Best Of: The Men — and Boys — Are Not Alright

we are off this week but I wanted to replay some episodes that I think are particularly of value right now we've obviously been talking a lot on the show because the candidates have been talking a lot in the election about questions of gender and particularly questions of masculinity last year I interviewed Richard Reeves about his book of boys and men about what has happened to men in America why they've fallen so far behind and what we should think about it what we can do about it I think it serves as very useful backdrop for a lot of what is getting debated right now [Music] enjoy I'm Ezra Klein this is the Ezra Klein [Music] show men and boys are in bad shape they're in real bad shape that's the argument of Richard Reeves new book of boys and men or maybe I shouldn't say it's the argument it's just what the numbers say across a huge range of domains health and education and income and happiness and friendship and on and on Reeves is a senior fellow at Brookings where he's been studying inequality and poverty and family policy and gender inequality for years and that work has taken him to an unexpected even uncomfortable place when we think about gender inequality we're usually thinking about women and girls and for good reason men have been dominant forcibly dominant legally dominant in society functionally forever and only in recent decades have enormous barriers been even weakened but the progress women have made in that time is remarkable here's one stat res offer that that blows my mind a bit Title 9 the big gender equity and education bill was passed in 1972 at that time there was a 13o gender gap in bachelor's degrees with men of course ahead 13 points that Gap has only grown since to 15 points but now it's women ahead so the Gap is bigger now than it was in 1972 but in women's favor and obviously obviously the problem there is not that women are doing well the problem is that in a lot of places men are doing poorly they're falling behind they're falling behind where they have been in the past and they're falling behind in ways that are tough on families ways that are tough on marriages ways that are tough on children and it gets much much worse when you go down the income ladder so I wanted to have Reeves on the show to take a Clos look at these numbers to think through some of the objections to them and ask what can and should be done here and I went back and forth on saying this next part because maybe it's just obvious but at a meta level I often think in politics you face this implicit sense that Compassion or concern is zero some that to care about one group or one issue is to care less about another and and I I just don't believe that I actually think there's evidence it's not true and maybe I can talk about that in uh ask me anything episode sometime but but compassion it's not measured out in teaspoons from a cup it's quite the opposite I think it's much more of a habit something we get better at something we have more capacity for the more we practice it as always my email as reclin show at NY times.com Richard Reeves welcome to the show thanks Ezra I'm really pleased to be here so your book opens with a line that I have been worrying about boys and men for 25 years why 25 years what do you worry about well that's a reference to the fact that I've raised three boys and the oldest is actually just about to turn 26 and so I've been engaged in the the Enterprise of fathering boys for that long and I I have this view that all scholarship is at least partly autobiographical I think inevitably we bring some of our own experience into it and so I just wanted to put out there immediately that that is one of the reasons why I have a particular interest in in boys and men I don't I obviously don't have a counterfactual would I have written the book book if I'd had three daughters or have written a different book as opposed to having three sons but that there's no doubt that that personal reason is part of the motivation for the book but something you suggest there is that in your long life as a poverty and family policy scholar 15 years ago 20 years ago you might have been worried about your boys but you weren't as worried about boys and something began to Ping for you and change that mhm what were the early signals that this was a class that needed special consideration now well it's true that I I I knew some of the general Trends around what was happening to to boys and men in various areas but I just had a couple of moments where I read a couple of findings or I I just it was a couple of facts were illuminated in a way that I hadn't really noticed before and I kept stumbling across them essentially and and eventually just cumulatively I came to see that my work on inequality generally on family change even on race Equity just had this missing lens which was this gendered lens and of course you know then I'm bringing the conversations from home into the workplace too but there just a couple of moments where I just read a paper or I saw a stat and I went whoa okay didn't know that and then I would sometimes share it with colleagues and say did you know this you know did you know for example that college enrollment fell by seven times as much for men as for women in 2020 that's one example uh and and so I just kept feeling like it went from stumbling across the these data points to kind of running in them and bruising my shin on them and then secondly the mere fact that these things weren't well known enough was an indication that we we weren't having a very good quality conversation about men and boys and masculinity I looked around and I said why who's talking about this and I I didn't really like the answer generally to the question of who's talking about this and so that felt like a both an opportunity and a responsibility I want to raise an obvious objection here which which maybe speaks to that who's talking about it why aren't people talking about it which is for most of human history men have been socially and economically dominant we're going to talk a lot about education and college studies but men were basically all college graduates for almost the entire time there's been such a thing as as College we've had a couple of Decades of just moving in the general direction of equality and as soon as women are head on a couple of measures not by any means all measures there's this oh crap what about the boys feeling that emerges how do you answer that objection when you hear it well the first thing I do is not only to honor that objection if you like but to share it I it's honestly one of the reasons I think that it's taken me so long to gather the evidence and to some extent must have the courage to address this issue because I have the same reflex essentially what we're saying is Okay so we've had I don't know 10,000 years in which the cause of gender equality was just intrinsically synonymous with the cause of women and girls and then just like yesterday women got ahead in a few eras and suddenly you're freaking out seriously like I I I I get that instinct I think that's actually a Perfectly Natural reflex in part because the pace of the change has just been so extraordinary the updating our sort of view of the world is very difficult it's a bit like the needles on a on a compass swinging from north to south or something it's like wait what and just think updating our view of the world as the evidence change is very difficult but also just honestly at an emotional level I I totally understand that gut reaction to this sense of like oh wait now you're freaking out about boys and men like you get three minutes where you're behind and it's a crisis I get it but I don't think it's productive to stay in that emotion I think that's an understandable and necessary and honorable emotion but then we say okay having established that now let's look at the facts and the facts are there are a bunch of places where boys and men are really struggling now and maybe it's in all our interests to address them let's work through a couple of them and I want to begin with education tell me about the the male female education Gap that is opened in K to 12 so it depends which measure you use of course but a couple of data points just to ground our our conversation are that if we take high school GPA which is a pretty good measure of all kinds of things outcomes it's a very good predictor what does it look like and if you then just rank high school GPA across the distribution what you find is that the top scoring students in terms of GPA the top desile 2third of them are girls and bottom 10% 2/3 of them them are boys with a roughly linear relationship in between so there's a there's a very big gender skew in high school GPA there's about a six percentage Point Gap rather in ontime high school graduation there's a very big gap in kind of School Readiness in the typical us School District now this is work from Sha Reen and his colleagues at Stanford in the typical School District girls are at least three quarters of a grade level ahead in English and dead even in math and in the poorer school districts they're a greater level ahead in English and about thir of a grade level ahead in math and so the the broad picture here is that in K12 education and indeed in every level of Education it will obviously come to higher education in a moment what you're seeing is that there is a really pretty significant Gap in favor of girls in school as opposed to boys a very important caveat is that those gaps are just much wider in certain places and for certain groups so for boys of color and especially black boys uh the gap between black boys and black girls is much bigger than the gender gap for other racial groups is much bigger and poorer communities and so there is a very strong class and race Dimension to this too essentially the gender gap just magnifies the further you go down the socioeconomic scale or you introduce a race Equity lens as well yeah I want to hold on that for a minute and this is a point you make in the book which I think is a little counterintuitive because there's a way of coding this conversation as an almost backlashing conversation a conservative take on where things have gone but something your book gets at very clearly is that this is very much an intersectional argument to use the terms of the day that when you begin to stack what is happening let's take schooling here for a minute with boys and then you add in poverty or you add in race or you add in some of these other markers the situation gets very very Stark which I think is honestly one of the better reasons to be deeply concerned about it can you talk a bit about that because I think when we talk about boys and girls there's a tendency to keep missing that uh the the kind of subdivisions within there yeah and the and the different ways that different distributions overlap and and again it's one of the reasons why I decided I wanted to write this book because you do see that this story of struggling boys and men is very largely one of kind of less economically powerful or less advantaged uh boys and men I've come to the point now where for some of these categories that we're looking at I think it's borderline irresponsible just to look at a category black for example in things like ontime high school graduation or higher education or upward Mobility because what that does by just Tak of course it's appropriate to look at it in one way but then you have to break it down because the differences between the outcomes for black boys and black girls for example are really very very wide so I think that the intersectional lens applied as I understand it anyway is to say look let's look at how different identities are coming together in ways that would actually explain different patterns of disadvantage and here it turns out that when you add gender to the story it goes in different ways so workingclass boys low-income boys doing really badly and as I said said especially black boys U and Men by comparison to their sisters or to the girls in their communities and the last thing I'll say on this and it turns out this is again something really struck me I didn't really know this it's one of these things that the scholars say oh well it's a well-known finding in this literature and in this case I mean seven people knew it which is that poverty School quality family instability Etc dramatically affects boys more than girls and so that means that there's an intergenerational element to male disadvantage as well and the fact that that inequality does affect uh poverty and inequality do affect boys more as I think an opportunity because what that means is that if you're serious about caring about boys and men which a lot of people on the political right would claim to be then you should get much more serious about poverty and inequality but also by the way if you're serious about economic inequality and poverty which a lot of people on the left would say they are you really need to look at the boys and men because they're the ones who are struggling most in those groups one thing that was a striking finding for me is that we will talk about the way schools structured but this is showing up before school you write quote girls are 14 percentage points more likely than boys to be school ready at age 5 controlling for Parental characteristics why do you think that is the blunt reason is that boys develop a little bit more slowly than girls on average I think we can assume that for this conversation people will your listeners will understand that these are averages and a fair question is how much the distributions then overlap but on average 5-year-old old boys just aren't they're just not quite as developed as 5-year-old girls and that's why controlling for all these other characteristics is important and why looking at siblings is important too so it's just they're just not quite as grown up as Girls by that point and then again there's a much bigger Gap later in adolescence which maybe we'll get to but so it looks like the two big developmental gaps by gender are around the age of four or five and around the age of 14 or 15 and the problem with those dates is that it coincidentally those turn out to be when you're starting school and when you're getting into high school which are in other words very important transition moments where you see this big development Gap so although there's a big heated debate about the male brain versus female brain in adults and so on how different are the are our brains to which my answer is not very different and not in ways that really matter once you get to adulthood there's really no debate about the timing differences and that a girl's brains do develop earlier than boys and that seems to be particularly true at around those two ages so I think it's largely a neuroscientific thing but I think there's also some evidence that boys are a little bit more sensitive to their environments they're a bit more sensitive to Poverty a bit more sensitive to family instability they benefit much more from getting stable foster care for example than girls and so there's something also about if you do have this disadvantage beginning these early years these crucial early years that to the extent that there are problems in those early years they'll be more likely to affect the boys than the girls and therefore show up in measures of School Readiness this is going to come up a couple times in the conversation but something that struck me reading the book is that there are moments of what you might call biological determinism or gender essentialism right this thing about boys brains developing a little bit later being more aggressive particularly as children and then there's a lot that goes in the other direction which I don't think you always actually call out but struck me as I went through it from our cliches right this interesting finding that boys are more sensitive to their environments and seem to pick up more intergenerational inheritance in some ways culturally socially than girls do I mean that is I would call that a narrative violation right boys being more sensitive to their environments in a lot of different ways um masculinity being a