradually the two start to balance out a bit more. But two things. One is the gap is much, much bigger.
as that chart suggests if you add sensation seeking to it too it's just this huge gap um uh for boys and for girls so it's bigger in adolescence for both much bigger for boys than girls there's difference boys are just all they're just all all go very little break for a few years like tell me something again this falls into the category of you know tell my mum something she didn't know right she didn't need to read the journal of adolescence
whatever it is um but also the the impulse control development does come much later for boys as that chart shows uh on average and that's the kind of skill that does allow you, as I said, to study chemistry rather than go out. It's the kind of thing that allows you to just, you know, work on your GPA, et cetera, or your, your.
practice your exams at 16 or and so on and so it's just that you know those they're sometimes called soft skills or non-cognitive skills or whatever you want to call them that's where the gap is it's really important some people misunderstand my argument here In terms of smarts, there's not that much difference in development between boys and girls. But what really counts is actually it is those skills. It is organization, impulse control, and so on too. And that paper that...
Captain Paige Harden did, with Elizabeth Shulman and Larry Steinberg, had quite a big influence on me. Something that I've just considered there, I think that on average, girls are more conscientious than boys. females are more than men now that is something that that you can't that isn't going to change no matter what you do with regards to the time that people begin school, any structural issues that you've got going on in there. That is a gendered skew like men tend to be stronger than women.
what you can look at doing is where are the areas where we can begin to close this gap? What are the sort of tools that we can use? What are the elements of this that are more mutable rather than immutable? So given the current... nightmare of trying to improve men's, males' successes in school whilst not rolling back the progress that we've made for girls, what's the solution?
Well, one headline solution is the headline of the Atlantic article just referred to that Catherine Page Harden responded to is to start boys in school a year later than girls. And so in the US got referred to as red shirting as a term borrowed from athletics because of this developmental gap. Age is a very crude proxy for development.
And it turns out that it's the difference for boys and girls. And so my proposal is that whatever the school starting age is, that it should be staggered. And so the boys should be going in chronologically a year older.
than girls and i think that that will really start to pay dividends for the boys in adolescence because they will have developed a bit more of a prefrontal cortex a bit more impulse control a little bit at the time to mature a little bit more and so actually will create more of a level playing field
uh developmentally um and so that's one that's one proposal we've already touched on the need to get many more male teachers especially in early years and english and the need to do much more vocational training but but i I think all of those reforms share is the characteristic of structural reforms. The other thing I will say is there is some quite good evidence that there are programs that can help. to develop those sorts of skills. It's not like
The chart that we just showed that level of impulse control somehow is not fixed. It is true that on average it's going to be harder for boys to develop that skill. It's not as innately strong impulse control in boys and men, actually. as it is in girls and women but we can learn and you know we can learn
to be more confident and assertive, maybe if you like that, but you can also learn impulse control. There's a very good study that just came out that looked at five-year-olds, and it was specifically targeted on disadvantaged boys teaching them these skills. these exactly the skills you just talked about and it paid
They pay dividends in terms of lifelong learning. There are programs like Boys to Men in Chicago, which works predominantly with black boys. I'm sure you know about it. And it's all about these skills. It's not math. how to keep your acts together, how to be in the world, how to organize yourself and how to control.
some of your impulses about behavior control too. That's just harder for boys. And so there are also programs that we could invest much more in that would be specifically targeted at boys. So that would be a gendered curriculum almost. in certain elements it would be a gender sensitive thing yeah i mean there's an argument for saying look you some of these you might just say we'll we'll give it to the kids that most need it and it will turn out to be mostly boys
depending on the nature of the program, but not entirely. But that's okay. We have programs that do the opposite. And it may also be that there are bits of the curriculum. bits of pedagogy and I know that you've you've you've talked to people like have you had Louise Perry on yes yeah and I think this whole area of sex and the need for porn education in schools
is actually one where I think I'd make quite a strong argument for separating the sexes when you're doing that bit of the curriculum. I think that's a bit of sex ed, I think porn ed. is what we would call it is actually gonna that's gonna go much better if you're gonna do that just with the boys because the relationship of boys and men to pornography is very different
to the relationship of women and girls and that's a distribution by the way that doesn't overlap very much right so some of the distributions we're talking about they're pretty like conscientiousness you're right but the distributions overlap quite a lot there right this one doesn't overlap very much.
