 Over the past 50 years boys and men have lost ground at school and work and their living shorter lives. They're less likely than women to graduate from high school and college or to earn advanced degrees. They're dropping out of the labor force in record numbers and account for two-thirds of so-called deaths of despair stemming from suicide, alcoholism, and drug overdoses. The Brookings Institution scholar Richard V. Reeves documents these and other equally dark developments in his new book of boys and men, why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it. He analyzes the structural factors exacerbating these trends, such as the changing nature of work in a post-industrial economy, and suggests solutions that don't come at the expense of women. Reeves was our guest at the Reason Speak Easy, a monthly unscripted conversation in New York City without spoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an era of conformity and group think. This is the Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Today's guest is Richard V. Reeves. He's a scholar at the Brookings Institution down in Washington, D.C., and he's originally from England. We're going to ask him about that, I don't know, seems problematic, but his latest book, and he's written many, is of boys and men, why the modern male is struggling, why it matters, and what to do about it. So please give a big hand to Richard V. Reeves. Richard, thanks for talking. Let's start with what is the elevator pitch of this book? That in many domains of life, boys and men are now the ones who are a disadvantage, including some aspects of education, some aspects of employment, and in family life. And that's especially true for working class men and black boys and men. And we've got to a point now, such as being the incredible progress that we've made on gender equality on behalf of women and girls, although there's still further to go in many areas, that is now not only possible to look at gender inequalities that are running the other way, but in my view, necessary and that failing to do so will actually create all kinds of political and cultural problems. So let's one of the things that is amazing about the book is the way that you document this. Let's let's we're going to spend some time going over the kind of the extent of the issue or what are the indicators that men are not doing well. And some of this is because they are, you know, relative to women, they're falling behind others. It's just where they were 20, 50, 70 years ago, they're falling behind. So let's work through some of that. What I guess a good starting place is when title nine was passed in the early 70s, which conditioned federal funding in educational institutions that get federal dollars, they need to have equal opportunities for men and women. The disparity of women in college to men was smaller than it is now. Yeah, is that right? Can we let's start with that and then run through your list of leading indicators of where men are not doing so well. Yeah. So I really like how you made that distinction, Nick, right at the beginning between a relative issue where there's an inequality and an absolute issue where we're actually seeing an absolute decline. So if you look at education, for example, you're quite right. In 1972, when title nine was passed, men were 13 percentage points more likely to get a college degree, a four year college degree. Title nine was passed within about 15 years. The gap had closed and the most recent numbers show that women are now 15 percentage points more likely to get a four year college degree than men are. So the gender inequality in higher education is actually slightly wider today than it was in 1972. It's just it's just flipped. It's reversed the other way. And it's when you look at the number of men going to college versus women, bigger gap or what's what's going on there and it's actually even bigger. It's a bit bigger there. So on college campuses now, it's about 60 60 percent women, 40 percent men, a little bit less true in private colleges because private colleges are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sex. So they're now discriminating in favor of men to try and hold themselves closer to 50 50, but across the board, it's now 60 40. And so even when men do go to college, they're less likely to complete college. So there's both an enrollment gap. There's roughly a 10 percentage point enrollment gap, enrolling and then roughly a similar gap in on time completion. So it's meant a less likely to go, but also less likely to complete. The result of that is that 15 point gap. And at, you know, in graduate school, whether it's a law degrees or medical degrees, we're also seeing something similar, right? Yeah, much more recently, women now account for the majority of postgraduate degrees, including PhDs. That is, let's say that's more recent master's degrees. Actually, that was probably 10 years ago. BAs probably 20 years ago. And so basically what we're seeing is this kind of ripple effect all the way through the education system now. So there there is no level of education now where the gender gap doesn't doesn't go in favor of women and girls. Whereas, of course, you don't have to go back all that far to discover to find that it was completely the other way around. And part of this, if you go back to high school, there are sobering statistics or maybe not sobering, but interesting statistics when, you know, a couple of years ago, I guess the, you know, the slogan was the future is female. Whether or not that's exactly true, it's