much more fragile construct which we will talk about boys in some ways becoming less adventurous that there are things that we have claimed in society for a very long time about how boys are strong and robust and durable and stoic and so on and you know women are emotional and sensitive and hysterical and you know you can run down the list of cliches that is not really proving out right now in a way that I think fascinatingly upends a lot of our typical conversation I I came across this term in Psychology a few years ago which I find quite helpful in this debate which is the difference between an orchid and a dandelion you know so it's a a well-used just conceptual framework which the idea an orchid is is some development much more sensitive right it takes a lot of work to make an orchid grow whereas a dandelion will grow pretty much everywhere under all kinds of additions so dandel lines are resilient and it turns out that in terms of the environmental conditions that boys are a bit more Orchid and girls are a bit more dandel iron the difficulty is that no one really knows why there isn't an obvious as far as I know an obvious causal mechanism that says why is it that boys are more sensitive to these different backgrounds than girls and there's lots of theories that fly around in evolutionary psychology but I just I haven't found any kind of convincing story as to why but we do know that it's true and that it's true across all these different domains all these different dimensions so one example that actually this is what draws on the work of Raj chedy that I know you know very well is that kind of neighborhood poverty just seems to affect boys more than girls right independent of the family's own income situation like just in a poor neighborhood and you can speculate as to all kinds of reasons that might be the case but the same with like a poorer performing school just seems to affect boys a bit more and and as I say I haven't found a kind of convincing explanation for why but I agree with you that it's a narrative violation to the extent that the narrative is you know if the narrative is boys are strong and independent they don't need any particular attention girls need nurturing and tendering to the extent that there is any difference it runs exactly the other way one thing you argue based on this difference in the timing of of brain development is that we need to face up to the idea that school is simply structurally designed in a way that disadvantages boys tell me what you mean by that yes and it's important just to say not structurely designed in order to be less favorable to boys so it's not intentional there wasn't some great secret feminist conspiracy a 100 years ago when we were designing the high school system to say aha it'll take a century but eventually we'll get our way but now that we're in a situation where we have thankfully taken away most of if not all of the barriers to women's education girls and women's educational opportunities and Pathways and ambition we do see this difference opening up and what I mean by that is that the education system rewards certain kinds of skills and behaviors which are everything else equal more likely to be found in girls than in boys and more like to come earlier in girls than in boys like organization Etc so I find the difference in the GPA Gap and the standardized test score gaps really instructive in this regard there is a quite significant GPA Gap in favor of girls but there isn't on standard ized test standardized tests now are basically equal so it's not that girls are smarter than boys or of course the other way around it's that girls have just got their act together a bit more they've got their prefrontal cortex kicking in they're turning their chemistry homework in they're getting their coursework done those are what social scientists called like non-cognitive skills or I do I refer to them as turning in your chemistry homework skills and so to the extent that we reward those kinds of behaviors and that they are more lik to be found in girls than everything else equal that means that baked into the education system is something of a tilt towards girls it's just that we couldn't see that before because we were basically not letting girls go into college or certainly strongly discouraging them from doing so so those natural advantages weren't as obvious and the other thing I'd say very quickly are the drop in the share of male teachers in public K12 schools not in privates interestingly it's going up there but in there are fewer and fewer men in our classrooms that everything else equal I'm reasonbly convinced does seem to have some implications for boys in the classroom so we're down to 24% of K12 teachers are men now down from 30 3% in the ' 80s and very few in particularly in early early years in elementary and middle school and the last point is a something of a retreat from vocational forms of training which everything else equal does seem to have some gender effects technical high schools more vocational training seems to be a little bit more attuned to boys learning styles than girls and of course you want balance here but we've actually underinvested in those slightly more male friendly aspects of education so you put all those three things together and what you end up with is a school system that not through intent but by accident has ended up being somewhat more female friendly than male friendly I was somebody who struggled terribly in school with these exact kinds of skills and so I'm very on some intuitive level sympathetic but I want to make sure I'm raising a frustration that that I can imagine coming up right about here which is traditionally when we've had groups that were struggling in school kids of another race poor kids kids from uh a different socioeconomic class uh women we've tended to turn that into a problem with them or the culture they came from or their genetic inheritance or something right if you didn't do well at school school was a testing ground and if you didn't test well well that showed there was something wrong with you and then now boys are struggling and it's like maybe there's something wrong with school how do you think about that difference between we should change school around boys versus we somehow need to change Boys around school or we're discovering something here that is more intrinsically telling I think I disagree with the way you've described the way we've treated those groups or at least you've generalized it I think that one of the big gains actually has been to move away particularly I would say on the center left away from that approach of saying well what's wrong with you right individualizing these problems and in Well that took a long time would say well I mean if you go back to the like in the 1970s this is a good test case which is more specifically around gender like in the 1970s when we passed Title 9 uh and we were really pushing and putting lots of money in trying to get women into stem Etc I think that actually there wasn't the presumption that the reason the women and girls were behind in education was because there was something wrong with them I think the presumption was because the system was sexist and Society was sexist and schools were sexist and colleges were sexist and we needed to B the hell out of those sexist institutions so I think you're wrong I think that actually one of the driving forces of the women's movement at least was not to say what's wrong with women it was to say what's wrong with Society what's wrong with these institutions and and move away from that now of course conservatives are much more likely to take that approach the one you've described which is the individualistic one I actually think by contrast what's happening now is that by and large on the center left there is a tendency to say what's wrong with boys what's wrong with men why are they so toxic why are they so lazy or whatever and and to not look for structural problems so as I think we've moved now to a world where we're much better at looking at what are the structural forces facing other groups but we're not doing that for boys and men now so in some ways I see it almost entirely the opposite way to the way you're seeing it in terms of this structural versus individual way of looking specifically at gender and I could be getting the history of the 1970s and 1980s wrong but my sense of it is not that we were blaming women and girls and saying what was wrong with them well I'd say two things on that so one I think if you only start the clock in the and ' 80s that's sort of my point that I mean yes we had a sort of moment of liberatory movements but even there I mean I came of age as a journalist at a time when the cultural pathology explanation for black kids in school and their achievement or what was happening in black families was extremely dominant and now that a lot of that has moved over to White communities that's become less true right the ways in which we're thinking about breakdown of marital stability I mean you know this worked much better than I do in white communities now is much less about oh there's some kind of cultural pathology and much more about and and it's somewhat in this book too there's a structural set of problems and I mean you see this again with the difference between the way we've looked at crack and and opioids so my point I actually think you're right I 100% agree that the left one problem it has it is resistant to making the same move for boys I think is actually one of the very important contributions of your book but I also want to I mean acknowledge I guess in part to knock it down but in part because I think it's been a real Dynamic that it is an interesting move it is a difference in the way of looking at something to say okay as soon as a group begins falling behind in school maybe we need to remake schools as opposed to begin looking for deficiencies in the group or in their parents or in their communities yeah start fixing the individuals like one individual at a time which is still I think the dominant narrative for many on the conservative side of this argument and when they're being consistent about it they also apply it to boys and men they would say yeah they need to Buck Up they need to they need to stop looking at so much porn and video gaming so much and they need to man up they need to ReDiscover their inner mascul what whatever right take take your cliche from the right and of course I could do the same for the left around toxic masculinity stop being so toxic and pathological but I I think that this move that we've made which is to say well look without in any way dismissing the importance of what's happening to individuals let's just look at the environments let's look at the structures let's look at the way in which the systems and structures around this person are informing their choices and let's start with that right don't necessarily end there but let's start with that insight and so you're right that what I'm trying to do is take what I think was a very important move and say let's look at structures and not just individuals and apply that to boys and men and it may well be that it doesn't always work and that it's not the right structure but I think that we should have the same instinctive approach when we see gender inequalities running one way as the other way one very striking finding given how clear the data is for girls doing better than boys in in grade school is it Boys still perform a little better on most standardized tests tell me a bit about how that data has been changing and what you make of it yeah and it's important I think only a little bit better I think it's gone all together on the act now so it depends which test you're you're talking about but that's generally right and the way I think about that is that those tests are largely getting at know cognitive ability let's call it just sort of just smartness whatever whereas things like know GPA and so on and getting these non-cognitive skills which turn out to be very predictive by the way of life success and college success and so on so I think historically we've probably overweighted the smarts the cognitive right the good test taking skills we're now actually we're now in danger if anything Perhaps Perhaps of going too far the other way I'm not sure but we need to rebalance it and to the extent that there are gender differences in those outcomes then what we want of course is a situation that balances both but the way I interpret that difference is I don't expect actually that the girls will massively overtake Boys on those standardized tests I think I would expect it to level out at something close to equality because I think girls and boys are about as smart as each other so that's a great thing that's a great gain a great win for equality if you like I think the the more interesting stuff is when you get into those non-cognitive skills and then the question is like how much do they matter right so for example when a college goes test optional in terms of its admission so a higher education institution says don't you don't have to put your tests in the main effect of that is to significantly increase the share of women by about 4 percentage points in that student body now you'd expect that because the girls are just doing so much better on all these other measures Student Government GPA Etc the only place where there's kind of basically equality is on standardized tests and so I actually don't blame the institutions for doing that but I think we should be W Eyes Wide Open about the fact that that kind of policy move is going to have these gender defects just because we see these differences in the outcomes on these two very different measures of ability let's move then to higher education you mentioned Title 9 which passed in 1972 maybe can say a word on on what that was but I think it's a good marker what was the gender gap like in higher education then and what is it like now so in 1972 Title 9 was passed and that that was a a big change in US law that just essentially said that we had to have and enforce uh gender equality across the board in US higher education and it had really very POS positive and dramatic effects on women's educational opportunities and outcomes I mean if you just look at the lines it's pretty extraordinary how quickly things changed after Title 9 but at that time when Title 9 was passed boys young men were about 13 percentage points more likely to get a four-year college degree than girls now girls young women are about 15 percentage points more likely to get a college degree than boys and young men and so we have Title Nine level gender gap in higher education now it's just the other way around so what happened was that's an extraordinary finding I mean not finding just that's just the literal data but it is an extraordinary statistic yeah and I guess what I'm doing here is I'm using it to just dramatize to some extent the scale of the change just to to put it the way that I just put it you're right it's not that's not difficult data to find but it is it's it's it's really interesting how many people are surprised when I tell them that because I'm like well it's there in the ncas data sets and like like didn't you know and of course answer is no of course they didn't know because it's not really anybody's job to make them know and it might not matter in the same way by the way I mean we might take a very different view even if the gaps about the same or a little bit bigger now we might very reasonably take different views about the gaps not least because we might see them as having different causes which indeed they do have right the main reason for The Gap now is that the boys are just performing not as well at high school that predicts how they do a college that's a very different problem to basically having this ceiling that we used to put on women's equality so an inequality doesn't necessarily mean an injustice but it did in 17 2 does it now I would say no it doesn't it just means we should look harder at the structures and so very quick catch up and then I think it's also important to note that nobody predicted or expected this great overtaking we were quite rightly focused in