It's not that it doesn't overlap at all, but it's a very bimodal distribution when it comes to porn use. And sex generally is one of the areas where we see quite a, and I talk a bit about this in the book, a big difference between men and women and boys and girls. What has been the change in the labour market then? The big change over the last 40, 50 years has been, and this won't be a...
Breaking news to you or to anybody listening probably has been a big shift away from heavy industry manufacturing. And that's a result of two, particularly in advanced economies. And that's the result of two big forces. One is more competition from overseas. The introduction of China into the World Trade Organization was a big deal.
in terms of what it did to manufacturing jobs in the West, just because of price competition, straightforwardly. To be clear, it's not that I'm arguing against that. I'm talking about what the consequences of it were. And the other is automation. Some of the roles that perhaps have been traditionally performed by men.
factory work etc been automated my dad's first job out of uh you know college he actually got on the ford graduate trainee scheme and was but he had to do some time on the floor and i tell you what the ford factories look a lot different today than they did in the 60s and they needed a lot fewer men
in there putting the doors on and stuff is basically being done by robots now and so those those trends have particularly affected male employment and the result has been a drop in male labor force participation and a stagnation in male wages The first true in every OECD country and the second true in most OECD countries in the US actually male male wages have gone backwards So most men in the US actually earn less today than most men did in 79
That's not quite as sharp in most other countries. In most other countries, it's just been very slow wage growth for men, especially in the bottom half of the distribution. At the top, men have seen wage growth. So this is all against the backdrop of rising economic inequality generally. So automation, globalization has meant that the typical brawn-based economy that we used to have has now been replaced with a more brain-based economy.
What's happened that's caused men to not adapt to this? I mean, women were not working at all. They were in the house and then they just got dumped into the labor force and they seemed to adapt. They weren't doing... washing machines and cleaning up house tasks around the domestic area, what's caused men to not be quite so malleable given that they were already in the workforce? Well...
I think there's a few things. One is that for a lot of the women, of course, a lot of it seemed like pretty much all upside in terms of like the economics of it. So for women, it was getting into the labor market and earning money for themselves.
I mean, it was important even in my own life. You know, my mom worked part time. She was an industrial nurse and so on. But actually, even though she wasn't the main breadwinner, it was important to her to have some sort of, you know, a degree of economic independence. And then you just multiply that by.
factor of 100 for the next generation which is no no no you're going to be economically independent and why shouldn't we have better wages why shouldn't we earn more why shouldn't that's those are incentives that should apply to everybody and it has been striking just the movement of women into higher end male dominated occupations in the professions especially, much less so in lower end. So if you look at things like construction, for example, that remains very male.
dominated um there are not many women on construction sites but there are a lot of women in law offices um and hospitals and so on too and so so it's important because that tells you some of the incentives here are just about economic upward mobility for women which is like don't particularly want to be a laborer but i'd very much like to be a lawyer um because of just the obviously the huge rewards you get from that
But there has been this really interesting shift in women's identity and the way that women can take on a lot of these roles. And including like if you do become a firewoman or a construction, people are going to celebrate that. Very few people are going to think there's something wrong with you anymore. if you become a woman engineer or a woman in construction. Whereas for men, the identity cost, this is, you know, Rachel Cranton, George Akelhoff had a...
article in 2000 called Identity Economics. And what it basically said was when people make apparently just an economic decision, they're also making an identity decision. What kind of person am I? What does this decision say about me? What does it signal about my identity? And up until this point, many of the areas of strong growth have remained very female in orientation, very, very gender segregated, and men have not yet, by and large.
Being able to adjust to a world in which you're going to have a better chance of making a good living as a nurse or some kind of living as a social care assistant than you are as, say, a factory worker. or a laborer um and and so that's a one of big parts of my argument is that they really need a kind of cultural transformation around a lot of those jobs so they do become more accessible to men and they don't seem as female because the
The demasculinization, if I can put it that way, of some of those other professions I just talked about, didn't just happen by itself. It happened as a result of concerted, intentional policy effort, massive campaigning on the part of lots of well-funded.
organizations to really kind of batter the doors down on behalf of women but there's no equivalent on the other side we haven't really tried yet to help men make that transition which means that for a lot of men especially working class men that's a pretty tough transition for a lot of them to make they don't see them as male jobs so you've got the male jobs disappearing the female jobs rising and men stuck between the two
And the worst thing that can happen is for politicians to come along and promise that they can bring back those old male jobs because a lot of men want to hear that. But that's an incredibly dangerous message because we can't bring those male jobs back and all you're doing is selling a dream.
selling a nostalgic dream, rather than helping men adjust to the world as it is, rather than the world as it used to be. And I think a lot of men are just stuck in the vice between those two right now. That's fascinating, the fact that politicians are running on a LARP.
basically. There's no way that this is going to happen. What are you going to do? Are you going to roll back automation? Is everyone going to start paying more for their... No one's going to do that. You want cost of living to go up even more than it already is. And then on the flip side, I agree that talking about getting more...