certainly the case that the high achievers in high school are female. Correct. Yeah. What are what are some of the, you know, findings in that? If you take high school GPA, which is a pretty good measure and actually probably more important for college admissions now, even than it was before, because so many places have become test optional. So they're putting more weight on high school GPA. Actually, girls have typically always been a little bit ahead, but now they're way ahead. So if you take the top 10 percent of high schoolers by GPA, two thirds of them are women, two thirds of them are girls. And if you take the bottom 10 percent, two thirds of boys with roughly a linear relationship in between the two. And so if you're interested in being like going to a selective college, doing well in GPA than, I say, twice as many girls who are already killing the GPA. No. If you peel back to grammar school or to preschool or to, you know, whatever, whatever, where, where does the gender gap start or the achievement gap really start showing up at first? Well, it's there from the beginning. So just in terms of pre in terms of school readiness, there's a gap. There's a gap pretty much all the way through now. Sometimes it narrows a little bit in some subjects like math before opening up again. Interestingly, when I went into this subject, I think I had an impression that so we know that on average, perhaps we can just preface pretty much everything we're going to say is on average, right? So we don't have to say every time. But on average, girls are much better at English, and that's certainly true. So in the typical school, in the average school district in the US now, girls are almost a grade ahead in terms of English. But I had this also since, yeah, but boys are better at math, right? So does it come out in the wash? And that's not true anymore. In the average school district, girls have caught up with boys in math. And in poorer school district, the girls are a long way ahead in math and English. And so the gender gap in our poorer communities is actually much wider in English, but it's also quite wide in math as well. And so this sense of like, well, you know, on average, girls are better at some things, boys are better than others. That's not really true anymore. There are really no serious areas where girls aren't ahead of boys educationally. Well, what about related thing? I don't know, like extracurricular activities and things like that. Or are there other ways of measuring like, or is it that boys? And, you know, and we're talking about boys here, you know, maybe through high school. I think it's probably fair to call most men boys up until the age of about 35 or 40. But, you know, let's keep it, you know, K through 12. Are there other places like, is it that well, men or boys are evacuating academics, but they're doing something else where they're, you know, kind of superlative? Not really. I think if they were, then we might be less concerned about it. But actually, there's been a drop in extracurricular activities generally. But just to come back to you, you're a bit unfair on men then saying the 30s, you know, men's brains catch up with women's brains on average by about 25, 26. So get credit where it's due. You know, we catch up a little bit earlier than you're suggesting. But by then I have a 26 year old son. So I'm like, yes, one down. But by then all of the firecrackers that you've exploded in your hair and things like that, you know, it's never going to be a full break. If you make it that far, then everything else equal, you'll probably be OK. In terms of brain development. And so it's essentially it's all the way through that you see this difference. Yeah. Well, let's talk about education or we've talked about education a bit, which is is a big deal, obviously. But then what about work? What's going on here? And I guess actually before we get to gender questions, you mentioned extracurriculars are down. One of the other things that is a kind of fascinating and I trend that I don't think it's discussed all that much is just how the idea of working when you're in high school or a teenage, that's really disappearing from the landscape within 20, you know, the past 25, 30 years. Must less of it. And actually, although you're talking about high school at the moment now, one of one of the, you know, sometimes you've got these big facts in the book about earnings, which we're going to get to and college graduation, but there are also these sort of data nuggets that in some ways I think can speak, they speak to something more profound. And so one of the things I was really surprised to find, for example, is that if you look at people who volunteer for America or the Peace Corps, so overseas or at home, twice as many women doing that. Back in the UK, voluntary service overseas, same thing, 70 percent women. And so in terms of those, that's not quite what you're asking about in terms of extracurricular, but in terms of like doing extra stuff, volunteering, going two to one, same in study abroad. So if you look at college students, like the number who study abroad, two to one women to men, and it doesn't matter what the subject area is. It's not about subject area, just twice as many women choosing to study abroad as men. Now, the numbers there are pretty small. We don't really know how to interpret it. But that's a kind of really interesting data point. It's like no one knows why, but it must be telling us something quite important because it didn't used to be the case that it was. And this is the idea used