the 70s and ' 80s and we really were focused on just like how do we do better in terms of getting women and girls better educational opportunities and outcomes but the lines just kept going and no one expected that there's you you cannot find anybody in the literature saying well wait actually this is going to turn out to go the other way which I think is partly why struggling to kind of get our heads around it because it was just so in some ways unexpected that the lines would just keep going in the way they have something you note which I really didn't know I mean I I I did know the college Gap although I didn't know that it was a perfect inversion of when Title 9 was passed but the idea that female students are now twice as likely to study abroad they're much more likely to do things like peace core or americore the Gap is even greater in the UK's service overseas program that's really interesting to me to talk a bit about that observation and what you make of it yeah it it's an example of what I now think of as like the small data points as opposed to the big data points so you have these big data points like college completion that we just talked about or GPA or you know earnings or whatever but then you stumble across these like small data points which I find in some ways are more culturally Illuminating so you're quite right that studying abroad twice as likely americore and peace core women twice as likely to be doing that as men and so there are these like outside of the kind of mainstream data sets there are these really interesting data points that I think indicate something about ambition about aspiration about future orientation there's this sense of like not of passivity of drift of a bit check checking out a little bit in young young men and boys and you see that then playing out things more like to live at home with their parents less like know women and they more like to buy their first home Etc and so you're seeing a whole series of scattered small data points which I think speak to a deeper cultural problem which is something like male Drift But but passivity uncertainty a bit lost so the women and the girls are actually just a little bit more metronomically going forward and I give you actually this is a big data point but another one that really struck me is that there's about a 10 percentage point gap in college enrollment fouryear college enrollment between males and females but then conditional on enrolling there's a very big completion Gap and particularly four years so there's a 10 percentage point gap between conditional on enrolling graduating four years later in favor of women and so they're just much more likely they graduate they they're more like to finish High School go straight to college finish college on time go and so there's a linearity to the progress of girls and young women and more of a zigzaggy look and a bit more of a sense of retreat perhaps among many boys and young men this struck me as another interesting narrative violation that you know we talk about men being very testosterone soaked risk-taking aggressive and and there's good evidence for that I mean you you talk a bit about aggression statistics and and they're very clear but packaged in all that I think in our stories at least has been that men are adventurists that we're explorers that you know we want to go out into the world and and women are oriented to Home and hearth and whatever the the sort of underpinnings of this this is quite different what we're starting to see now I mean the the degree to which women are venturing out and Men seem to be closing in including in sort of digital worlds and otherwise is striking yeah I I I say something along the lines of like women have been having to fight against misogyny outside of them and men are now struggling for motivation within themselves and it turns out that actually men if anything perhaps need a bit more structure a little bit more sense of a script if you like uh which maybe we can talk a bit more about but even things like geographical Mobility is really interesting I I think I discovered this after I finished the book but in many countries women are much more geographically mobile now partly that's driven by the higher education thing but not just that and so a great example of this is East Germany where actually what happened was a lot of the women left and went to the west to seek New Opportunities and so there are parts of East Germany now but there are massive differences by gender just in the populations also not coincidentally the heart of the reactionary right in Germany so this sense of actually men being a left behind not moving not getting up not going having less agency in many ways than women and that could be partly related to the internet in some ways the internet might be both bad news and good news in that sense because it might be better that men are in the basement than you know roaming around doing uh antisocial things we can maybe get into some of that theory as to like is it good orad that men are on the internet all the time um but I do think the kind of broader point is that absent a really clear set of messages and scripts men are actually not as likely to be adventurous the only thing I wonder about I'm just thinking about this recently is like is this a temporary effect I've had a lot of people say to me well look women are basically like immigrants now they've had to fight their way in they're fighting for it they they want to be independent they're getting a message about being independent so there's a generation or two of women that are just unusually like ambitious and aspirational out and that will pass over time that difference will go so the aspiration Gap could be it's just that women are just unusually like killing it right now and very aspirational and that will pass but I'm not convinced actually I think that there might be something more structural going on here that brings up something I've been wanting to ask about which is the international data let's take schooling as an example here when you look at peer countries so other po industrialized mostly democracies what do we see we see the same pattern pretty much everywhere is as a short version to some there differences at different levels but I think it's important that it's happening pretty much everywhere in terms of those advanced economies because that's a good sign it's not something weird about the US K12 system for example like if it wasn't also happening in Canada and the UK and Western Europe and everywhere then then you might start to think oh maybe it's something about our system it it's not it's something broader than that which I think speaks to these more deeper structural issues that we're facing so in every oecd country for example there are more young women with a college degree than men the Gap is much wider in more gendere equal places which you might expect so places like Scandinavia there are much narrower gaps in other places like Germany for example has you know a much smaller Gap than others in terms of getting some kind of post-secondary education but that's largely because of the technical education system in Germany but the basic picture is I know the UK best that's OB see where I'm from the UK data and the UK data is very similar to the US data in terms of educational outcomes for boys and girls as someone who spends a lot of time reading about policy intervention something that you tracked in here that I really didn't know and was strike was it there we've seen now a lot of pretty profound efforts to increase college attainment or better kid2 outcomes that look like they work and then when you dig into them they only work for women and you have quite a few examples here so I want to see if you could talk through the kalamazo study and then just generally what you think this might be revealing yeah it was the kalamazo one that sent me down this track so the kalamazo promise is the most generous college scholarship program there are there are a number of these promis programs now around the US and essentially what they do is that they say look if you're from this place you can go to college for free so in kalamazo if you come out of the Kalamazoo High School you you go through the high school system there we'll pay full tuition we'll just pay for it this in any basically any college in the state so it's unusually generous as a promise program but also it's really the only one that's been properly evaluated by Scholars at The upjn Institute and I looked at their evaluation of the kalamazo promise and it finds Pretty good overall results but huge gender differences and in fact all the positive result is driven by women so it increased College completion for women by around 50% which they describe quite rightly as a really just very very big increase but it didn't move the needle at all on male College completion there was no effect on male College completion so that again is one of those moments where it's not a data point you stumble across it's one that like you bruise your shin on you fall over you get up again you run around the corridors of Brooking showing up to everybody saying did you know this they're saying no and then I dug in and I kept coming across other studies Community College mentoring program a school choice program Etc and I and then I actually discovered that you know colleagues like Brad herbine who who was one of on the team in up John but also David uton Melanie wasman David Figo and others they've done work on this and and there were sentences in their conclusions saying and we find as so many other studies this well-known effect that the intervention worked for girls or women but didn't work for boys and men and I was like well I didn't know it I sort of think I should have known it given where I am and so I walked around the corridors again I'm going to colle did you know it and they're like no not really like so it was literally a handful of Scholars knew that there was a pretty well-known effect that we had these interventions that didn't work for boys and men so I ended up really digging in on that and finding examples now of course there are examples that go the other way not many actually and and like a Boston prek evaluation founder was a bit better if anything for boys and there are lots of things that seem to work for both like the ASAP program for community colleges and stuff but to the extent that there are differences they tend to break that way and the scholars themselves very often weren't making a very big deal of it with some honorable exceptions it was sort of noted well that's interesting we found the same thing as that last study move on but I didn't want to move on I thought okay this is just important from a public policy point of view why is it that these policies or programs are working for one sex and not the other so you went down to Kazo and you talked to some of The Men Who would have benefited from it or maybe tried to and didn't what did you hear I heard a lot of what what we've been talking around in terms of the the social science actually which was you know these guys were very the ones who'd struggled they' gone in hadn't finished Etc and I heard a few things I heard one is like I couldn't make up my mind what to do or so I kept changing Majors then my friend had an idea for a business so I stopped out to go and help him and I never got back on on the rails orb someone got sick and I couldn't get back and so a bit zigzag versus straight line again but they're also very I was Tyrese was one of the guys I I talked to there and he's like well look the women are more motivated they're more organized they've got longer term kind of Horizons and they've got better study skills he's like duh and said I think it was one of them said to me I always try and get women if I'm going to do a study group right because they're just so much better they're just on it and that sense of just being on it really kind of came through from these guys so they were they were seeing themselves just this skill Gap essentially that they thought explain most of the difference in the ability to take even the money so what it suggested to me and this is a broader point now I think just from gender is that it's really about the skill you know study skills and the ability to kind of make your way through college that's important and I'm pleased some colleges a handful are starting to realize that men are just men are just finding that harder Queensboro Community College for example just launched a men's Resource Center there's one at the University of Oregon I think we'll see more of those as colleges just wake up to the fact that the guys just don't have quite the same developed skills as the women that's certainly what all the ones I spoke to in kalamazo said so now to wrap this in an actual proposal you you argue that the college Gap reflects the K to2 Gap and I think your most eye-catching idea of what to do about it is to red shirt Boys in school to start Boys in school a year later than than girls tell me about that yes based on the evidence that boys just do develop later than girls again on average age of course is a very crude proxy like when when do we put our kidss in school right how do you just like different countries different states different different schools have different rules about this so it's a very arbitrary system in a way is that when when do we put them in but given that there is this Gap and especially this Gap in adolescence where girls seem to develop earlier and in terms of non-cognitive skills they're a year or two ahead of boys in adolescence why not just start the boys a year later so if we start girls at five start boys at six or four and five or whatever it would be and I see that as leveling the playing field it would mean that developmentally the girls and boys would be closer to each other even if chronologically the boys are ahead so the relationship between chronological age developmental age is a bit different for the two of them and so for in ninth and 10th grade for example where you see these huge gender gaps opening up I think you'd see less of that I think the boys would doing a bit better if they just had that extra year essentially for their brains to catch up with the girls brains and the other thing and here I'm putting on my sort of class analyst too is I really noticed that it was affluent parents quite commonly holding their boys back and in one private school I went to in DC area 30% of the boys were actually old for their year and I interviewed this is for an Atlantic article that I did on red shirt the boys I interviewed a bunch of people in and around these affluent parts of DC and it was kind of common knowledge I mean you know this woman who was actually a counselor to parents said well there are two there are two entry dates one for boys one for girls everyone knows that and so as soon as I see people in positions of power people with the resources to do something doing something and paying attention and right now this is a very upper middle class thing to do but ironically it's the boys who are the poorest who would benefit the most from the extra year not the ones who are richest how would this affect girls I mean imagine a world where all boys are starting uh a year later mhm and that means they're going through among other things puberty earlier they're that much bigger have we been able to see in the studies whether this creates a better or worse environment for for girls in these schools no so I importantly of course it would mean actually boys were hitting puberty at about closer to the same time as girls in the school because of course girls hit puberty quite a bit earlier than boys but I don't know of any good evidence for the effect of having older Boys Around in schools has on girls in the school or in the classroom I think at a classroom level it's reasonable to think that it wouldn't be a bad thing right if the boys are just a little bit more mature they're a little bit more developed and I think that's if anything going to create a Better Learning environment for the girl so if you're a 15-year-old girl trying to study then actually you want a boy that's a bit more like you in terms of