Women and girls into STEM fields and getting them to do more of those sorts of subjects in school in college But there hasn't been the equivalent push for men to become carers or nurses or to work in HR or to work as teachers. I imagine that if you were, this isn't just from a, we need to find a place for men in the workforce. This is how much better could the service be for the users of that service? If you are a...
Guy that needs care because you have some disability or perhaps you're elderly, I would imagine it is significantly better for you to be looked after in some of your more intimate moments by... a male than by a female and there are no males around and that to me is it a typically masculine job not culturally but i mean you've had medics on the battlefield for a very long time you've had the doctors this is you helping your fellow man to retain some of his dignity this doesn't
feel like a step down i don't think it would be too far of a jump culturally to be able to make this pedestalized again and something that's praised and applauded for men to go into and it would be great for the users of it but it hasn't been Correct. And and of course, you know, historically, I mean, it's Florence Nightingale that turned nursing into a female profession. She said she actually men were men were banned.
men were not allowed to be nurses after Florence Nightingale got her way. And because you just said they are not equipped for it, they can't do it. And so she feminized the nursing. profession she also professionalized it to be fair to her um but yeah you're exactly right that's that's the the dilemma is that we haven't really done very much to change these these roles and i'm glad you mentioned the point about about users because when i i know i talk about this
the need to get them into what I call HEAL professions, health, education, administration, and literacy. So it's the acronym to match STEM, to mirror STEM, right? You have to have an acronym. You know that. Everyone knows that. So I'm in the US, you know, in the US especially. And so what we actually see fewer men in heel, declining numbers of men in psychology, social work, et cetera, tiny increases in nursing.
And right now, only about 15% of care workers are male. David Goodhart had a very good piece, actually, in I think in the London Times about this. where there's this discussion about immigration. We need more immigrants to fill these care roles. And his point, and he's much more skeptical about immigration than I am, but his point was, well, how about...
trying to get more men to do these jobs. And that, again, was from a workforce point of view. But if I was making this argument again, I'd lead with the argument you just made, which is the users of the services. If you're a guy in a care home and you need to go to the bathroom and you need help, or even if you're, let's say you're a guy struggling with porn addiction. Yep, I was literally about to say therapy.
We're trying to get more men into therapy to have conversations. What is it, 2% of men? It's like a 10x difference between the number of men in therapy and women in therapy. You get to fix the labor force issue. You get to give men jobs. You get to...
make the users of that service have a better experience because the people they're speaking to, they can resonate more with. And downstream from that, those people are more well-balanced, which means that they become better members of society all the way down. Exactly. And when you when you see such a strong set of arguments for something
then I think it's really hard not to come to the conclusion that we shouldn't do stuff about that, that we shouldn't have concerted efforts. And I want male-only scholarships. to encourage men into those sorts of professions. I want subsidies to employers that hire more men into those roles. I want diversity. All the things we've done to get women into STEM, we should be doing the same. Right now, it's quite hard even to get past the idea.
only men are going to benefit from this scholarship like yeah you betcha because that's what we need for all the reasons you've just said if we agree that that's important so we realized as a society we needed to do more to help women break some of these barriers down so we threw money and political capital and institutional power at that problem. And it's been great.
We need to do exactly the same and with exactly the same level of intention and force to try and help men get into these jobs. And there's ways you can describe these jobs that are actually just much more appealing to men, you know, without indulging in great simplistic stereotypes.
lots of aspects of these jobs that actually... actually are quite male you know quite physical in many cases as you talked about dignity and so on too and so without leaning too hard into stereotypes you can definitely describe these jobs in ways that are more appealing to men than we currently do What about when it comes to family life? What's happening with men as fathers and husbands and stuff?
