Does Anyone Care About Men’s Struggles? - Richard Reeves

Richard V. Reeves is a writer, scholar and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Men are falling behind in education, employment and family life. They're underachieving in school, dropping out of the labour market and being less useful around the house more than ever. And this isn't simply cultural as it's happening all over the world, the problem is deeper than that - it's structural. Expect to learn why there are twice as many female fighter pilots compared with male kindergarten teachers, why a male needs to be 24 to have the same impulse control as a 10 year old girl, where the term toxic masculinity actually came from, whether a man's gain is actually woman's loss, the problem of promoting men's issues in the press and much more... Sponsors: Get 7 days free access and 25% discount from Blinkist at https://blinkist.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy Of Boys & Men - https://amzn.to/3eb6so6 Follow Richard on Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/richardvreeves Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - 00:00 Intro 00:20 Origin of ‘Toxic Masculinity’ 04:20 Why Are Women Told to be More Masculine? 11:30 The Decline of Men in Education 20:24 Gap Between Male & Female Teachers 27:27 Solutions for the Education Imbalance 32:14 Why are Men leaving the Labour Market? 46:36 Expanding the Role of Fatherhood 58:48 The ‘Checked-out’ Men 1:04:48 Men’s Rights Vs Women’s Rights 1:13:04 Where to Find Richard - Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Listen to all episodes on audio: Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Richard Reeves?

  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. That's an extraordinary fact that no one predicted.

• 0:19Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about the term toxic masculinity?

• 0:23Richard Reeves?

  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 behaviour by boys and men that the user disapproved of. It's rarely defined without any specificity at all. And so it's a, in a sense, is a 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

• 1:05Richard Reeves?

  is quite useful. But the idea of toxic, it's like Puritan. It's like, it reminds me of the idea of original sin in Christian theology, right? And you need these exorcisms. You need someone to come and exorcise it. If you just weren't so male, you'd be okay. And having raised three boys to adulthood, I got to 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, if we could just consign that particular term back to the obscurity of academic journals, that would be great.

• 1:36Chris Williamson?

  Where did it come from?

• 1:38Richard Reeves?

  It was originally from work that was being done with very violent incarcerated prisoners. And so there were 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 it was a concept that was being used by a few psychologists. But 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

• 2:19Richard Reeves?

  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, et cetera. And, you know, there you go.

• 2:36Chris Williamson?

  I've heard you say that it's a catch all term to use when one finds the behaviour 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.

• 2:53Richard Reeves?

  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 just did a quick search around and discovered that everything from climate change to COVID to war to 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's this, I talk about this in my book. There was an incident at my kid's high school 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 and used indiscriminately.

• 3:36Richard Reeves?

  But as I say, it's not just it's not just vacuous, 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, you know, 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.

• 4:11Chris Williamson?

  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 a 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

• 4:56Chris Williamson?

  that be seen as something that's preferential? Why is that something that's pedestalized in a way?

• 5:01Richard Reeves?

  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 upfront, these are averages, the distributions overlap. Can we just edit that into every, 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 aspiration, leadership ambitions on it, to the extent that those were previously seen as, quote, masculine. If women are now being encouraged to express those, that's a good thing. I mean, that's what liberation

• 5:42Richard Reeves?

  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 labour 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. I will say that some of those terms you've just used about, sort of, you know, female aspiration are important not to kind of misunderstand, because they are against, of course, a history of lots of women being told the opposite, right? So there is something empowering about women being saying you can be everything. And it's also important to note that whilst there is a bit of a panic about fertility in a lot of countries right now,

• 6:28Richard Reeves?

  I don't share that panic really, you know, most women are having children. Most women do want children. And so if you look beyond the pages of a few elite, you know, media outlets that are catering to, you know, a very small group of highly educated thirty something men and women. Most people are having kids. Uh, and so, you know, the, the thirty five year old in New York or London or wherever 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.

• 7:06Chris Williamson?