age and one data point on this is that girls are twice as likely to date a boy that's older than them in school that's obviously a romantic thing so it's a different measure but it speaks to something about that developmental Gap I think and it's not as if we don't have a lot of older Boys in our schools anyway I mean you know quite a few boys will get held back a grade and so it's not a new thing to have older Boys in schools this would of course mean there' be a lot more of them and I think we'd have to evaluate I think we'd have to see but on the face of it I actually think that having slightly more mature boys in a school wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing I mean they're going to hit puberty in high school anyway they're going to have that kind of the bath of testosterone that comes with puberty that's going to happen anyway and so actually in a sense that it happening a year later to them in terms of the school year isn't a bad thing I think in terms of the fact like how how do they deal with that I think it would be I on balance I think it would probably be good for everybody but especially good for the boys so as far as interventions go this just seems like a dream to pilot and evaluate like you choose six school districts in different areas of the country you randomize which schools within them do this you follow the students for 10 15 20 years and boom you really know what's going on here but there have been some studies done that are more limited talk me through the effect sizes we seem to see here yeah so first of all yes if there's anybody listening who would love to Pilot this that would be great and I do think it needs careful evaluation for sure but so the studies that have been done and there's a very good one by Dian shut back and Elizabeth Casio and I should say by the by the way that they do not agree with me in terms of the policy proposal although I partly base it on their research I want to be clear and honest about that but what they do is they take a study that actually just accidentally meant that there were some kids that were older in their classes as a result of an unrelated policy reform it's actually about class sizes reassigning kids to different class sizes but it had this nice effect of basically randomly putting kids of different ages into different school years uh in Tennessee and what they found was there were some positive effects to being absolutely a year older so it's not about relative age within the class it's about your absolute age but strikingly they found that the effects were just much bigger for boys than for girls and for boys they lasted all the way through high school graduation or at least sat taking but for girls they they they disappeared by high school and they were much bigger for boys what was nice about that study was that it was largely lower income boys and disproportionately black boys and so it was an unusual sample for this quotes red shirting thing because most of the people being red shirted tend to be more affluent and white uh so it was it was a good chance to see what the effects were and there were there were non-trivial uh effect sizes and so to the extent that we have evidence from those kinds of studies where there's been almost this accidental thing happening the evidence points to some positive effects I the question is just are they big enough to justify the policy overall and what I argue is that we should just change the default we should just think differently about it and say maybe by default just boys a year later than girls and of course you could override the default just as we do now or maybe ultimately just have a a system for admissions that was a bit more developmentally sensitive anyway you said those researchers don't agree on the policy what is their argument what don't they buy in yours so one of the concerns is that assuming that we keep girls starting schools at their current age if we start boys a year later then they're they're going to be older they might be more likely to drop out of high school that's one thing because they hit a legal age where they could do so that's a real concern but we could increase the school leaving age maybe uh someone said to me we'll just start the girls a year earlier because they're ready here earlier so that's a different way of structuring the the policy of course but they're also concerned that there are costs because it's an extra year of child care or pre uh so that's an important thing to bear in mind as well uh and they're worried about a lost year in the labor market they're worried that by taking extra you know another year over finishing school essentially that's one year Less in the labor market which has effects on earning Social Security Etc I'm much less worried about that than them because honestly the boys I'm most worried about are not are not generally going straight from high school to college to a good job and staying in work they're zigzagging one way or the other and so I think they're overweighting that one year for the group I'm most worried about but I think that's a reasonable concern and I think again a reason why ideally you'd want to evaluate a policy like this [Music] [Music] [Music] let me ask about one other solution in the the educational space which is you argue for a dramatic expansion of vocational and technical schools not just education not just a class in this school but schools really dedicated to this for people not familiar tell me what the schools are like and then tell me the kinds of effects we we see of sending boys to them so a technical high school is one that's intended to be one that is focused more around vocational kinds of learning uh and so it could for example be doing more stuff in stem but it could also be doing sort of more vocational training towards for example some areas you'd consider to be more female like like healthcare administration Etc but also a lot more around uh what you see as kind of classically vocational classes that were kind of more leading towards engineering type jobs or electrician Etc and so they're just more vocationally or auto mechanics is another one you do so it's essentially just more of what people might think of as quotes more shop class now importantly not instead of academics they still do very strong academic programs as well and there are a few states in the northeast of the US that do have quite a few technical high schools where we can actually draw some good evaluations from and I do propose we significantly increase that so they just it's more Hands-On learning more vocationally oriented more career oriented and the evaluation studies that have been done in places like Connecticut show really some very good results in terms of earnings in particular for boys who go to those schools and no results for girls this is a great example of a counter it's a counter example to the general trend of an educational intervention tending to work for girls and boys to the extent this is seen as an intervention it tends to be quite Pro male it really does seem to help boys a lot more than girls and so and for me that's a reason to do it rather than not do it and an important although slightly wonky point is that the evidence that I look at anyway suggests that Career and Technical education just spread across high schools doesn't seem to be as effective as just okay here's a technical high school and you're going to go to a technical high school and I'd I'd love more students and parents to have that choice there's a real suspicion around that some of them I think maybe a bit of snobbery some concerns about tracking which obviously have you know deep roots in American educational history so there are lots of reasons why the US just is not as cool with the idea of these high schools as other countries are but I'm pretty convinced that they would be a good idea not least for boys so let's move then to what happens after school how would you describe the way the labor market changed over the past 50 years for men and for women so we've seen dramatically different trajectories for many men most men and many women and most women but by no means all so the way I see the labor market over the last 50 years and here I'm very influenced by the work of people like Claudia golden and others just looking at the labor market trajectories is that for most men things have been pretty tough and David utter and Melanie wasman are good on this too it's been pretty tough so a data point here is that most American men earn less today than most American men did in 1979 so not all the men at the top are doing better than the men at the top are doing but just overall mean the median and a little bit above the median male wages are a little bit lower controlling for inflation of course than they were were we've seen Rises across the distribution in wages for women although again much faster at the top than at the bottom so the class Gap has massively widened for both men and women but in terms of wages of course there's still a gender pay Gap largely as a result of the differences in the impact of parenting on men and women but another data point is that in 1979 only 13% of women earned more than the median man the typical man 133% and today it's about 40% so about 4 % of women now earn more than the typical man that's a just a dramatic economic change the female wage distribution has not caught up entirely with the male one and especially at the top there's still a lot more work to do but wow I mean it's hard not to look at that and see that as I do as the greatest economic Liberation in global history the amount of economic power that women now have in the labor market compared to 50 years ago is extraordinary and then of course that plays out employment to and rates of female employment are just much higher than they were and actually male labor force participation is has obviously dropped quite significantly you mentioned the the gender wage Gap and and the role of parenting there I do think that's an important thing to talk about directly so the stat people will hear or maybe know for every $100 earned by men women earn $82 tell me how you understand that data and tell me a bit about how you parse the the debate over that data yeah and it's actually also just a great example of just another debate where I was so frustrated by the arguments on both sides honestly where you all these YouTube videos of why the gender pay Gap is a myth right and then there'd be someone saying yeah but once you control for occupation and earnings and age and time in the labor market it basically disappears right so it's a myth well even if all those things are true well it's doesn't make it a myth it's you you're helping me explain why it's happening but it's it's not a myth it's just math it's just just true there's a great line sometimes of controlling for what you're measuring which I always think about when I see those videos yeah ex exactly yeah like aha I've controlled away the difference I was looking for I know I you see it in race too I mean actually I've seen studies that say basically if you control for every aspect of what it means to be black in America then being black doesn't make any difference and so I think that's a that's that's a real problem in the way you use controls generally and so I think that's a fair criticism of it so you you're controlling away the very you know the gendered nature of the labor market for example but on the other hand there is Al a really strong sense among a lot of people that yeah there's a gender pay Gap and that's because of discrimination right and in fact I'm really struck by the survey evidence the more educated the respondent is the more likely they are to believe that the cause of the gender pay Gap is employer discrimination that it's because women are paid less than men for doing the same job and that's just not true um it's actually for much more interesting and deeper and structural reasons about gender division of labor and child care occupational segregation Etc and so it's just a more complex and nuanced debate as so often than either side of this would prefer us have to believe you know on the one hand it's a myth on the other hand it's a sign that employers are still Patriarchs Des discriminating wildly against women doing the same jobs and neither of those are true it's actually just a much deeper question I think it at this point it is fair to say we simply are using the wrong word for it so back when I uh was at Vox as editor uh Sarah Cliff who is there too is now the the New York Times and is a great health and and policy reporter she did a ton of work on this and we actually did a Netflix episode about it in the whole thing and it's really a motherhood penalty right and you can see this in different countries and you see it in lesbian couples yes can you just Trace some of that that finding yeah I actually Drew on some of Sarah's work when I was looking at this I think it's really really excellent work and that is basically right I mean essentially what you're seeing is it's a it's a parenting penalty I'll put it that way because it actually turns out as you say we have very good from samesex couples now Etc that it is just this fact of like you have a child that affects what happens to you in the labor market and because that's mostly women that's having this gender effect so it's really striking if you look at like earnings of men and women in their 20s now are very close but you know around the age of 30 something happens what is that thing well duh and if you look at the charts that I think Sarah and others Drew on from some of his work clevin has good work in Denmark but Corin low I think and others have work in the US that it's still essentially true that for women having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite whereas for men it doesn't make a dent you just don't see it you know assuming they're in heterosexual couples and then what you see from this new data on samesex couples is that it's really the parent so among lesbian couples as you just all I think alluded to like the birth parent has suffers this wage penalty what's interesting of course about lesbian couples is that very often you can take it in turns to be the birth parent and so to that extent within the couple at least the quotes pain of being out the labor market for a while and learning some of losing out in the labor market can be shared but in a straight couple obviously it's inevit that the woman will be the birth parent and if the birth parent is still the one that's kind of paying this economic cost in the labor market we're still going to see a gender pay Gap and that is largely the reason for the gender pay Gap now now of course that doesn't mean okay nothing to see here then move on what it does is it just raises the more interesting question which is huh okay so why is that then why is it that women are taking more time out the labor market why does parenting have such disperate effects on women and men is that really a choice how far is that choice constrained why are the tradeoffs so hard how do we make this better so in a way it just raises a more interesting question rather than saying there's no question here to be answered so to go back to the pay data and I think this gets to something very important we can talk about medians right the kind of imagined person in the middle of the the data set and we can talk about means right the sort of averages of everybody and one thing that one of those will catch and the other won't is that Elite men men at the very top of the income distribution there's a very different story to tell about them than men in the bottom half including comparatively with women so can you talk about a bit about that difference and also the ways it might deform this conversation yeah it's true that like men at the top are continuing to do really well you're also seeing like massive wage gains for educated women at the top as well relative to where they were before and especially for white women actually I mean white women now earn more than black men for example but it is this top of society is the top 20 this is back to my earlier work on the dream hord is the top 20% and they tend