to be that, well, men were, you know, men were adventurous, right? They're odysseists. They want to roam the world and all of this kind of stuff. Jack Kerouac. Exactly. And it's like Jack Kerouac now is, you know, he doesn't have his license. Right. Right. And his girlfriend is driving around everywhere. Yeah, women have taken men in terms of the number of driver's licenses. So, yeah, that even in Saudi Arabia. Yeah, but that's not that's not true. But is it? I think we have to fact check that. But it is. But it is true. You mentioned in Saudi Arabia, there are places where women are outpacing men even in Saudi Arabia. Well, in education, it's basically true almost everywhere. I mean, every OECD country for sure. But even in some Middle Eastern countries, you get you get really pretty big gender gaps in favor of women. Yeah. Wow. That's, you know, when when under the Taliban, when, you know, all of their valedictorians are women and they can't go to graduation because there's only one burqa, you know, maybe then this will really sink it. Yeah. You know, the women are. These arguments don't travel all that well, sometimes, do they? So, well, let's talk about employment. What are what are the big trends there, you know, that boys and men are just kind of not getting it done? So there are two here. I think there's a relative story and an absolute story. So the relative story is a really incredibly positive one, which is of a kind of massive catching up in terms of earnings of women compared to men. It doesn't mean there isn't a gender pay gap, of course. Although that's mostly a parenting pay gap, which we might get into. But but if you take in 1979, 13% of women earned more than the median man, right? So take a guy in the middle of the distribution, only 13% of women were earning more than him. Now that's 40%. Now, 40% is not 50%. So the distributions aren't exactly the same, but that's an extraordinary shift. 40% of American households have a female. Why is 1979, by the way? Because that's when the best earnings data series go back to. So in the UK, people would use 1979 because it's when Thatcher was elected. And you wanted to say how how everything had gone either brilliantly or to hell since then. Yeah. But in the and so when I came to the U.S. and I noticed everyone doing 79, I was like, oh, they're obsessed with Thatcher as well. And it turns out it's nice. Dennis Thatcher was the canary in the coal mine, right? He's like the first house husband in international politics. I mean, actually the UK is now, of course, we're on our third female prime minister and not really bats an eyelid anymore and a third of MPs. And let's, you know, the chromosome tests on Boris Johnson were kind of indeterminate, right? Yeah. No, I think they're pretty definitive. But well, let's talk about it. Sorry. So the gender pay gap has closed quite a bit, and that's great. So what you're just seeing is as you'd expect from an equality movement, women catching up with men. But there's also a different story, which is the absolute story, which is that depending on how you measure it, most American men today are earning less than most American men did in 1979. Not all the ones at the top are earning more than the ones at the top did because we've seen a big increase in economic inequality in that period, especially during the 80s. It's important to point out. But median male wages are a little bit down on most measures, which means that just as an overall group, what's happened to men is that you've seen this big split. So most men earning less, some men earning a lot more, whereas for women, earnings have increased across the board and especially at the top. And is that when you say earnings, is that total compensation or is that salary? It's both, but the ones I'm referring to are mostly salary. And then if we are, what about the percent of men who are in the workforce? You know, because unemployment rates, which, you know, are most typically cited in press accounts are kind of useless in a lot of this because they're subject to a lot of kind of gaming or, you know, they just don't capture. But if we're looking at the labor force participation rate, particularly what's considered prime age men, so that's 25 year olds or people 25 to 54. I know, it's depressing, isn't it? Well, no, I've known I've been past my prime for a long time before I was 54. I'm 53. So I'm launching a campaign to redefine prime age. Yeah, OK. Good luck with that. That's a depressing number because I'm about to hit the end of my prime age. All right. But you're you're an inspiration. Oh, yes, I am. As an 80 year old, I continue to earn exactly the same amount as I was 20 years ago. But you're right. Among prime age men, there's been a decline in labor force participation generally, again, depending exactly how you measure it, there are around 7 percentage points in the last decades. But the class dimension here is really important to because you're still seeing pretty good labor force participation among more educated men, but among less educated men, a real cratering. So among men with a high school education and no more about one in three are out of the labor market. And that's about 10 million men. And what does that compare to, you know, say in 1979? What would it have been? I don't know what it was in 1979, but I know it was significantly higher. And as you just alluded to, in a sense, the issue isn't is more troubling because most of them are not unemployed in the sense of actively seeking work. They're actually detached from the labor market. And nor if