  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 immutable 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.

• 7:51Chris Williamson?

  It is men who must be fixed, one man or boy at a time.

• 7:56Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, and I, I think it's a really interesting and well put observation, but uh, I think in some ways it, it's important to get a bit of the history here. So I think right now there is a focus within the women's movement, um, using that term broadly, uh, around structures. So structures of care, you know, childcare, healthcare, you know, workplace flexibility and so on. But it wasn't that long ago, um, 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 when you send for more assertiveness training, and if you're not getting a pay rise, it's because you're not being assertive enough.

• 8:40Richard Reeves?

  And even today, you've got the whole power stance thing, you know, like, which I think has been now completely debunked.

• 8:47Chris Williamson?

  Revocation crisis came and decapitated.

• 8:49Richard Reeves?

  Just completely debunked.

• 8:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Richard Reeves?

  But, but like all things that get headlines and then get debunked, no one knows about the debunking. We can, we could have a long list of things that people still believe.

• 9:00Chris Williamson?

  Everyone stood, everyone stood like this. Yeah.

• 9:04Richard Reeves?

  I've been doing it. And then I, and then you, and then you read the debunking. It's like, 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 that 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, then in a way, that kind of older style feminism did for women. And, and, and not try and change the world around it. And what that results in is a sort of unholy alliance between

• 9:49Richard Reeves?

  a progressive left that says it's toxic masculinity that's to blame for all men's problems, or, or, you know, rare 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 okay. And the right says you need to be like your dad and you'll be okay. And meanwhile, us men in this world of more gender equality, 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 labour market has changed in ways that structurally have had a disproportionate effect on men, you know, it's not

• 10:30Richard Reeves?

  deindustrialisation, free trade, automation, et cetera. 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 friends terms. So 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,

• 11:09Richard Reeves?

  I think, 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.

• 11:30Chris Williamson?

  What's happened to males in education then?

• 11:34Richard Reeves?

  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 the all the OECD countries, which is a pretty good proxy for decently economically advanced, there are more young women with a college degree than young men. In both the UK and the US, it's of sixty forty now on college campuses. And that's happened incredibly quickly. And when I was born in nineteen sixty nine, it was about, college campuses were about seventy percent male, thirty percent female. By the time I went to college in the late eighties, it was about fifty fifty, and now it's flipped to sixty forty the other way. And so on pretty

• 12:17Richard Reeves?

  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. You know, in most places now, the the girls and women have caught up on the in the 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. You go back and you read the stuff in the seventies, when we were really pushing for gender equality

• 13:00Richard Reeves?

  in education to get more women into college and especially into more male-dominated subjects. And everybody was pushing towards parity. Nobody predicted.

• 13:09Richard Reeves?

  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 big agenda gap in higher education than we did fifty 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, it's 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 it's a structural problem with the education system that's just not male friendly enough.

• 13:54Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 14:05Richard Reeves?

  No, and it's important to distinguish, of course, as you imply there, 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 the gender pay gap, right? So the fact that women are earning a huge ton more than they were fifty years ago, but that doesn't mean they're caught up with men yet. So 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 some, in many areas, they're actually sliding backwards. And but you're right to kind of point to the distinction between relative and absolute.

• 14:46Richard Reeves?

  What I think has happened is that the education system is just structured in favor of women and girls because it 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 sixteen. 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, this bit of the brain that's the CEO of the brain, it is the bit that turns your homework in, that says, it's the bit of your brain that stops you going to the party

• 15:31Richard Reeves?

  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?

• 15:46Chris Williamson?

  No, not yet.

• 15:47Richard Reeves?

  All right, well, trust me, that's what it is. You're basically just going to be their prefrontal cortex until it's like, 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 brain in, 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.

• 16:31Richard Reeves?

  And they are, as a result, largely, in my view, of development. 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.