to marry each other and so on and so there's just like massive like runaway economic inequality or there has been the last few decades towards the top and that is driven to some extent by men so men at the top y still doing pretty well economically and women at the top doing pretty well economically a lot more than they were before and then when you get into the institutions especially at the Apex right you start to see like who makes partner in a law firm who gets into the ca Suite Etc still very gender skewed and so at the Apex of society what you're seeing is that women are still struggling to turn these kind of massively increased educational credentials into economic power at the same rate as men they're obviously much more economically powerful than previous generations of women but that that translation mechanism just isn't working quite the same way and I think that's because there remain these structural barriers in some ways in some areas like politics which you know better than me for sure Ezra but in things like how do you make partner how do you get tenure how do you get into the sea suite and the way that the labor market currently works is that basically the way you do that is by killing yourself from about the age of 27 to the age of 37 well duh they then wonder why it's harder on average for women to do that and so again it's the trajectories of elite professional careers that really seem to end up penalizing even these very highly educated women which results in some pretty big gender pay gaps even at the top one of the questions I think your book is asking is why there isn't more attention to how badly met are falling behind particularly the bottom half of the income distribution particularly black men why The Narrative of female disadvantage is still so Stark and entrenched and sort of all-encompassing and I do suspect there's some answer here that if you think about where a lot of this conversation comes from who who has access to the level of microphone to be in this conversation on this podcast you know writing stories in the media Etc it is people men and women who are much more familiar and are themselves operating within the Dynamics of lead institutions M and so you know when you think of some of the very culturally important documents here you know you think about CH sandberg's lean in or you think about Amry Slaughter Big Atlantic article from a couple years ago on whether or not women can have it all there is as always as in all things an outsized focus on what are the Dynamics of elite institutions because people from them have access to the media and write books and so on MH and so if they're telling a pretty different story if if that is a very different reality in those institutions than it is in society at large you're going to get a very skewed conversation and and I do think that has happened um quite significantly here I think that's right we we're leaning in but we're not looking down and inevitably our reference points are those that are around us and so and I think you're right and it's a really deep problem that within Elite discourse you just look around so these you know if you're an upper middle class educated woman trying to make law partner you listening to this you're looking around say what is he talking about because all you see is guys like above you and Etc and I'm not suggesting for a moment that like people at all levels can't be struggling with in all kinds of ways but the Deep problems here are just much lower down and so this class fracture gets in the way of more honest debate about this because even the women who are doing so much better than their mothers are doing at the top of the distribution they're still looking around and see a society where there's still a lot more to do on behalf of women and girls but that can simultaneously women particularly into these sea Suite jobs and so on where again there's been huge progress but more to do but we can think two thoughts at once we can think yeah particularly around political representation corporate repes leadership Etc there is really quite a lot more to do and I think here we are into the design of Labor Market institutions and so on but whoa look down here look over there Cy those boys over there the boys and men are the ones who are really struggling and are we allowed to think both those thoughts at once and I'm afraid that up until this point it's been like a choice and that people have understandably but wrongly thought that focusing on the problems of boys and men even those who are really disadvantaged somehow distracts from or means less attention to the problems of women and girls especially in these Apex situations and I think that Zero Sum framing is just poisoning the whole debate as it is generally our politics it's not Zero Sum we can think two thoughts at once can you talk about Raj ched's findings here on the differences in upward Mobility between black women and black men because I I remember being knocked over by this finding a couple years ago and watching as the coverage of that study filtered out and realizing nobody knew what to do with this part of it again it like one of the studies that that really influenced me thinking about this was Raj ched's work showing this just much higher rates of upward Mobility for men than for women from poorer backgrounds but especially a huge difference in the upward Mobility rates between black men and black women and he in his research team conclude that all of the difference between black and white Americans in intergenerational Mobility is explained by black men boys and men all of it and there's actually more recent work from the urban Institute that tries to control for the structural effects of being black In America which again shows this huge difference like in the impact on black boys and black men it essentially shows that taking away to trying to look at the effect of structural racism and it would have massively beneficial effects for black men if we were to do better better on that front than for black women so again I agree with you that we didn't quite know what to do with it or at least certainly perhaps in Center left circles didn't know what to do with it because it sort of disrupted some of these senses that we have we like the world to be neat we like it to be white above black men above women straight above gay you know take take your thing and and it all just Stacks up neatly like that like some sort of you know child child's toy where it's all just neat but that's not how it works and especially when it comes to the experience of being black in America gender is hugely important and seems to strongly disfavor black boys and black men and what Raj and his colleagues work really showed was that just plays out in this intergenerational literature very very strongly and what it means is that if we if we're genuinely worried about what's happening to Black Americans then most of our attention should go to black boys and black men so I want to talk a bit about the solutions chapters you have here and one opportunity that that you talk a lot about is for men to expand their I think I'd call it identity in the labor market the the way they understand themselves in relation to jobs and so you talk a lot about the work on stem jobs and the need for symmetrical work on what you call heel jobs tell me about that well the first thing I I I stumbled across this great story looking into the background of stem which is that a woman called Judith ramay who'd been brought into the National Science Foundation to promote what at that point was called smat Smet occupations and Smet careers she said what the heck is that and they explained that it was science um math engineering and Tech and she said no no no that won't do it'll have to be stem so she renamed it stem and the rest is like within a year there was a congressional caucus and stuff so like never doubt the power of a good acronym in public policy not all heroes were CES right uh so she turned it to stem and sort of the rest is history in the sense that that became a huge thing first of all for national security reasons and then really getting more women into stem was a big push and even very recently um Melinda Gates has put a billion dollars into gender equality in the US and a huge chunk of that is going to get more women into stem jobs and we have increased a share of women in stem jobs from like single digits like 8% back in the 1970s up to 1980 to like 20 approaching 30% now 27 28% so not 50% but just massive gains in terms of getting women into those stem jobs not accidentally it took huge amounts of money and effort and campaigning and people going to middle schools and massive recruitment drives of female stem teach teers in colleges and high schools and so on so it's been a really successful movement I think we should be very proud of the efforts that we've made to get more women into stem but on the other side of it there are these other jobs that are becoming more gender segregated so the labor market generally is becoming less gender segregated in stem but also in things like law and medicine but there are other areas particularly areas like Education and Care and and social work and so on where we're becoming more gender segregated there are fewer men as a share of those professions and I I refer to those as heel jobs so health education Administration and literacy so there's my acronym to to compete with Judith's stem which is heal and there are fewer and fewer men in those heel jobs even though we need men in those jobs those jobs are growing Etc and so again I didn't think it was getting enough attention that we're just seeing an absolute plummeting in the male share in uh we've already talked a bit about education but also in areas like social work and psychology where we've basically hared the male share just in the last few decades give me a few of those numbers if you have them off the top of your head in social work and Elementary Middle School it's gone from about 40% male in 1980 to about 20% male now but one of the ones that really jumped out at me actually is psychology I was surprised to learn that psychology was actually a bit was more male in 1980 than it is now maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by that but but it's really astonishing what's happened so in the last and here I'm using you know Prime agent full-time but in the last 10 years or so we've gone down from mail share and psychology like 39 to 29% massively declining share of male enrollment in Psychology courses uh at universities and so on so I think that's interesting for a number of reasons because it first of all shows you that that occupations can get quite gendered quite quickly right they can also get de gendered quite quickly but it turns out you can gender them quite quickly because that's happened like in my lifetime very quickly in a few decades um but I also think it's a problem for the the provision of services so when you when I wanted a therapist I was actually given the issues I was dealing with delighted to be be able to work with a male therapist when one of my sons needed a therapist we were really happy to be able to find a male therapist for him but that's getting harder and harder to do and rolling this forward it's going to become even harder to find men in those caring professions and I think that's a problem for all kinds of reasons but one big reason why it's a problem is because men need those services and if it's hard to persuade them to get that kind of care anyway and it looks like it is a bit harder to persuade men it's going to get even harder still if we don't have male providers and so the divers lack of diversity and provision and those heel jobs I think is a problem for all kinds of reasons I think one reason the psychology example is interesting too is that psychology is a very well-paid job so I think sometimes there's a view that one reason men stay out of these professions is that they don't pay that well they don't have a lot of societal cache and people say that about nursing and and and teaching which is not of course always true but there's an argument to be made compared to say stem jobs but psychologists can make quite a lot of money they can although they don't make as much money given the levels of education required for those professions as you might as you might hope for and and that's true for a lot of these professions what's in these professions actually share an interesting characteristic which is that they have quite High credentials to get into them you you need like master's degrees to get into most of these professions and even though you don't need a master's degree to get into K12 education it actually helps and I think about 50% of K12 teachers have a master's degree and of course they all need a four-year degree so there's high levels of credential which don't translate into earnings in the same way that they might might if you went down a different path so you're right that some of those can actually pay quite well but conditional on the level of Education that you have to get in order to get those jobs they don't pay all that well comparatively interesting counter example is that nursing you're seeing an increasing share of meance up to I didn't know 13 14 percentage points now male share in nursing down from single figures back in 1980 that's the only area where you are seeing somewhat more men going in still very low levels and much more we need to do but of course nursing actually is getting better paid so I think your intuition is right that kind of pays mattering here but you can make pretty good money as a nurse now and you don't necessarily need quite as much education as you might for other professions so I think it's no coincidence that we're doing a bit better at attracting men into that profession so what do you think of as the explanations here I mean one you'll often hear is that um men are thing oriented and women are people oriented and these are people oriented jobs and men just don't want them there's nothing that can really be done about that how do you take that objection I think the Money Matters for sure and so the fact that K12 teachers essentially haven't had a pay rise for 20 years matters just period right obviously just matters like for all kinds of other reasons but one one reason it also matters is because I just it is harder to get men to go into those jobs when they pay relatively poorly especially conditional on the educational requirements to go into them but I think there's a couple of things here one is that it is true that on average women a bit more into people men a bit more into things but the distributions overlap quite considerably so the question is like as you look at these occupations do they look like they could be the result of differences in say those natural preferences and the answer is for a lot of these professions we're talking about now the answer is no there's just no explaining it through those natural differences and I was very pleased to find a study by a couple of psychologists wrong Sue and James rounds where what they did was they looked at the differences between men and women on this people things psychological Dimension right so I'm into things so I'm going to be a engineer or car mechanic I'm into people I'm going to be a nurse I'm going to be a social worker and what they do find is that across the population yes on average women are a bit more people oriented and men are a bit more thing oriented but the question is how much and then how does that map against occupational segregation and what they estimate is that if everybody was choosing occupations based at least on that psychological difference about 30% of Engineers would be women and about 30% of nurses would be men okay that's important because it's not 50% right that suggests that even under conditions of total equality you are going to see a few fewer women do engine Ing and a few few are men do nursing that's explained by these natural differences but currently we're 15% engineering 12% nursing so the question again is is not that there isn't any difference the question is how much weight should we put on those differences to explain these