In some ways, I think this is the deepest problem of all, the biggest challenge, and it may run beneath some of the others or overlap with some of the others too, which is the primary goal of the women's movement. Second wave, I guess I'm not very good at my waves, but certainly the kind of Steinem wave was economic independence.
was, you know, post-war especially was to say women needed to become economically independent, needed to break the chain of dependency that women had on men. That would make marriage a choice rather than economic necessity. and rebalance power relationships and so it's all about material stuff uh obviously since then feminism has become much more cultural and ideological but um that has been secured to a very large extent in two ways one
by massively increased employment and earnings for women and two, by the expansion of the welfare state, especially to help mothers with children. So those two things have basically broken the chain of dependency that women used to have with men. in the blink of an eye almost in my lifetime i mean it's an incredibly short period of time you know 10 000 years of
some kind of patriarchy, 50 years to do a huge amount of demolition of that institution. Amazing. I mean, just extraordinary revolution that we've seen. So they were right. The feminists were right. They've been largely successful. the big question is what does that mean for dad if the previous role for dad was breadwinner largely did other things as well but it was kind of provider and that was the relationship he had so with the
with a woman and then they had kids together. What if she's now a provider, doesn't need him as a provider, but she's also still the main carer? The risk is that dad's become redundant. They're just not needed anymore. And I think that's the world we're living in now, especially for unmarried fathers, especially for those who are out of work or who are struggling in the labour market. Actually, they basically get benched.
Like who needs them anymore? Because we're in this cultural lag moment now, whereas actually fathers matter hugely as fathers. But there's a real problem of fatherlessness. in many parts of the Western world now, particularly in less affluent areas of working class. And I think it's because of this profound shock that has hollowed out. the basis for the traditional family which was economic dependency and great except now what so I think we have a responsibility to deal with some of the
consequences of even very positive social changes. And to be clear, I think we agree that the women's movement has been by and large an incredibly positive change, but it has had a bunch of side effects. And one of them has been to ask real questions about the role of fathers and the role of men. And unless we...
you know, re-pedestalize, to borrow some language from you, fatherhood as an institution in and of itself, I think a lot of men are going to feel like they're failing. Well, think about how strange it is that men... Working less has made them worse fathers. Men being in the workforce less and potentially spending more time in the home has somehow made them into less of the father figure that they wanted to be.
Yeah, that's because we haven't expanded the role of fathers enough into that more direct kind of caring role. And so it is this kind of sense of, well...
you know, one or the other. And now, and I would say again, from personal experience, like just comparing my father with my brother. So my, my dad lost his job in the recession of the eighties. He obviously worked in manufacturing and he got up every morning and put his tie on and had breakfast with us. And I asked him, why are you wearing a tie?
high he said because i have to get another job and he'd go and sit in his resume and so and his way of signaling to himself he was still working the idea that he would sort of take some time out of the labor market while my mum you know, took the economic load was unthinkable at the time. Whereas my brother, he's a doctor and, you know, he's taken time, he's taking his parental leave when his kids are in adolescence, because their mum is also a doctor.
And so they have that kind of flexibility, right? Doctor, doctor is a very, very different world. And he is able to step into that role much more easily than in the past. But by and large, that's not happening because. All of us have failed to update our models of fatherhood for a world of gender equality and failed to honor and valorize the role of fathers as fathers, period. Dads matter, period.
Not just as breadwinners, but period. And in some ways, if you're not a breadwinner, you matter even more, perhaps, to your kids' lives because you're going to be more involved in their care and so on too. Well, that's the, how would you say?
counter-intuitive example that i just thought of there that when you think about what a father is at least a little bit more archaic sort of most of the 1900s it's the one that's setting the rules perhaps the taskmaster the one that goes to work and comes home they are creating a role model that's hard work and conscientiousness and discipline and motivation and all this sort of stuff okay assessing my own assumptions around that
particular stereotype which part of that involves fathering not much of that actually has anything to do with you being a father it's to do with your economic utility how you contribute to the family and some byproduct of it. What are the values of someone that would be a good economic utility creator? They would be disciplined. They would be a disciplinarian. They would be aspirational, so on and so forth. Okay, well, what does it mean?
Adding another element in that I'd love to get your thoughts on. I spoke to Roy Biomaster not long ago, and Roy was talking about the fact that... There seems to be a bit of a question about why men were needed other than as sperm donors ancestrally. And after a long diatribe about... What it's not, it's not this, it's not that, it's not the other. He said it's a hired gun problem. He said that men, it seemed, mostly were there to protect.