• 16:48Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

  Gendered discrimination that has restricted women from being females, 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

• 17:46Chris Williamson?

  mapping that on to 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.

• 18:02Richard Reeves?

  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 college. Like my dad went to college because that was the way he was going to hopefully earn more money and be able to raise a family. My mom was basically encouraged to leave high school at 17 and said, do you want to be a nurse? And the idea that she would have gone, it just didn't happen.

• 18:32Richard Reeves?

  And so you don't have to, 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 get their head around the idea that boys could be at 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 then you get books like The War Against Boys, The War on Men, et cetera, which is that there is intentional discrimination against boys. And there's almost no evidence, no evidence of that.

• 19:16Richard Reeves?

  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 chronol, the difference between the chronological age and developmental age of the average boy and girl, especially in adolescence, has been revealed by, 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 the styles of learning that seem a bit more boy friendly

• 20:00Richard Reeves?

  and male friendly, like vocational education, for example, which does seem to suit, on average, overlapping distributions seem to suit males more than females. And so for, so there's been a series of trends in education that have, 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.

• 20:24Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 20:38Richard Reeves?

  Yes, it's about, it's about 2%, yeah. Um, and it's not going up either. Uh, it's similar in the UK. Um, these numbers actually do map pretty well across US and UK. One in 10, um, uh, elementary school teachers or primary school teachers male. And in, in, uh, and like, you know, 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. Uh, and so when you dig into the numbers here, 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

• 21:21Richard Reeves?

  as there are men teaching kindergarten and pre-K classes. So we have about three times as, so three times, it's about seven percent, seven percent 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 the, oh, most of the air forces are doing this, US Air, they're redesigning the cockpits of planes. So that they're not designed anymore around a presumed kind of ma- male height, which will allow shorter men to be pilots, too. Um, but it also, most importantly, will allow more, 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?

• 22:05Richard Reeves?

  Answer, nothing. And so there isn't even seen as a problem to be addressed, let alone one that we're proffering solutions for. And so it's one of the reasons I'm really emphasizing this point.

• 22:17Chris Williamson?

  Why would that matter? Why would it matter to have male teachers in schools?

• 22:23Richard Reeves?

  So 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. Uh, in just the same way that girls seem to do a bit better when there are female teachers. Uh, especially when it's in subjects that go against the sort of stereotypical grain. So girls do especially well when they have the female science teachers, but boys do especially well when they have male English teachers. Um, uh, 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, it could be role models, it could be that male teachers have a more intuitive understanding of male behavior.

• 23:09Richard Reeves?

  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 prior to a female teacher. They're more likely to understand it for, 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 gotta 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 be male and female comes in our earliest

• 23:51Richard Reeves?

  years. And so you'd think in some ways that 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 is 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.

• 24:24Chris Williamson?

  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. They really know how to name these journal publications.

• 24:43Richard Reeves?

  They really do.

• 24:45Chris Williamson?

  Riveting stuff. But I'll, the graph will be up on the 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.

• 25:05Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, I know, it's like.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  It does dip.

• 25:07Richard Reeves?

  Tell me, tell.

• 25:09Chris Williamson?

  It does dip a little bit during puberty to give it its due.

• 25:12Richard Reeves?

  For girls as well.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 25:13Richard Reeves?

  It does. Yeah, it's interesting. Of course, again, all the caveats about means and so on, too. These are averages. 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 and us talk about it, it's like the gas, it's like the gas or the accelerator and the brake, right?

• 25:52Richard Reeves?

  And during adolescence, you get a whole lot more accelerator and a bit not enough break. And so that's when you do the crazy stuff as an impact. 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, there's just this huge gap 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 mom something she didn't know, right? She didn't need to

• 26:32Richard Reeves?

  read the journal of adolescence, whatever it is. But also, the the impulse control development does come much later for boys, as that chart shows 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, etc. Or your your practice for your exams at 16 or 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. And 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,

• 27:16Richard Reeves?

  impulse control, and so on, too. And that paper that Catherine Page Harden did with Elizabeth Shulman and Larry Steinberg had quite a big influence on me.