patterns and a lot of these occupations there is just no explaining those patterns by natural differences so one of my sons is an early years educator for example and that puts him among the two or 3% of men in early years education in fact as a share of the profession there are twice as many women flying US military planes as there are men teaching kindergarten and I'm going to go out and a limb here Ezra and say that I think it's more important to have men teaching kindergarten than women flying fighter jets it's not that they're not both important I found that to be a very striking comparison and and it was something I was thinking about when I read it because we would like we moving and thinking about child care in our next spot and we would like to have male child care for our two boys and it's quite hard to find not because obviously women aren't amazing at the twoo but you know they're rambunctious my older one seems to connect with men more easily and it just seems like you should be able to do this and it is not a straightforward thing to do and you made the point that you think in the book that because you actually did have male child care that might have affected your son's decision to go into early childhood education and we do know that representational and visibility effects like that including from some other work from R ched are very power ful so I'd like you to talk a bit more about about that pathway about the ways in which having so few men in these positions can become self-fulfilling for the future of them yeah I think that's right I mean this was the the Mantra from the women's movement is that you you have to see it to be it and I think we could really apply that to these roles here too and I do think that actually having those Role Models is hugely important too actually one of my other Sons said to me we were driving home from a appointment with pediatrician and I can't remember how old he was about six or seven but but he said oh Dad I didn't know that men could be doctors cuz the doctor we'd just seen was a male and I said what do you mean he said well I didn't know that and I realized that every doctor he'd ever seen had been a female and so of course in his brain perfectly naturally he assumed having only ever seen female doctors that men couldn't be doctors and so I said no no actually you know men can be doctors as well and nurses it was a real vividly showed me just how imprinted these roles can become on us quite early so I do think that one reason to get more men into these professions is a again so that boys growing up see those roles as ones that are appropriate for men because I'm also convinced by the evidence that there are sort of tipping points around the degree to which an occupation is pretty segregated and so it looks as if around something like 30% is an important number right and I don't want to say it's exactly 30 but but like if you're if it's an occupation that's like 3% male like early years is it's quite hard to go into that as a guy and similarly if like only 5% of Engineers are women it's quite hard to go into that as a woman right but one of my frustrations honestly is that even getting people to agree that it's a problem that we have fewer and fewer and fewer men in these occupations let alone spend money or political capital on doing something about it really frustrates me because I'm worried about this Tipping Point thing so right now as you said 76% of K12 teachers are women what about when we get to 80% or 85% it's just going to get progressively harder to persuade Ade boys and men that teaching is a career for them unless we can I think start to turn the tide a little bit on the share of men in those professions right now [Music] [Music] [Music] we've been talking a lot about economics here and economic outcomes but I want to be mindful that there's a lot more to life than a paycheck so tell me a bit about what the data show right now on mortality yes so so-called deaths of Despair that was a term that was I think originally used in the Atlantic but popularized by an Cas and andus Dayton they're much higher among men than women but those deaths include suicide alcohol rated illnesses and Drug overdoses so opioid deaths are about 70% plus male men are about four times more likely to commit suicide than women are it's risen by about 25% as well over the last 10 years or so it's risen for all groups but because the starting rates so much higher for men you're still seeing this kind of four-fold difference in in rates of suicide uh obviously men die earlier but that's for all kinds of complicated reasons and they're also much more lik to die from covid by the way that was one of the most interesting stories about covid was the way it played out and about twice as many middle-aged men died from covid as middle-aged women in the US that's a little bit of a separate story in some ways but but overall what you're seeing I think in these deaths of Despair is not just a mental health crisis although of course you're seeing that to some extent a cultural crisis to some extent a a crisis of meaning crisis of identity I quote one academic as saying that men lack ontological security which is not a great sort of rallying cry what do we need on ological security when do we need it now but what he's getting out there I think is exactly right which is a sense of like a secure place in the world a secure sense of like who am I I have a role and that I am I am needed by somebody or something at least I think that sense of being needed is hugely important and I came across a study by Fiona Shand published in the British medical journal which looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before suicide and the two words they most commonly used were useless and worthless and of course that's a selected sample tragically selected sample of men but nonetheless I thought there's that's not just words there's actually something here about a sense of like I won't be needed and many of the men will say that they think that their families and communities will be better off without them than with them and I think that's a very deep problem that we should take very seriously indeed I do want to hold on Co for a second because I think it it operates as a useful case in part because it doesn't have some of the cultural baggage or blame or you got yourself into this mess that that people sometimes attached things like drug overdoses and I would say wrongly but but nevertheless and the death rate Divergence was very striking and you write something that feels true to me say quote almost every major Think Tank and international organization in the world produce reports on the negative impact of the pandemic on women many written in a hyperbolic tone by comparison the much higher risk of death from covid-19 for men warranted barely a mention tell me a bit about that and what you're getting at with it yeah and it's an area that I ended up working in and producing reports for Brookings on this gap between men and women and and I tried to get other colleagues involved in it and so to just like well I'm not a public health person why am I doing this and the honest answer is because nobody else was and even the organizations who were collecting the data that showed these gaps were not really promoting them and weren't all that thrilled necessarily that I was using their data to highlight this gender gap really very significant gender gap which is global by the way and I think that it it does show the the institutional asymmetry that we currently have so there were huge number of organizations councils reports Etc on the impact of the pandemic on particularly women's employment there was lots of discussion of a she session because women's employment rates did drop more precipitously than than men's of course everyone's just dropped it was like a it was like an asteroid hitting the economy but actually women's rates have bounced back pretty well and so I don't know a credible labor market Economist now that would still use the word she session turns out that it it kind of came out you know in the wash that doesn't mean there weren't other issues for women by the way but there were huge issues for men including dying and we didn't hear very much about that because there are no institutions or at least no responsible institutions or respected institutions whose job it was to point out that fact to us whereas there were lots of Institutions whose job it was quite rightly to say how will this thing in this case a pandemic and affect our stakeholders I.E women and girls like just there's people there are thousands of people whose job it is to get up every morning and write about that and think how will this affect women and girls and they did a pretty they did a good job of it there were a lot of reports and of course the reports meant that they got lots of coverage but there were just no equivalent really reports saying well hold on what's Happening to men here and particularly this greater vulnerability to death just wasn't getting very much attention so I'm not blaming anybody for that I'm just saying that there just aren't any institutions whose job it is to draw attention to that but that institutional asymmetry I think does create a problem down the line because it means that someone's going to talk about that and those those people who are talking about that maybe people on the internet who will then use the fact that mainstream institutions are not talking about it as evidence that you don't care about boys and men that you've fallen into a feminist conspiracy well I think it's not just that the existence of Institutions but also the existence of accepted frames right so one thing that was true in the pandemic and this is an accepted frame because it is a true frame is it when there are Cris of family life women often bear much more of that burden and so the dynamic of of pieces that now just like always something has gone wrong and women are being asked to be you know working and or sacrificing their work to immediately go back and now run Zoom school and you know also handle the the elderly parents and and so on it was all true and we sort of knew where to put that but the fact that men were dying at a much higher rate although that does actually connect to things like dust of Despair and Trends in male mortality there wasn't as much of a kind of accepted like this is where this fits in the conversation and this is what you do about it there was that again on Race I mean we heard a lot correctly about the toll the pandemic was taking in say black communities but the gender death rate which I was myself slow to realize was happening was really really quite large I mean it is not a small difference I focus here because I think it's for a bunch of the things we're talking about in this conversation is you get a lot more coverage of things where the frame is more accepted and close at hand not because other things are exactly suppressed but because a lot of things just go with the cultural grain yeah and if and if it it confirms our priers it goes with the grain as you say it kind of causes you to just start nodding your head almost subconsciously like yeah once again this will be terrible for women Etc as you say it fit and it's uncomfortable to go against those frames it's it's uncomfortable to say well hold on this thing's happening which actually doesn't fit with that but it's also true and what that means is we've just got to be better about reframing we've got to get better at just of just looking at our frames and saying huh okay well that's true there say around some of issues around childcare but it's not true over here but and it's true for this group but it's not true for that group and become I I think kind of wear our you know use our frames a little bit more Loosely than we currently do but think that is a bit of a counter example to something we were arguing about a while ago which is this individualization of the problem so you're quite right that there was correctly attention and I did some work on the race gaps in covid as well so like differences and racial outcomes but that tended to be at least among mainstream institutions to look for structural reasons why that was the case right it wasn't typically described as the fault of black people or Hispanic people because they had more pre-existing conditions or they wouldn't wear a mask or they wouldn't get vaccinated or whatever right or choose your kind of reason but all of those were actually applied to men and so there was quite a lot of um quite a lot of coverage quite a lot of storing wearing well it's cuz men you know they have pre-existing conditions more than women that turned out not really to be true they won't wear a mask they won't get vaccinated so that actually I think it was a bit worse even than you're describing it there was a tend even in order to make it fit with the frame people particularly people in mainstream or maybe cental left institutions had to find a reason why it was men's fault rather than saying okay let's let's see what's going on here but I think the deeper Point here is just that we I've really kind think thinking this much more recently and since I've been out talking about the book is that just the lack of like boring institutions looking at the issues of boys and men is is a problem because it means that the there aren't there is an Institutional framework through which to have these conversations and I'm thinking about what that means uh in terms of my work going forward but it also means that this stuff still goes somewhere and it goes to the internet it goes to the men's rights groups it goes to the people who can really exploit it and I'll give you one example of this I was having an argument with him as right activist the other day he would he would dispute the label but very alt-right guy and he said look they don't care about men male suicide I said what are you talking about of course they first of all who's they what do you mean he said he means I mean the CDC I mean the White House I mean the government they don't care about male suicide I said yes they do why did you say that he sent me a link and the link was to the CDC page on suicide disparities he said where does it talk about men and he's right it doesn't it talks about all kinds of other disparities by race lgbtq rural urban veteran non retan Etc there isn't a subsection it doesn't just straightforwardly address the fact there's a massive massive gender gap in suicide and so I'm like oh I'm cursing the CDC people who made that decision because they're making life much harder for me as I'm arguing with this men's rights activist when he says they don't care because they didn't cover the covid deaths they don't talk about male suicide enough makes it harder for me to tell him he's crazy and I think this institutional asymmetry means that they don't sound as crazy as they should when they say that we don't care enough about boys and men and I think the goal here has to be to make them sound crazy it has to be to when they say that to say no what are you talking about there's a whole task for us on male suicide there's a whole thing in the White House about boys and men what are you talking about and make them sound crazy but right now because of this reluctance to address the issue we create a huge vacuum and it makes them sound plausible when they claim that we're not addressing these issues and I think that's fatally damaging I I will push just a little bit on this in in one particular way which is I think the covid example is a very good one that is a clear case of what you're talking about I think deaths of Despair have been widely widely widely covered as a male problem that that's not one where I think if you've followed the debate like I followed Co very closely and it took me time to realize there was this huge gender gap in immortality but if you followed the death of Despair discussion from the beginning it has always been about men yeah it's been more about white hasn't more about more white and then working class before men wouldn't you say well yeah I mean it was initially framed as a white working class thing although I think that the data now shows