you look at what they're doing, is it because they have become the Dennis Thatcher's. They're not house husbands by and large. I think that would be a very different story. And honestly, one I think a lot of us were hoping for, which is we'd see this reversal of gender roles. And so if the guys are out of the workforce because they're home raising kids, that's one thing, but by and large, they appear not to be doing that. So what are they doing? And keep it clean. This is a family program. Sure. Sure. Well, I can refer you to a very, very good new report by Nick Eberstadt out of the American Enterprise Institute on Men Not Working, where he really digs into it. Which I think is the name of the study, right? Men Not Working. Yeah, and he's done a post-pandemic edition. So men not in the labor force. Oh, some people refer it to him as Nilfs. But I'm, but I've learned that in the US. Except nobody wants to fuck that. I mean, never being honest. That's the main reason to work. Well, now we're into a whole new chapter of the book about marriage market. But I'm told that Nilfs is not a good time for them for the reason you've just demonstrated. But the truth is, actually, like in many cases, we don't really know. I mean, it's something of a mystery. We do know that a disproportionate number of those men are on pain meds. Alan Kruger's work showed that disproportionately subject to opioids. Sometimes it's not even clear exactly what their sources of income are or that they could be living with parents again or whatever. And some of them are doing some parenting as well. I don't want to say none of them are doing that. But by and large, they seem not only to be detached from the labor market, but in a sense, more troublingly, quite detached from family life and community life as well. And so Catherine Eden has done some very good work on this where she talks about the haphazard self and its men kind of trying to improvise their way through life without those anchors. And a lot of those are the men we're seeing in that group. Are they are they on disability or are they, you know, and this is why the labor force participation rate is generally regarded a better measure of like what's going on, because it doesn't ask whether or not you've been looking for work recently or anything like that or you're discouraged. It's just this is the number of people in this demographic and they're either working or not. Right. And once they're on disability, of course, they would be taken off unemployment. Correct. Yeah. And obviously Scott Winship, as you know, has done work on this. And the problem is that the way the disability system is constructed is that if you're on it and your labor market prospects aren't that good anyway, then the incentives to get off it aren't very good. Right. Because lots of other things get bundled with that in terms of health care and so on. And so it can become some that that can become something of a trap. And it seems to be catching particularly these these less educated. Talk about health outcomes, because, you know, one of the things I I have to, you know, confess to kind of not thinking about covid much anymore. But there is a stark outcome in, you know, male death rates versus female death rates in covid. That is another place where men just are really not doing well. Correct. Yeah. And actually, the covid story is an interesting one of the test of this overall debate, I think, because the evidence started to become clear that men were dying at significantly higher rates. So especially in middle age, middle aged American men are about have been about twice as likely to die from covid as women and age adjusted across the world. It's at least 50 percent higher risk of death for men than for women. So this is very, very clear, well documented gap. And first of all, it's quite difficult to get people talking about that at all. You know, I did some work on this. And it's quite difficult because the ones who care the most about it are dead. Well, it could be that it's hard to mobilize them for it. But it also went against a bit of a narrative, actually, a strong narrative at the time is how terrible covid was going to be for women in particular economically. Meanwhile, there was as much bigger death rate among men. But then the next reaction was, OK, even if it's true, it must be their fault for not wearing masks or getting vaccinated. OK, that doesn't true either. The case rates are the same. OK, it's not that then. Oh, it's because they drink and smoke too much. So they've got all these kind of preexisting health conditions. Turns out that wasn't true either. The gap remains when you control for all that. So what is it then? And it turns out it's just a biological vulnerability. There's something to do with ace receptors. If there's any doctors in the room, now's a great time to weigh in and tell me what's happening, because I'm not an expert. But but it's now quite clear that men are biologically more vulnerable to a virus like this. That was just true. Now, does that matter? Well, it might matter a bit in terms of how you think about vaccination policy. It might matter how you're marketing the vaccines and so on. But it seemed to me like an important fact that was not explained in the easy way that people were trying to explain it away. But talking about deaths of despair, men are also much more likely to be setting the pace there. Three times more likely to die from a so-called death of despair. And can you, you know, briefly kind of summarize that or explain what that is? This is a time popularized