• 27:26Chris Williamson?

  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. But 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

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  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 a solution?

• 28:18Richard Reeves?

  Well, one headline solution is the headline of the Atlantic article you 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, it's kind of referred to as red shirting, it's 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's 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,

• 29:02Richard Reeves?

  because they will have developed a bit more of a prefrontal cortex, a bit more impulse control, a little bit of time to mature a little bit more. And so actually, it will create more of a level playing field developmentally. And so that's one proposal. We've already touched on the need to get many more male teachers, especially in early years, in English, and the need to do much more vocational training. But 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 impulse control somehow is not fixed.

• 29:44Richard Reeves?

  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 we can learn to be more confident and assertive, maybe if you like that, but we 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, exactly the skills we just talked about. And it paid dividends in terms of lifelong learning. There are programs like Boys to Men in Chicago, which works predominantly with black boys, and I'm sure you know about it. And it's all about these skills. It's not math. It's...

• 30:27Richard Reeves?

  How to keep your act together, how to be in the world, how to organise yourself and how to control some of your impulses, about behaviour control too. That's just harder for boys. And so there are also programmes that we could invest in much more and it would be specifically targeted at boys.

• 30:43Chris Williamson?

  So that would be a gendered curriculum, almost, in certain elements?

• 30:50Richard Reeves?

  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'll turn out to be mostly boys, depending on the nature of the programme, but not, not entirely. But that's okay. We have programmes 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?

• 31:16Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 31:17Richard Reeves?

  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

• 32:02Richard Reeves?

  overlap at all, but it's, it's a very bimodal distribution when it comes to porn use and, and sex generally is one of the areas where we see quite, and I talk a bit about this in the book, a big difference between, between men and women and boys and girls.

• 32:14Chris Williamson?

  What has been the change in the labour market then?

• 32:19Richard Reeves?

  The big change over the last forty, fifty 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. That's a result of two, particularly in advanced economies, that's a 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. It's not that I, 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 these, some of the roles that perhaps have been traditionally performed by men, factory work, et cetera, been automated.

• 33:04Richard Reeves?

  My dad's first job out of 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 sixties and they needed a lot fewer men in there putting the doors on and stuff, 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 labour force participation, 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 seventy-nine. That's not quite as sharp in most other countries.

• 33:46Richard Reeves?

  In most other countries, it's just been very slow wage growth for men, especially in the bottom half of the distribution. The top, men have seen wage growth as a result of, so this is all against the backdrop of rising economic inequality generally.

• 33:59Chris Williamson?

  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 labour 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?

• 34:35Richard Reeves?

  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 for women, it was getting into the labour market and earning earning money for themselves. Uh, I mean, it was important even in my own life, you know, my mum 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, uh, econ- econo- degree of economic independence. And then you just multiply that by a factor of a hundred 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.

• 35:14Richard Reeves?

  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 labourer, but I'd very much like to be a lawyer. Um, uh, 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, and the way that women

• 35:56Richard Reeves?

  can take on a lot of these roles and including like if you do become a, you know, firewoman or a construction worker, people are going to celebrate that. Very few people are going to think anything wrong with you anymore. If you become a women engineer or a woman in construction. Whereas for men, the identity cost, this is, I know, Rachel Cranton, George Akoloff, had an article in near two thousand called Identity Economics. And what he basically said was when people make an 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,

• 36:37Richard Reeves?

  very, very gender segregated, and men have not yet, by and large, been 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 labourer. And so that's one of the big parts of my argument is that they really need a kind of cultural transformation around a lot of those jobs that they do become more accessible to men and they don't seem as female. Because the the de-masculinisation, if I can put it that way, 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

• 37:18Richard Reeves?

  campaigning on the part of lots of well-funded organisations 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,

• 38:00Richard Reeves?