They were there to enforce norms within the group. They were also there as security from either other tribes or from animals or from elements to go out and do things. It seems like even the big game hunting that men went to go and do netted... an energy loss so the lack of likelihood of them bringing it down the amount of times that someone got injured or killed and the amount of energy that you got back if you did finally take down the woolly mammoth or whatever
was almost always a negative however it was great mate signaling so it was fantastic as a peacock's tail that look at how competent i am that i've brought this down but as women could have absolutely survived on berries and nuts and things that they pulled out of the ground so my question is he went through all of this was well okay well
what is the role of men if that's the case if we didn't need them to go and hunt and women they do allo parenting you've got the grandmother hypothesis now for why menopause occurs so it seems like women stick about and they do this sort of shared parenting thing unbelievably rare even in uh
other primates alloparenting very very rare it's like the mother takes care of a child not in humans it's the mother and the grandmother and some of the aunties and sisters and maybe a friend that's and it's this big big group okay so what's the use of men I wonder whether we are seeing a gain in the same way that women or females having equal access to education unearthed some of the underlying...
disparities within the system i'm wondering whether the same thing has occurred within the family that with women no longer needing men around that the surplusness of men within the family has now finally been revealed. So interesting. I mean, I love Roy's stuff. I cite him quite a bit. But I've been... I've been quite influenced by the work of Sarah Herdy.
And Anna Machen. Anna Machen has a book that I think you'd be very interested in. It's called The Life of Dad. She's an Oxford evolutionary psychologist and talks about how fatherhood developed precisely. for the the reasons that you just hinted at which is the increased calorific requirements of raising kids because our brains grew we needed a lot more calories so it went to i i botched the number but you know suddenly it was 13 million calories or whatever to raise a kid
And actually that was impossible. Her view was that it was impossible for moms to provide that on their own. And so that's when fatherhood became a social institution about 10,000 years ago. Because if the dad wanted his kids to survive, they needed more calories than mom could provide. And so he had to create some surplus calories for the kid.
And that's the creation of fatherhood in her view, which sounds like it's a different view to the one that Roy had, which is actually she could have done fine. And so it was just basically it was like a sport.
Right. The big game hunting was the sport and the other element was the bodyguard hypothesis. Okay, so he could protect you. So it was a way you could show that you could protect. So it wasn't about calories. Okay, so it's more about the protector than the provider side of it. Seems like that.
Yeah, well, that's very interesting and incredibly depressing, if true. Think about the fact that everything that we've spoken about so far, the change in education has unearthed some disparity that very much... pulls the floor out from under where men thought their position was in society. And this family thing, it's the first time I've thought about it. I didn't even think about it while I was reading the book and as I'm trying to join these dots now.
I'm going to have to email Roy about it and see what he thinks, but it's... Dude, it feels like a vacuum. It feels like a hole being pulled out. You should have Anna on as well, I think. because that would be a useful exchange, definitely. I mean, it's hard for me to believe just... What little I know from Joe Henrik's work and Catherine Page Harden's work and Anna's work and so on too, that it can all be, but it's all protector. I'm pretty sure that there would be an element in that.
It's how much of that is the case? And in a world which has been nerfed from the protector role, if the protector's been removed away from it a little bit more, what happens then? Yeah, well, the protector role is kind of, it's certainly, as a matter of fact, practice become significantly less important in fact a lot of women's rights groups would say actually the man in the house is more dangerous than the man outside the house um you know so you don't want
you're protecting, in terms of a protector role, you just need a good police force and good domestic violence policies and laws. um the provision thing is interesting i mean my view but this is again going back to this sense that like men did provide they generated a surplus for the family for the kin for whatever the group was that they had to generate some kind of surplus
calorifically or whatever and very often risk their lives doing so that's why you know roy's very fond of this stat that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors because the men only have a 50 chance of reproducing which is why they're more risk-taking suit too but But if I bring it up to just what I know from the contemporary social science, actually the evidence is quite good that engaged dads are good for the dads.
importantly, and that's very often not said enough. And I don't think I say that enough in the book, honestly, but also good for the kids. You see these long run outcomes and it can last a long time. So like girls who have a good relationship with a dad at 16 have better mental health when they're 33.
but especially for boys i mean the performance of boys at school and some of the acting out stuff we alluded to earlier just much better with engaged fathers just that's just true and so what kind of provisioning is going on there It's a different thing. I think so. I think the idea that dads are providing and protecting and teaching is still true. It's just the nature of that provision and protect is very different in the world today.