that that has changed yes we've we've developed a terrifying a terrible form of equality there but I think it was always framed as a as a male thing and I think um it goes a little bit to this point of frames that people are used to because it has been connected to something else you talk about in the book which is another place where I think there's a lot of widespread attention to to a problem of man this is not as severe but but is loneliness which I think is very commonly um covered as a as a problem with men and you write quite a bit about the male friendship deficit which I think is pretty important you know for instance a 2021 report from the survey Center on American Life identifying a friendship recession with 15% of men saying they have no close friends at all which is up from only 3% in 1990 so I want to hear what you're saying about the the question of frames but I'd also like you to talk a bit about the the male friendship crisis which in terms of a life well lived I think is pretty profound yeah so I think you're right as I reflect on it the white with the workingclass guy and I think actually now you're right the evidence is that it's not just white for sure in terms of deaths of Despair there has been some concern about okay what's happening to these guys and that is from people like wasan and UT but also Nick eat and so on too I think that the concern about loneliness and social isolation is one that we have to look at through a gender lens and I agree the that we are you do see I think quite a bit of attention being paid to this idea of like what's happening to these especially young men these kind of lonely and isolated young men partly because of the the suicide rates and so on too so I agree and the evidence again is just so striking the there's a deeper problem of friendlessness and isolation among men than among women and I think there's all kinds of reasons for that um I think women typically get a bit better at doing that emotional maintenance I also think men have these competing attractions online for kind of in real life friends if you like so there's lots of reasons for that but the kind of key Point here is it means that the mental health problems that we're seeing of girls and boys and young women young men are just playing out very differently and so for young men and boys especially I I think they're more properly seen as problems of isolation of retreat of despair of a sense of not being needed lack of purpose Etc whereas I think what's happening for a lot of girls and young women is a sense of like they feel like the environment is quite hostile there's a lot of relational bully being social media is having a very different effect on um women and young girls I think than on boys and young men you know the Tik Tok the relational issues and obviously issues around body image and self-esteem are just just it's playing out differently it's again it's not that one is worse or better than the other it's just that they're playing out differently but for sure among boys and young men and again especially those with less economic power this issue of isolation is a growing one they just feel alone too much of the time this one really I recognize it is by no means the worst of what we've talked about but it it it breaks my heart very particularly and you know I have two young boys and and I worry I mean they're not there yet but but I worry about them these findings on friendship really always break my heart in a particular way I have incredibly deep male friendships I mean I have friends I deeply love and and have for for many many years and so I don't have as much I feel like empathic access to this one as others and so it confuses me more and in particular what confuses me about it is you have to explain a rate of change you could say men have been stoic and you know they don't share their feelings and and all that stereotypically culturally would have been truer I think about mid 20th Century men than men and boys today but you're seeing this really sharp drop since the 1990s right I would say men are better at talking about their feelings than they were in 1990 but they have fewer close friends according to to the data how do you understand that like what is an explanation that counts for a drop since 1990 first of all at just a personal level I agree with you I think these findings are they are genuinely kind of emotionally resonant when you see just to how isolated many of these men are I think Bertrand Russell the British philosopher once said that the mark of a civilized person was the ability to weep over a column of numbers and there's been quite a few s of numbers that I think that's applied to in my case and similarly I have male friends who I deeply love too and I think it's very important we use The L Word by the way I think we're just all getting better at that so what's happening more generally I think what's happening is a deinstitutionalization of male friendships and male relationships that men to the extent that perhaps men might struggle just I think for some natural reasons but but uh for other reasons just struggling a little bit to make those connections a little bit less relational perhap just off the bat than women what that means is the the institutions through which you form male friendships whether that's schools colleges workplaces places of worship Boy Scouts groups etc those institutions are actually more important for the building and sustaining of male friendships everything else equal even than the female friendships right um and stereotypically again like you know the shared experience of becoming mothers and those biological differences might actually give women access to kind of relational networks it's harder for men to access right becoming a father doesn't automatically open up a network of other new dads in quite the same way that it does for so what that means is if there are fewer men in colleges fewer men in the workforce fewer men in our all of our religious institutions have a gender gap if we do see the falling away of Institutions like the boy scouts or in fact the Boy Scouts have become co-ed so what that means for male friendship I don't know but I think it was a mistake because I do think there's something to be said for those environments so basically what I'm suggesting is that the in institutions including institutions of marriage where women would do a lot of the work in terms of kind of sustaining those friendships as those institutions have atrophied it's exposed the fact that men were more reliant on those institutions for making and keeping friends than women were and so you see this gap opening up I can't prove any of that but I have this strong intuition that institutions matter more to men in terms of those relationships than they due to women and men are actually in those institutions much less than they were before including the institution of marriage and the institution of of the family speaking of of calms and numbers that might make You Weep one of the ones that that I've been thinking about since I read it is you write quote women and men are equally likely to say that their job or career provides a great deal of meaning and fulfillment that's 33% among women 34% among men but in almost every other domain there was a marked gender gap so 43% of women across all age groups mentioned children or grandchildren as a source of current meaning compared to just 24% of men can you talk about that fragility of meaning for men the the way in which women seem to have more diverse sources of meaning and men have their identities built on more narrow pillars there's a couple of things here I think one thing is that I have come to believe and this is something that I have reluctantly come to believe that male Identity or masculinity if you prefer is somewhat more socially constructed than female is right I don't like that I'd prefer it to be that's my reading of the evidence that we have to do that is more of a construction job right for boys to become men and you know for men to know their role than for women I think that's largely around the differences in reproductive roles so I think there's just a more of a quotes fragility to masculinity and some I don't mean that that's used as a slur quite often like eye rolling oh yeah fragile masculinity Etc I think it's just an anthropological fact that masculinity is a bit more fragile in the sense that it has to be more constructed like every society has kind of worked on finding pro-social roles for men that attach them to communities and so on so I think that's a finding that I find a little bit uncomfortable but I nonetheless am I'm reasonably convinced of so I think that that's a big part of the story here but I think it's also true that at least right now women women have developed something more about we might think of as like a balanced portfolio in terms of their sources of meaning they've expanded their sense of meaning to include like careers and occupations but but without giving up the strong sources of meaning that they get from families and relationships and so on too whereas men are still putting too much of their their eggs in one basket if you like I think it's like a sense of male identity is still too narrowly construed and what that means is that if you fail to succeed in that pretty narrow area of meaning then you don't have as much to fall back on the idea is here is what psychologist call cognitive self- complexity so you have a bad day at work but you did well as a dad or vice versa and it turns out that women have a bit more of that ability to switch between different sources of meaning which might make them a little bit more resilient but men are still a little bit too stuck on the source of meaning being from their occupation from their job and from their income which is why I think the loss of a job has much bigger psychological impact on men than it does on women it's it's bad for both but it actually turns out to be a much bigger psychological blow for men because again I think that so much of their sense of themselves is wrapped up in that draw out for me for a minute more that anthropological idea that masculinity is more fragile is more constructed as I understand it this has to do with the idea that motherhood is a much more obvious role in the creation of the human species than than fatherhood is that basically right yeah I think it's a broader point that there are clearer Markus let's say for the kind of different life stages that women go through than men which are then culturally either they're venerated or pathologize depending on your point of view but there is a kind of clearer sense of what it means to go from you know girl to woman to Mother Etc and than there is perhaps for men but also because just the the just now I'm thinking like over long historical time this sort of sense of like knowing who your child is looking after the child or the tribe and so on it's just been a little bit more of a question for men then I think that's meant that the kind of roles for men the rights of Passage for men Etc have tended to be more elaborate and I don't think that's just because of straightforward patriarchy I think it's because we have had to be had a bit more intentional about taking boys and men through those rights of Passage and there's actually a line from Margaret me which I've used so much that I've committed it essentially to memory Margaret me the Anthropologist um who said that in every known Human Society men have had to learn to be nurturing it's rested on the Learned nurturing behavior of men and this Behavior being learned is rather fragile and can disappear quite quickly under circumstances that no longer teach it effectively and the reason I like that quote is because it's really getting in a sense of like yeah men can nurture of course they can maybe not exactly the same way as women but it's more of a learned behavior for men and so every known Human Society has found ways to teach men how to do that nurturing but because it's learned taught scripted it's a bit fragile it can disappear a bit more easily and I fear that we're in a period right now where we're not doing a very good job of setting out that learning that teaching that script for men partly because at some level we kind of wish we didn't need it think we don't need it honestly personally I sort of probably kind of wish in some ways we didn't need it but I think we do need it and absent that we leave a lot of boys and men not flourishing in this whole new androgynous world where they can be whoever they want but actually finding on internet influences that we might prefer them not to find well on that I mean not just not flourishing but but groping for some kind of leadership yes we've been living through this interesting period of this where there is the the very fast and very profound rise of Jordan Peterson the the Canadian psychologist and sort of I think reactionary political thinker which is how the left knows him but more than that I think for his own fans he's functionally a like a self-help Guru then he's kind of ebbed and and then Andrew Tate who I think in a lot of ways is a lot worse than Peterson but there's a really clear and consistent searching right now for these hyper masculine I would say like pretty aggressive and angry voices that are in a very tough lovey way trying to tell men how to be men or trying to tell how lost men how to be found men yeah I I love lost men how to be found men I think just like What's Happening Here is the the internet search is how should I be a man today what does it mean to be a man today or whatever the equivalent is and I see Jordan Peterson as something like a gigantic and quite empathetic listening ear I mean he is a psychologist by background of course I mean what he says is honestly either kind of wrong or a little bit crazy or overstated or obvious right um I don't I don't find at least on this issue um he I do think he has contributions elsewhere so he's not innovator he's not he's not saying anything at all remotely kind of new all he's just saying is I hear you I get it I do think that I understand it and he's visibly on their side he gives young men the sense that someone's hearing them articulating some of their concerns has their back and the mere fact that that can turn him into a global phenomenon right who has to book like Wembley when he goes to London it's all millions of copies of his book what's interesting about that of course is not the supply because I don't think his Supply is that interesting it's the demand and then enter Andrew Tate and I see Andrew Tate who's this internet influencer massive influence what's interesting about Tate is that he makes Jordan Peterson seem like George W bush When Donald Trump came along right to remember that moment when all the Liberals in around the dinner table started saying you know what George Bush he wasn't so bad you know he's a pretty good guy really I want to say that I am not one of those people and I do not go in for George W bush revisionism like like that he caused a tremendous amount of damage that guy but by comparison to Trump I noticed a lot of people saying yes as a personal figure there was definitely a a yearning for him but and and you're right about this phenomenon it's just a real big bug of I think I may have heard you say that before so it's a badly chosen analogy for at least this audience of one but maybe other people out there have had this experience no you're right you're right you're right about what you're Bush doesn't seem so bad now that Trump is along and the the same things happened with Peters like Peterson's a pretty kind of Tweety academic guy who's just stumbled across this Reservoir and you know monetized it Andrew Tate is just a straightforward performative algorithm driven video misogynist who's been deplatformed obviously he's now he's now been arrested for alleged uh rape and trafficking and he's just mastered the algorithm but he he's everywhere and so actually as I was finishing up my book at the beginning of 2022 my son said to me well you got to write about Andrew Tate if you're writing about men I said who's Andrew Tate I asked the question that people have been asking