  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.

• 38:08Chris Williamson?

  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, you know, 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. And 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

• 38:52Chris Williamson?

  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

• 39:34Chris Williamson?

  far of a jump culturally to be able to make this pedestrianized 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.

• 39:45Richard Reeves?

  Correct. And, and of course, historically, I mean, it was 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 she 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. But yeah, you're exactly right. That's, that's 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 there's the acronym to match STEM, to mirror STEM.

• 40:27Richard Reeves?

  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, but we actually see fewer men in HEAL, 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, how we're going to, we need more immigrants to fill these care roles. And his point, and he's much more skeptical of immigration than I am, but his point was, well, how about trying to get more men to do these jobs? And that, again, from a workforce

• 41:12Richard Reeves?

  first 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.

• 41:20Richard Reeves?

  Right. If you're a guy in a care home and you got, you need to go to the bathroom and you need help or you need, or even if you're, let's say you're a guy struggling with porn addiction.

• 41:30Chris Williamson?

  Yep. I was literally about to say therapy. We're trying to get more men into therapy to have conversations. The, what is it? 2% of men, it's like a 10, 10x difference between the number of men in therapy and women in therapy. You, you get to fix the labour 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, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, all the way down.

• 42:00Richard Reeves?

  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 like concerted efforts. And I, you know, I, we, 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, what, only men are going to benefit from this scholarship? And like, yeah, you, 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 realised as a society, we needed to do more to help women break some of these barriers down.

• 42:42Richard Reeves?

  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, you know, create simplistic stereotypes. There are 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.

• 43:21Chris Williamson?

  What about when it comes to family life? What's happening with men as fathers and husbands and stuff?

• 43:28Richard Reeves?

  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.

• 44:10Richard Reeves?

  Obviously, since then feminism's become much more cultural and ideological, but 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, 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, feminists were right, they've been largely successful.

• 44:55Richard Reeves?

  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 with the 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.

• 45:22Richard Reeves?

  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, working class. And it's, I think it's because of this profound shock that has hollowed out the basis for the traditional family, which was economic dependency.

• 46:04Richard Reeves?

  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-pedestalise, 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.

• 46:36Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 46:57Richard Reeves?

  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 I know, and I would say again, from personal experience, like just comparing my father with my brother. So my dad lost his job in the recession of the eighties. He obviously worked in manufacturing and he got up every morning, put his tie on and had breakfast with us. And I asked him, why are you wearing a tie? He said, because I have to get another job. And he'd go and sit in his resume. And so, and his way of signalling to himself he was still working. The idea that he would sort of take some time out of the labour 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

• 47:41Richard Reeves?

  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 and failed to honour and valorise the role of fathers as fathers, period. Dads matter, period. Not just as breadwinners, not just, 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.

• 48:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, that's the, that's the, how would you say, counterintuitive 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

• 49:07Chris Williamson?

  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, I'd love to get your thoughts on. I spoke to Roy, 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

• 49:52Chris Williamson?

  were there to enforce norms within the group. They were also There is 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,

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  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 other primates, allo parenting, very, very rare. It's like the mother takes care of her 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 again, in the same way that women or females having equal access to education unearthed some of the underlying disparities

• 51:19Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 51:37Richard Reeves?

  So interesting. I mean, I love, I love Roy's stuff. I cite him quite a bit. But I've been

• 51:46Richard Reeves?

  I've been quite influenced by the work of Sarah Hurdie and Anna Machin. Anna Machin 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 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 botched the number, but you know, suddenly it was 13 million calories, 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.

• 52:29Richard Reeves?

  And so that's why, that's when fatherhood became a social institution about 10,000 years ago. Because the dad, if the dad wanted his kids to survive, they needed more calories than mom could provide. And so he had to get, 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?

• 52:58Chris Williamson?

  The big game hunting, big game hunting was the sport and the other element was the bodyguard hypothesis.