by Angus Dayton and Anne Case. And essentially what it does, it takes three sources of death to get suicide, drug related death or an alcohol related death and put those together. And the the rates of rising for men and women, but they're three times higher for men than for women. And if you break each one down, they're roughly the same. And so there's been a big increase in those deaths of despair, but there is also a massive gender disparity. And again, it crosscuts with class. The most of those at most are actually white working class men who are dying in the greatest numbers. And again, opioid deaths about 70 percent men. And the interesting thing about the opioid deaths, and again, it's one of those like data nuggets. One of the reasons why people are more likely to die from an opioid overdose is because they're on their own. And so if you think about certain drugs, there are certain drugs you might take to kind of go go out to the club, right? You might take MDMA or something or to chill with your friends or weed. But opioids are a drug of retreat. And so one of the reasons why people die is there's no one there. They are very often indoors and alone, and that's particularly true of men. Are there any before we talk about the causes of these disparities, are there any places where men are affirmatively doing better? And I guess it's worth pointing out that even though men's labor force participation rate is declining, it is still higher than the female rate, which has been increasing for decades. Correct. Although the female one in the US has leveled out. It's continuing to arise in other countries, which is causing a very interesting debate about whether that's because other countries do a better job of allowing mothers in particular to combine paid work with raising kids. But so it's actually leveled off for women, too. But you're quite right. The labor force participation rates are still higher for men. But the reason why women aren't in the labor force is because they're caring. Right. So it's almost always the case that you look at a woman who's not in the labor force not looking for work and what is she doing? And she's usually a mum or sometimes caring for parents. But she's she's doing something she's taking care of Jughead Jones, right? I mean, of a non-working man, perhaps. Well, maybe I don't I think increasingly a lot of those women are like, you know what, I don't need another mouth to feed. In fact, that's what Catherine Eden's work finds is that one of the reasons why men end up on their own is because if the woman is the main if women are bread winning and they're caring, there is a serious question, which is like, what are you for the guy? Well, you know, as somebody who is a the grandson of Irish immigrants, I've heard this story before. In fact, I've heard it most of my life where the question is always to the man, what are you what are you here for? Yeah. OK, well, are there places that where men are doing better or where they are making gains, whether in absolute terms or relative? Yeah. So economically, men in the US do seem to be worse off than men in other Western European economy. So it does seem like the trends for male wages in particular are worse here than in other places. So that's one thing I also think again, a class dimension, which is that actually upper middle class men, however, we're going to define them, but men before your college degrees, decent earnings, their earnings are higher than men at the top were before. They're still going they're still going to college. The gender gap at the top of the distribution is much less than at the bottom. Their marriage rates are still really high, like in comparison to everybody else. They're still developing wealth. And so actually, there's a lot of men who are in the more upper echelons of society who are still doing pretty well and who've managed to adjust to a world of much greater gender equality without actually apparently suffering any of these dislocating consequences that working class men have. Is there also, you know, I've heard it called various things, but a kind of harem effect that you know, men at the top who are doing well, you know, have, you know, they are not only making more money, but they have access to more women. I mean, because of the way things have changed, but it's pretty good if you're in the top 20% of the income distribution and you're a man. Yeah, we're not going to compare harem sizes. Are we? I would never think to do so. So well, I think there was a serious point there. Interesting, Utah just decriminalized polygamy. So that will be a nice social science experiment. I think you see that on dating apps. I will say, say upfront, I am not an expert on Tinder, but... But you're working hard to become one. So, but a very good friend of mine, I'm happily married, a very good friend of mine on Tinder has, and it's now well established, it's been talked about, there are studies showing this is that those dating apps are creating something like these kind of old effects that you would have where high status men are actually able to be dating many women, whereas like 50% of men just don't get any matches at all. And that is actually, that's how things were for most of human history, of course. It's a very, very new thing not to have the problem of surplus males as some men are having kind of multiple wives or multiple partners. But in society generally, the idea of a kind of monogamous relationship within marriage still seems pretty strong. Especially among the upper middle class. So, you know, the