in the month since which is who is Andrew Tate and he told me who he was and showed me him I said now I don't need to worry about him he's a fringe figure of course my son was right and I was wrong by the summer he had 12 billion views on Tik Tok he was the top influencer in the world and so just a massive Global phen he made he made Jordan Peterson look like an amateur in terms of ability to capture the sense of it and he performs this sort of retrograde cigar smoke smoking Maserati buying bronze kind of muscular you shade wearing you know way of being a male and so I talked to a lot of young men in my life about like what's going on with Tate and they say well a lot of it is obviously crazy stuff like misogyny but actually at least he's answering the question he's offering advice he's saying it's difficult to be a young man here here are some answers and my view about someone like Tate is that if we don't like his answers the solution is not to just tell boys to stop looking for those answers it is to provide some better ones for ourselves and it is to recognize the fact that there is a real search here a real real demand for an answer to the question of how should I be a good man today uh and remain a man right I want to be a boy I am a boy I am a man how do I do that I am I'm in favor of gender equality I I want a world of gender equality and most boys and men do but look I I don't want to feel like I'm the problem here I don't want to feel pathologized I don't want to keep being told how toxic I am like can you help and unfortunately I think we we as the mainstream institutions and so on because we haven't acknowledged some of these problems sufficiently or embraced them we've actually driven a lot of this stuff and so I think we've provided a lot of the market for people like Tate and Peterson to sweep up I have very complicated feelings on this and people on the show have heard me before say that a question I'm very interested in was what a Jordan Peterson of the left looks like and a real frustration I have with liberals on this is I have read and and heard repeatedly Peterson and Tate described in this weird way as boring right unoriginal uninteresting and if you're looking at phenomenons like that and just kind of casting into the bin of advice you've heard before you so you don't need to think about what it is doing I think you've like closed your mind in a way that is really dangerous and and as you say we'll we'll let these kinds of figures flourish what I'm not sure of is that there is some kind of pro-social shunting of that same impulse and and I do think it's fair to say that Peterson who I have a lot of problems with is a quite different sort of figure than Tate there there's an overlap um as you call there's a an overlap in the distribution but there is a a difference in what they are but I think something you see if you watch them and if you go back to other figures who I think were a little bit like this or would have been like this today I mean I think about the the popularity of Andrew Dice Clay the hyper misogynist comic in the 90s that there is there has long been an interest among young men in these transgressive angry figures and they both have this I mean Tate is very angry like a thrumming anger right has a sort of MMA mixed martial arts background if you look at um Peterson he's always struck me as having the affect of a clenched fist he is also emotional and he'll cry but there is a kind of like a Readiness to to fight and in everything he says just a he's wound very tight but that when you talk about demand and Supply I wonder if it is actually in the power of the left to supply something that answers the demand for for Andrew Tate because sometimes demand knows what it wants and maybe if you're a 14-year-old boy like what you want is transgressive in a way that it is very hard for institutions or people who want to be pro-social to answer I mean there's always this this tendency to say on the left like oh let's give the good version of this thing but there isn't always a good version of that thing so so I'm curious what you think it would actually look like yeah well I think what it means is that we really have to pass out the different elements of the demand for these kinds of figures the different levels of Interest right you don't get 12 billion views on Tik Tok just by meeting one kind of demand and I do think that people like Tate some and Peterson and all the people that you've just mentioned actually might be meeting different kinds of need answering different questions and that actually separating them out is an important part of the exercise so if we go through them I'm thinking out loud here but like you mentioned transgression right I think being transgressive is just always appealing and especially to adolescent boys right just is always has been and right now a way to be transgressive is to transgress against like whatever you want to call it feminist Orthodoxy mainstream Society Etc and be know perform this sort of just outrageous I mean he I mean t sort of makes James Bond look like Jermaine gri type thing I mean just like just absurd caricature but most of them men watching it they know it's a caricature but there's a thrill there's a real thrill in that transgression that's very adolescent I think Trump played into that he was a bit of a middle finger Trump was a very adolescent male figure in my view and so that sense of transg that's one thing I think the second thing is this sense of okay I just want misogyny I want backlash I want to feel angry I want to share in this misogynist anger against the fact that women are out to get us now and we're being crushed Etc that's another one and then another one is I really just want some help like how do I how do I date how do I navigate this world what should I do like advice essentially so the you know the kind of the uncle if you like the the advice column from the uncle or brother or cousin and actually I think the consumers of some of these people are depending on if especially if they're a little older are able to make some of those distinctions but I think more importantly we should make those distinctions because of course if there are people out there who just really want to consume Ang gree misogynist content we should not try and replace that we should try and show why that's a very bad idea transgression well you're always going to get that humor or whatever it's the third element it's the extent to which Peterson or Tate and or others are providing advice honest conversation feels like they're just being candid in their advising that's the bit we should try and replace in a way that is still recognizably masculine so the trick here is try and meet that part of the demand and that I think is doable I don't know how I don't have a how yet maybe you do I think there's an actually interesting tension here because I I think that decomposition is correct going over to Joe Rogan who's very interested in figures like that lots of things people don't like about Joe Rogan but but I don't consider Joe Rogan sort of Simply mign in any way but is again you know if you listen to him particularly back in the day when he built his audience it's a lot of comedians it's a bit it's a bit transgressive it's a lot of stuff about weightlifting a lot of stuff about mixed martial arts um it's about how to be a person in a way it's like a men's magazine used to be before the men's magazines uh got more egalitarian and then you go over to Peterson and and Tate and they both also have this self-improvement Dynamic and one thing that's interesting in conversation with our conversation is I think a problem for the left when trying to talk to this desire is the tendency to systematize problems right is a tendency to say you know if you're struggling out there it's because we have designed schools poorly or the entire structure of the economy has moved towards heel jobs or we don't have enough vocational education and I mean this a probably point out with the right it is extremely individualistic in the way it responds to these problems right the the famous Jordan Peterson you know clean your room make your bed advice but also people live life as individuals and they want to hear something they can do now yeah and they want somebody who empowers them now and one of my observations I think there's a turn against self-help language on the left I don't think it's true everywhere I can think of counter examples here particularly for women but I do think there is in general a kind of pushing against the individualization of of problems is kind of pull yourself up by your bootstraps but if you give up on that I think you also give up on very deep human yearning and so funnily enough I think that the kind of figure you would need to answer the problem you're talking about is also a figure who somehow very very different than the systematic analysis that runs through your book yeah that's so interesting I mean what I think is there's maybe some Middle Ground here and it's where actually I've I found myself moving honestly since writing a book that's pretty wonky right deliberate deliberately so I think what you're alluding to is that there is a cultural problem here too which I think sits between this idea of like oh here here's the public policy here's the system let's fix the schools so they're better for boys and make your at the individual level which is the sort of peterian thing and that intermediary is culture it's the relationships between people it's the way that boys learn to become men it's the institutions not just in the sense of like an institution like a school delivering products but like the culture the people around you the people you see the people you interact with and what I think now is that the cultural requirement to actually just have a straightforward conversation and to some extent not only tell but show a way of being masculine in a modern world and again it's uncomfortable to think about I think that's important because kids especially and young people believe their eyes much more than their ears and so they do need to see it and hear it and to try and fill that space in a way that I think is lacking in a little bit in our institutions and so one of the reasons for example why I care about the lack of male teachers in schools is not just because of the studies showing the boys will get better grades it is because when you don't have male teachers in schools you don't have male coaches in schools and you don't have men around the boys for the boys to see and just see how they're being I think about my own English teacher who was a Korean War veteran and managed to get a bunch of 16-year-old workingclass boys to be tearful over 17th century love poetry that's a tough thing to do with with a bunch of but he did it part and I'm sure it was partly because he was a man and he was showing us that he could be both obviously masculine in various ways that we could either say as a problem or but also by the way we can still read Andrew marll and find it very moving hey guys look I'm doing that I'm not just telling you that you can be like that I'm showing you that you can be like that and I don't know exactly where this leads me but I do think that what Tate and others are doing is they're filling a cultural Gap and that it's a mistake on the left to think that we don't need places and spaces where boys learn to become men especially from other men in our families in our communities in our schools in our churches and synagogues or Scout group what to take your pick but my basic point is that especially masculinity doesn't invent itself and so if we think it needs to be it does need to be to some extent created then we need to do some of the creating and not leave that to the people who are online that's the vacuum I think Tate and other figures fill because like you can consume the take content that's the most horrible misogynist stuff but if you watch a lot of it and I've watched a lot of it now there's some really good stuff in there and I afraid even to say that out loud because it's like what Andrew Tate said something good and the answer is yeah like an example someone called into a show he was doing and says I'm very short and I know that women prefer tall men am I scre What should I do right and what Tate basically said was look mate you got to you got to deal you got to deal the cards you dealt like you know get yourself in good shape get yourself sorted out try and dress but whatever he just said that's just the way it is he didn't win she didn't say oh it's and most importantly he didn't start blaming women for preferring taller men he just said that's the way it is let me help you make the best of it and I just I watched that clip and thought that's pretty good actually and so why is it only Tate right now that's having those conversations and I don't think we should necessarily try and replace it on the internet but instead where it leads me to think is yeah more male teachers please more male Scout leaders please more men in our churches please more men in our communities again to quote the cheddy work more fathers in our neighborhoods please more more men in roles where they can help boys to become boys without just there isn't a curriculum for masculinity it's a culturally learned behavior and we've I just think we've backed off that task too much I think it's a great place to end always our final question what are three books you'd recommend to the audience can I cheat and do one as a paper rather than as a book you can I I always have a good paper you know I know you do of all people I could say that to it's probably you Ezra but um one paper I just kept back to over and over again is a paper it's in the Journal of economic perspectives and it's called the tenuous attachments of workingclass men and it's by Katherine Eden Tim Nelson Andrew Chin and others and it's just it looks at the way in which the kind of some of the core anchors of male identity around work and family and community and and religious communities have just atrophied in four different cities it's just one of the best pieces of qualitative work that I've seen in this space and I just I found myself going back to it over and over again I just Splendid work I I hope they will turn it into a book I think they could call it the hap Hazard self which is the way they refer to what men are doing now I think it be a great book the second book I'd recommend which really gets at both the educational and labor market stuff but actually more from looking at women I think you learn about men is Claudia Golden's book uh career and family which as I said I think golden is just absolutely the best in the business when it comes to looking at gender and education in the labor market and she does it looking at women I actually talked to her at one point and I said can I talk to you about men and she said I don't know anything about men I only do women but but actually because she's talking about family and and more generally about these institutions I actually sort of read Golden's book and learned a lot about the other side of it that she claimed not to know anything about and the third book I got a huge amount out of was a book by Anna mein who's a anthropologist I think May evolutionary Anthropologist at the University of Oxford and her book maybe you'll know it actually as it's called the life of dad the making of a modern father as few years old now but it's um it's just a terrific book and it looks at the way in which kind of fatherhood kind of came into being as a as a result of some of the changes in our evolutionary history and makes I think it just a very strong uh Progressive and Humane case for the importance of fathers uh in the modern world and Richard Reeves your book is of boys and men thank you very much thank you [Music] the is Clan show is produced by emao Annie Galvin Jeff geld Ro Karma and Kristen Lynn back checking by Michelle Harris Mary March locker and Kate Sinclair mixing by Sonia Herrero original music by Isaac Jones audience strategy by Shannon Busta the executive producer of New York Times opinion audio is Andy Ros ster and special thanks to Carol Sabo and Christina Sami [Music]