• 53:04Richard Reeves?

  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?

• 53:10Chris Williamson?

  Seems like that.

• 53:11Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, well, that's very interesting and incredibly depressing if true.

• 53:15Chris Williamson?

  I think about the, 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, I'm, 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.

• 53:48Richard Reeves?

  You should have Anna on as well, I think, because that would be useful exchange, definitely. I mean, it's hard, it's hard for me to believe, just what little I know from Joe Henrick's work and Catherine Page Harden's work and Anna's work and so on too, that it can all be, that it's all protector.

• 54:06Chris Williamson?

  I'm pretty sure that there would be an element in there. It's how much of that, 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?

• 54:22Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, well, the protector role is kind of, certainly as a matter of 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. So you don't want, you're protecting, in terms of a protector role, you see the good police force and good domestic violence policies and laws.

• 54:44Richard Reeves?

  The provision thing is interesting. I mean, my view, but this is again going back to the 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 Roy is 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 too. 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.

• 55:30Richard Reeves?

  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 is a different thing. I think so. I think the idea that dads are providing and protecting and teaching is still all 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, uh, let's say they're only 10,000 years old, but it's still a long time, 10,000 year old fathering roles and instincts.

• 56:13Richard Reeves?

  It's still applicable, especially to adolescents. Uh, 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. The 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 up your 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 complacency, I think, to the roles of, of mothers and fathers. But look, conservatives are worrying for a long time

• 56:56Richard Reeves?

  about this. Jeff Dench has this book, back from the nineties now, where he said, "The family is a myth, but it is a myth that makes men tolerably useful." Wow. And so if Baumeister's right, 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 is no longer, 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 seventies 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.

• 57:39Chris Williamson?

  Young male syndrome, yes.

• 57:42Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, we'll have your surplus males, all the Henrick stuff too. And it's going to be like Mad Max, basically, 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. And so this is 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 some of the language from before. So their nightmare scenario is absolutely not played out.

• 58:27Richard Reeves?

  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.

• 58:48Chris Williamson?

  An interesting consideration here that I learned about from Diana Fleischman's paper Uncanny Vulvers, which is much more interesting, like I'm still paper titles.

• 59:03Richard Reeves?

  Not a reference I'm, that has crossed my desk at the Brookings Institution, but you're right, it's a better.

• 59:07Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  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 manage 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

• 1:00:06Chris Williamson?

  less tumultuous, but even more sort of nihilistic,

• 1:00:13Chris Williamson?

  which is this group of sedated, checked out men.

• 1:00:17Richard Reeves?

  The checked out thing.

• 1:00:18Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, the checked out rather than acting out. Yeah, I mean, I, I think that if we pursue this thought a bit further,

• 1:00:26Richard Reeves?

  the argument very often is made that the internet and particularly video games, the technology in the form of video games especially and pornography

• 1:00:37Richard Reeves?

  have been, you know, this is horrible thing, right? And I know Jonathan Haidt very well and work with him. And I think there are a lot of, 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.

• 1:00:57Richard Reeves?

  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.

• 1:01:08Chris Williamson?

  That's very interesting.

• 1:01:11Richard Reeves?

  It's so, were we, were we, 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, what's the counterfactual? Imagine, 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, dislocated, etc.

• 1:01:33Richard Reeves?

  Uh, 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. No, no, again, nobody predicted that the falling employment of prime age men and the growing detachment of men from their families, et cetera, 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'm just like, I didn't,

• 1:02:16Richard Reeves?

  I don't think there's much going on there. I looked at the evidence on porn. I was gonna 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. And a friend of mine said, look, if you have a chapter on sex, you, you'll never get people to talk about education or the labour market. And that was probably good advice. But I do think that something you've, you've mentioned some, you know, 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, a 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,

• 1:02:57Richard Reeves?