So the way we express what I would argue, let's say they're only 10,000 years old. That's still a long time. 10,000 year old fathering roles and instincts. They're still applicable, especially to adolescents. I think that's really, and Anna's work has influenced on me this too, and I mentioned it's like, actually, it turns out that kind of learning, teaching and pushing the lines a little bit, helping adolescents to navigate risk and learn how to manage themselves, that dads seem to be...
a little bit better at that on average mums tend to be a little bit better in the very early years when it's much more about pure nurturing um and and just like everything you do to just keep the baby safe but actually when it's time for the when it's time for baby to start riding a bike and jumping off walls and whatever it is, actually dads turn out to be a little bit stronger on that front too. So there's a complementarity, I think, to the roles of mothers and fathers. But look.
Conservatives are worrying for a long time about this. Jeff Dench has this book back in the 90s now where he said, the family is a myth, but it is a myth that makes men tolerably useful. And so if Baumeister's right, then it is a myth. It's always been a myth, and there's game acting and whatever, but it's a myth that we have to sustain to keep men tolerably useful. If the myth dies, then...
What are we going to do to make men tolerably useful? The thing that conservatives like Gilder and Dench and all that were worried about in the 70s was we're going to make men, they're not going to be, we're going to make them irrelevant for the reasons we've already discussed. And they're going to form.
marauding bands of violent young male syndrome yes yeah you have your surplus males all the henrik stuff too and it's going to be like mad max basically um with all these guys they're going to be full of testosterone because marriage and kids lower your testosterone levels so they're going to have like hyped on testosterone they're not going to be economically useful anymore we don't need them as it's going to form and society is going to get ravaged
by as i said this kind of mad max apocalypse the opposite has happened rates of violent crime have halved in the last few decades, including sexual assault and so on too. Our society has become progressively more peaceful as men have become less...
required to use my language before. So their nightmare scenario is absolutely not played out. I'm much more worried about the men who are checking out, not the men who are acting out. I think that the checking out of men is a much bigger problem. There's a retreat.
of males into basements to indulge in stereotypes rather than Mad Max style marauding on the streets. Men are not marauding around on the streets. They're retreating instead. An interesting... consideration here that i learned about from diana fleischmann's paper uncanny vulvas which is much more interesting when it comes to paper titles
Not a reference that has crossed my desk at the Brookings Institution, but you're right. It's a better title. You're not reading the right things, Richard. You're not reading the right things. And she... makes a hypothesis that men who utilize porn and are not going out to seek partners are getting simulacrum fitness cues that they are being successful.
from using porn. And you could roll that thought process forward for, well, what are computer games? What's a computer game? Well, that's... progress over time that's conscientiousness it's a band of brothers you've got community you've got belonging you've got a sense of all of this stuff okay so if you are able to provide proxy fitness cues
that managed to keep men going. And you can basically sedate them out of being the roving band of miscreants causing trouble and pushing over granny that we were concerned about originally. But now you've got something which is... less tumultuous, but even more sort of nihilistic, which is this group of sedated, checked out.
men the checked out thing yeah yeah the checked out rather than acting out yeah i mean i i think that if we pursue this thought a bit further um the argument very often is made that the internet particularly video games, the technology in the form of video games, especially and pornography have been, you know, this is.
horrible thing right and you know i know jonathan height very well and work with him and i think a lot of there are a lot of issues there but you could flip it on its head and say given what we've seen about the declining marginal utility of males actually
those things came along just in time to save us. And that even if it's not optimal, and we can get into some of the claims that you've just made, some of which I'm more skeptical about than you are, I think, it's certainly better than the alternative. That's very interesting. So are we actually being saved by games and porn? Now, we're so focused on the problems that there might be with those that we're like, well, what's the counterfactual?
Imagine that we'd had none of those technological changes at all, right? There were no video games for men to play, there was no porn for men to look at, and they were increasingly out of work and dislocated, etc. Maybe some of the things that conservatives warned about would have been a bit more true. Maybe we wouldn't have seen this incredible decline in crime that has accompanied. Again, nobody predicted that the falling employment of prime age men
And the growing detachment of men from their families, etc., would be accompanied by historic decline in crime. No one. predicted that everybody would have predicted the opposite of that and so i think that's important so why and maybe you've got this this escape valve in a way now how bad are those problems i i'm not convinced that
They're that bad, actually. I looked at the video gaming evidence, and I just, like, I don't think there's much going on there. I looked at the evidence on porn. I was going to have a whole chapter on sex. It's still there, but I cut it out. Because there's only so many things you can, you know, a friend of mine said, look, if you have a chapter on sex, you'll never get people to talk about education or labor market. And that was probably good advice.