very men that you would in other cultures would be able to have some multiple wives, don't. Jeff Bezos doesn't have multiple wives. Elon Musk doesn't have multiple wives. But you might see something of an effect there too. And Joe Henrich, the evolutionary biologist. Just imagine how successful he would be if the hair plugs looked good. He's doing, yeah, I mean, he's doing pretty well on that. He's worried about fertility, so he's obviously doing his bit on that front. But actually Joe Henrich makes this point that says, you always talk about polygamy and we say like, of course men would want it, right? But of course they would want to have a world like that. But he actually makes the point that it's restricting, he's not in favor of it, but restricting women's choices as well. And it's an interesting question to ask people is, would you rather be Jeff Bezos's third wife or your high school boyfriend's only wife? Now, it may be that all women would say that high school boyfriend, even if he's unemployed or whatever. But it's an interesting question. I have a prime, I thought you were asking me. I'm ready to be Jeff Bezos's third wife. Third wife, yeah, okay, well, I didn't expect that. You know, just every two days you have to produce, right? Yeah, I'm already regretting opening that door for you. So are there other places though where things are going well for men? Yeah, certain places are doing better too. And so some states seem to be doing better. Obviously the ones that have been hit hardest by manufacturing, the deaths of despair. And actually interestingly, the places where the deaths of despair were highest and where male employment had dropped the most were the ones that swung most strongly from Romney's share to Trump's share in 2016 election. What does that mean? Explain that. The deaths of despair? No, no, the swing, so Romney did poorly? No, no, no, just, no, no. So even if Romney won in that, how much did Trump outperform Romney, right? And you could predict that quite strongly by how many deaths of despair there were in that county. So when Trump came along and said, you know, American carnage, I mean, I say this in the book, I think at the time I was just like rolling my eyes and just thinking it was ridiculous hyperbole, but I now think it was just hyperbole. And I think he knew who he was speaking to, who's speaking to certain communities that really did feel devastated by the loss of many of these traditionally male jobs and the rise of the opioid epidemic and so on. So for those people, that language didn't sound hyperbole. That might be a good way to start talking about the causes of some of these trends because when we talk about deindustrialization, I went to graduate school in Buffalo from 1990 to 93 and people in 1990, and this was around the time that NAFTA was being kind of crafted and finally passed. And they were like, oh yeah, we've, all the industrial jobs have gone and they're gonna go because of NAFTA, but in fact, they were already gone, they were gone in 1970, they peaked in 1950 and the share of the American economy for industrial work was in like 1943. Is it, I mean, is deindustrialization, how does that tie into this crisis of masculinity? Because it seems like, I mean, it's just a straight line decline from World War II on. So it just seems odd that we're still talking about the last manufacturing job in Southwestern Ohio is the reason why men suddenly are doing so poorly. Well, you're right, the trend has been continuous, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we've adjusted to it even now. And so I think that just the economic shock of free trade and to some extent automation has disproportionately affected men, it's affected working class men in particular. And it is probably more automation. I mean, most studies say that it's less trade and it's more automation that has changed industrial work. I think that's right. And also if you look at the good studies of the impact of China entering WTO, you do see some effects on manufacturing jobs but quite geographically restricted. And it also, one of the reasons why the men didn't do better was because they didn't move to other jobs, either geographically or occupationally. But there is this issue, there's a lag here. And honestly, some of the politicians don't help because they do sometimes give the impression that just give us another term and we can bring all those factory jobs back. And so we keep sort of holding out this illusion that we can somehow reverse the tide. And that doesn't help men in particular to in a sense face the music and say, look, okay, those jobs, the jobs that my dad was able to do for a good wage with a high school education are gone, gone for good. So I need to rethink my labor market strategy here. And A, we're not talking about that but B, we're not really helping men to adjust to that world through things like helping them get into some of the growing jobs in health and education, for example. What are the other, I guess let's start with grammar school and high school. What explains men doing more poorly now or boys doing more poorly now versus 30 or 50 years ago? Well, some of them are doing worse in absolute terms but mostly it's been this relative shift. It's just been the way that as we talked about earlier that girls and women have just like blown past men which by the way, no one expected. If you go back to the seventies when we were fighting for gender equality and education, nobody said, well, what if the lines keep going? At what point will we start to worry about gender