  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, right? So I'm old enough to know that if you wanted to, you know, to get any kind of action at all with a girl, you had to go through various, various phases. You had to shower, you had to dress properly, you had to go out, you had to be, you had to risk multiple rejections until perhaps finally something happened that broke in your favour. It was humiliating, it was exhausting. And you had to do it every Friday and Saturday night from the age of 15 to whatever it was.

• 1:03:39Richard Reeves?

  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. And so I worry a little bit about the ease with which you can opt out of some of those difficult things like, like, like a mature mating strategy. And that might be de-skilling some young men in ways that are quite important. But I think, 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 twenties.

• 1:04:25Richard Reeves?

  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 and 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.

• 1:04:48Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:05:15Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, I think that's a big, a big part of the problem on both sides. I think sometimes the opposite is true, perhaps on, you know, on the other side of the political spectrum. It depends who you're talking, talking to. But for sure, I think that one of the problems is that, that even, 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 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 under a court of parliamentarians, you know, and I have my, my wife actually is in the, in the process

• 1:06:00Richard Reeves?

  of raising money for a startup business. So I know that only 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders. I, I'm reminded of that on a, on a nightly basis, Chris. Um, so I'm acutely aware that there's still a lot of work to do for, for women in many areas, especially at the top of society. And so just a sense of like, no, no, no, we've, it's unfinished business over here. A lot of unfinished business over here. And it's really difficult right now, 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 as resource zero sum, and let's be clear, sometimes it could be, right?

• 1:06:45Richard Reeves?

  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 and to 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, in the conversation, you've got to pick sides. And that merely saying, boys and men are in trouble. We need to do to help more of the boys and men is to betray any commitment to the needs uh, 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

• 1:07:30Richard Reeves?

  attempts to try and do this, to try and think two thoughts at once and say, okay, create a 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.

• 1:08:04Chris Williamson?

  I think this very much has a social signaling stated preferences thing going on as well that.

• 1:08:14Chris Williamson?

  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

• 1:08:57Chris Williamson?

  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

• 1:09:38Chris Williamson?

  are so disruptive that that must lead to worse education outcomes for the girls that are in class with them as well?

• 1:09:45Richard Reeves?

  That's why I think, yeah, that's exactly right. That's why I think red shirting, you know, boys or starting boys would 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 the disruptions that the boys have. But I think, I think you're raising quite a deep point here, which is how we think about human flourishing across different groups. And

• 1:10:10Richard Reeves?

  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 car-carrying 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 well? Yes, they would say yes is yes to all of the above.

• 1:10:37Richard Reeves?

  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? Like some, as we discussed, it's not just a psychological problem with your son. It's a problem with the school system. Right, do you agree with that? There are structural things here, okay. 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 then. 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.

• 1:11:23Richard Reeves?

  And you see it back from Charlotte Perkins, her land, all the way through to that Rick and Morty episode. What's it raising? Gazza, Gazza Thorpe or something?

• 1:11:38Chris Williamson?

  Another one that you mean.

• 1:11:39Richard Reeves?

  Yeah, where the guys are all like living as barbarians on the planet. And then there's this kind of serene 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 island, the Amazons and so on too. And it's really speaking to something, I think, which is this idea that you could currently create this perfect society if only you could kind of get rid of all the men.

• 1:12:09Richard Reeves?

  Or some cordon them off or put them on a different planet or something like that. 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'd 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.

• 1:12:55Richard Reeves?

  But in many parts of the world, it's absolutely true now that for to help women flourish and kids to flourish, we need to help men to flourish as well.

• 1:13:04Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 1:13:10Richard Reeves?

  They should go to my website, which is richardvreaves.com. I have a Substack, which is called Of Boys and Men, where I post weekly on these particular themes. Check out the Brookings website where my scholarship is. I'm on Twitter, same, Richard V Reeves. And it's been a great conversation, Chris. I really appreciate this. Thank you.

• 1:13:28Chris Williamson?

  I appreciate you too. Thanks, Richard.