But I do think that you've mentioned some people like Louise and Christine Ember and so on, too, that I think are talking interestingly about sex. I'm not convinced for hugely negative effects from porn.
either to the extent except for the minority who are highly addicted that is a problem as it is for alcohol or anything else i think the issue with things like games and porn you've hinted at this is is less what boys and men are doing when they're doing those things it's more what they're not doing it's the displacement of other activities that's the problem not the activity itself
And it could be that it displaces, say, going out. So I'm old enough to know that if you wanted to get any kind of action at all with a girl, you had to go through various phases. You had to shower. You had to dress properly. You had to go out. You had to risk multiple rejections until perhaps finally.
something happened that broke in your favor it was humiliating it was exhausting you had to do every friday and saturday night from the age of 15 to whatever it was okay so that's not the world that my boys grew up in because there's porn and there's
games and there's weed and i'm not i'm not even necessarily sure that my world was better but i do know that it was riskier and i do know that you had to put yourself out there a lot more and i do know that you had to make much more of an effort um and so i worry a little bit about the ease with which you can opt out of some of those difficult things like make like like like a mature mating strategy and that might be de-skilling some young men in ways that are quite important but
I honestly think it's a bit too early to tell. And I'm, again, a bit worried about the stereotyping here, the stereotype. Well, guys just lie around smoking weed and, you know, looking at porn and, you know, playing video games. And I have three sons in their 20s. I can assure you that young men do lie around in the basement doing all of those things, but they don't do that all the time. They also have jobs and girlfriends and college studies and tennis coaching.
job you know so so i'm just it it veers a bit close to the toxic masculinity stuff we started with actually if we're not careful there there are some quite pernicious stereotypes about men that that i think can get in the way of a better conversation and these get close to those for me
It seems to me that this debate about men's and women's rights is being treated as a zero-sum game. That seems to be one of the fundamental issues that we're butting heads against. And you say that people believe... arguing for the rights of men and boys would automatically mean rolling back women's rights or denying the existence of misogyny. That has to be probably one of the prime flashpoints when it comes to putting this forward and how it's going to be received.
culturally. Yeah, I think that's a big part of the problem on both sides. I think sometimes the opposite is true, perhaps on the other side of the political spectrum. It depends who you're talking to. But for sure, I think that one of the problems is that... that even conceding that we should do some stuff for boys and men, that there is a problem for them, is seen as even if not necessarily diverting resources away from things for girls and women, although it could mean that.
It's much, much more about the distraction of attention. It's more of the, are you kidding me problem, right? It's more the, you want me to talk about boys and men when, you know, 6% of companies are led by women when, on your court of. parliamentarians and i have my my wife actually is in the in the process of raising money uh for a startup business so i know that only two percent of venture capital money goes to female founders i i'm reminded of that on a
on a nightly basis, Chris. So I'm acutely aware that there's still a lot of work to do for women in many areas, especially at the top of society. And so just a sense of like, no, no, no, it's unfinished business over here. a lot of unfinished business over here and it's really difficult right now in the current environment to get people to think two thoughts at once it's really hard to break away from this sense of like can i still care about that and care about this or am i having to choose
And unfortunately, the way it's framed is it very often is a choice. So even if it's not a resource zero sum, and let's be clear, sometimes it could be, right? If there's only so much money to spend on education, say, and some of it does go for policies that are... pro-male, which I would argue for, you could argue that that means less money is going into some of the money for women's scholarships into STEM or whatever it is.
Okay, so I think you have to be honest about that. I would argue that that's now justified. But it's a deeper problem than that. It's more just almost in the conversation. You've got to pick sides. And that merely saying... Boys and men are in trouble. We need to help more boys and men is to betray any commitment to the needs of women and girls
And that false binary is really crippling the conversation, I think, around this subject. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book, honestly, is because I just didn't see that many good faith attempts to try and do this, to try and think two thoughts at once and say, okay.
create permission space for a conversation around this, which does not require people to give up previous commitments, but also opens their eyes to the fact there are some pretty big gender inequalities running the other way now. And so you have to decide, are you interested in inequality? or you're interested in girls and women. And if you're interested in girls and women, because that's what you care about, that's what your institution does, fine.