and equality the other way around? Because no one expected it. People just expected their rough parity. We get to parity and it would level out. I think what's happened is that by taking the breaks off women's educational aspirations and opportunities, it's exposed the fact that the current education system is structured to be somewhat more female friendly because girls mature early than boys. When I say mature, I mean like just actually neuroscientifically their prefrontal cortex develops earlier, partly because they hit puberty earlier and so they're just more advanced. And to some extent, the style of learning might be a little bit more female friendly than male friendly. Obviously we've seen a huge shift towards more female teachers. There are fewer than one in four K-12 teachers are now male and that's dropping. And so what did it used to be? I mean, so I graduated just to inject useless out of biography. I graduated high school in 1981 and I can count on one hand like the number of male teachers I had in high school. When were men, I don't know, 50 years ago, was it 50% of school teachers or men in high school? Yeah, and the high school, so the drop in high school has been much greater. It's now majority female in high school. I don't, the exact numbers aren't quite at my fingertips but in elementary school, men have always been in their minority but that's dropping as well. One in 10, in early years education, there are basically no men. One of the other ways to illustrate that, it's about 3%, one of my own sons works in early years education and only about 3% of early years educators are men which as a share of the profession is about half as many women as there are flying US military jets. So we now have twice as many women flying US military planes as we do men teaching kindergarten as a share of the professions. And I want to be clear that I would like, I'd like lots more women flying military jets or to be even clearer, I just want the best people flying. I want women to be drafted rather than men. I think that's payback. We got very, very close to including women in the draft and then Josh Hawley did a deal with Kirsten Gillibrand to knock it out at the 11th hour, which is super interesting. I think, this is a libertarian event so I just want to point out that it's great that there is no draft, right? Well, there is, there is still it. I mean, it's not actually enacted but men still have to register. That is true. Like everyone who's had three sons knows that they are. In fact, one of my sons failed to do it and I had to do it for him because I was going to get fined. Well, you're part of the problem now, right? You're bailing them out. But the good thing is you register at the post office so you know that it just goes down the garbage tubes. That's true. But the point about early years education is I would, I'm going to humbly suggest that the lack of men in education is a bigger problem than the lack of women in the military. I'm not suggesting for a moment that we shouldn't continue to fight for a gender equality in the military but in terms of the message we're sending to the next generation, in terms of the culture and ethos of those institutions, I would say that it's a bigger problem that there are fewer and fewer men in teaching. So education seems to be more female friendly than it was maybe half a century ago. No, I think what's happened is it always was to some extent, but that we can now see it. Actually, girls were doing a bit better in high school in the 60s, in terms of GPA, a little bit better, which made no sense whatsoever given the incentives that they had. So the structural advantages that women and girls had in the education system was camouflaged by sexism. When women weren't going to college and were encouraged to go to college or pursue an education, then we couldn't see it. Once we took the breaks off, it became apparent that actually they had an advantage which is why they've blown right past. And so it's paradoxical. I think it took the women's movement to expose the fact that the education system is a bit more female friendly and probably always was, but we didn't know that because we were saying to boys, you should go to college and we're saying to girls, find yourself a nice husband. And amazingly, that meant we didn't see the advantages that women had. And so I wanna be clear that the taking of the breaks off women's educational opportunities has been just one of the most amazing and positive changes in recent history, but it's also exposed the fact that we may have a few boys to worry about now. Let's talk about higher education. Higher education, and I think enough people are of relatively my vintage or have seen movies like Booksmart and whatnot, but I know when I was in high school and girls were always the valedictorian and salutator and you would say, well, they're Booksmart, they're not really smart, they just study and they spend time doing their homework. But when we get to college where real intelligence matters, boys will do well, but why aren't boys going into college or flourishing when they get there? Well, because it turns out that if being Booksmart means turning in your homework and going to class and studying for tests, then the higher education system rewards all of those things too. There is no significant difference in cognitive ability between girls and boys, pretty much any age actually. So just in terms of whatever you wanna think of that is, it's just raw intelligence defined, however. There's a big differences in what some people call