But then we do need countervailing institutions or policies that take the other gender inequalities seriously. We can't just look through one eye. I think this very much has a social signaling stated. preferences thing going on as well, that a lot of women at the moment, a lot of people that are pushing for the upholding of women and the pushing forward for the progression that they can have in terms of access to education, employment, family support, so on.
are not thinking sufficiently deeply about the problem. Do you not want your daughters to grow up in a school where they have strong male role models so that they actually understand that they don't need to fear men? Perhaps they come from a fatherless home. Let's remember as well that a lot of the policies are chosen by people in the upper elites.
And yet they most harshly impact the people that are poverty-stricken. It's very much a disparity between those that make the rules and those that follow the rules. Would it not be better for your sons that you have to be able to grow up with...
Good examples, good role models in and around school. The grandfather that you've got, that you care about, that's going to be looked after. Would it not be better for the... daughters that you have that you say that you're trying to make the world better for to have some partners that they can actually respect and contend with someone that's going to be a competent caring well respected well contributing father figure partner in life
breadwinner, whatever it might be, it seems like not understanding the challenges that are facing men and boys. is putting women at a disadvantage as well. Do you really want your daughters to be in school with boys that can't sit still and are so disruptive that that must lead to worse education outcomes for the girls that are in class with them as well?
That's why I think red-shirting boys or starting boys will be good for girls, actually. It's one of the reasons parents very often put their girls into single-sex schools, if they get the option to, is to get them away from.
disruptions that boys have. But I think you're raising quite a deep point here, which is how we think about human flourishing across different groups. And outside of... a very small separatist part of the feminist movement i don't think many women would disagree with pretty much everything you've just said right including those who would consider themselves card
caring feminists right do they want boys and men to flourish do they want their husbands to be doing well do they want their brothers to be doing what they want yes they would say yes he's yes to to all all of the above um the question then is Do you agree that some of them are struggling? Okay. Do you agree that some of the reasons they're struggling are not just their own individual frailties? As we discussed, it's not just a psychological problem with your son.
It's a problem with the school system. Do you agree with that? There are structural things here. Thirdly, do you agree we should do something about those? in order to try and help boys and men succeed. We've got to go through all three of those stages. I think a lot of people are at stage one, some people are at stage two. I'm hoping to get people to stage three, which is, okay, let's do some stuff about this. Let's do some stuff to help if we agree. There is this...
strand of utopian feminism, which has always been about female only societies. And you see it back from Charlotte Perkins, her land. all the way through to that Rick and Morty episode. What's it? Raising Gazathorpe or something? Another one. yeah where the guys are all like living as barbarians on the planet and and then there's this kind of serene
the society above and they kind of brutally kill them. They throw the males out and they just get them to inseminate and stuff. But it's actually that there's a lot of literature around this. And of course, you know, Wonder Woman from an all female.
all-female Ireland, the Amazons and so on too. And it's really speaking to something, I think, which is this idea that you could create this perfect society if only you could kind of get rid of all the men or some cordon them off or put them on a different planet or something like that. um and it's always been an interesting strand there's been much less of it lately and of course the real world that women want to live in is not a world like that if you spoke to most women
They don't want to live in a world without men. They want to live in a world where men are doing well and men treat them well and they treat men well. The world you just described so well. And so assuming that men and women are going to continue to live together.
and that there are going to be lots of men and women around, then helping each other to flourish is surely the project here. And for a very long time, that has meant paying a lot more attention to women and girls. And in lots of the world, that is still true. I wouldn't want to be misunderstood here. I don't think there's a big market for my argument in Afghanistan. But in many parts of the world, it's absolutely true now that to help women flourish.
And kids to flourish, we need to help men to flourish as well. Richard Reeves, ladies and gentlemen. If people want to check out what you do and keep up to date with your work, where should they go? As you go to my website, which is richardvreaves.com, I have a sub stack, which is called Of Boys and Men, where I post weekly on these particular themes. Check out the Brookings website, where...
My scholarship is on Twitter, same, Richard V. Reeves. And it's been a great conversation, Chris. I really appreciate this. Thank you. I appreciate you too. Thanks, Richard. I get asked all the time for book suggestions. People want to get into reading fiction or nonfiction or real life stories. And that's why I made a list of 100 of the most interesting and impactful books that I've ever
read. These are the most life-changing reads that I've ever found, and there's descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them, and it's completely free, and you can get it right now by going to chriswillx.com slash books. That's chriswillx.com. Slash books