non-cognitive skills, which is more about organization, planfulness, future orientation, the ability to make decisions now that are gonna pay off in the long term. So the prefrontal cortex is the bit of your brain that says, don't go to the party, do your chemistry homework. And it develops much later in boys than in girls. And I can tell you, having raised three boys, that raising boys is essentially being a substitute prefrontal cortex for about 10 years. They don't have one, the school system thinks they have one and keeps saying things like, you have to do your homework and turn it in. There's no way a boy's gonna be able to do that on average, so you have to do it for them. And by the way, I think that's why the gender gap is much smaller in upper middle class families because upper middle class parents are doing that for them or making sure they're doing it, they're on them. They're checking online, do your homework, et cetera. So they are being a substitute prefrontal cortex. And is there a path dependency there where if you're not doing that in high school, you're less likely to do it if you go to college? I think you do develop the skills for sure. But actually, I really want to emphasize some of these just biological differences in the pace of development because otherwise there's a bit of a tendency to just yell at your sons, why can't it be more like your sister? What's wrong with you? And so what that does is it individualizes the problem. It makes it say, and actually it's not their fault that their brains are developing a little bit slow and it's not their fault that the education system is rewarding skills that they might have on average a little bit less. And so by stressing the skills element to it, it has the potential consequence of saying it's basically their fault. And I don't think it really is by and large their fault. Is there something to the, I've heard this brooded about usually by people who are talking about the need to help men or boys gain. Do you think being a boy has been pathologized in a social or cultural or educational setting? And this is the idea, we don't hear about this as much anymore and it might be that the trends have changed or we just don't care, but boys were much more likely to be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. And is it because they have it or is it because by being boys, that's disruptive in an environment where it's no longer tolerated? Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. I mean, it's quite clear to me, looking back on my own school experience, I would definitely have been diagnosed with it now. I actually kind of remember just the sense of physical pain I had sitting on a very uncomfortable plastic chair, incredibly boring class, trying to survive it by making up imaginary worlds in my head and so on, just to physically survive. So of course there's no question. And I was in remedial English. I couldn't focus. And actually I've experienced some of that with my own sons as well. It's actually diagnosing them that made the doctor look at me and go, yeah, well, you can see where they get it from. And I was like, what are you talking about? And then it became clear that's true. But at the margins, it's also a danger that it does get pathologized. And right now about one in four boys are diagnosed with some kind of developmental disability. That's a really high number. And I just don't think that that can be right. I think if you're labeling one in four of any group as having a developmental disability, then I'm looking to the institution. I'm saying maybe your measures of disability need to be looked at. Maybe you're presuming they need to behave in a certain way in order to not be disabled. And I think that is happening. And one of the reasons for wanting more male teachers is that male teachers are a little bit better on average at not pathologizing male behavior, maybe because they themselves are men. And not seeing it as necessarily problematic that they're behaving in a certain way. And so I do think there's a danger we're overdiagnosing for sure, especially around ADHD. Autism, not quite so much. Autism seems like, I think that's a real gender difference in terms of autism. And it's more likely to affect boys. Much more. What about the question of, well, let's talk about biology then because how does that factor into, I think people can infer what you mean, how it affects education, particularly in K through 12 or maybe K through eight. But biologically, how does biology disadvantage men? And this is kind of controversial in the context of the book because we are coming off of at least a couple of millennia where it was always advantageous to be male. And male is the universal subject. The default human is male, et cetera. But you kind of make the case that biologically, men have some issues that are kind of hardwired it. Yeah, I try to avoid the use of the term hardwired. I've been advised that's not a good term. And I think for good reason. Yeah, it feels too fatalistic. It understates the plasticity of our brains. So what's not controversial is the timing of brain development which we've already discussed. So let's just, and that's what I focus most on because there's no controversy about the fact that some of these bits of brain development happen earlier on girls and boys on average. Now, once you get to adulthood, let's say 25, just to remind you that it's 25, not 38, whatever you said earlier, that actually male brains kind of catch up with female brains. What are the remaining differences? And I do have a chapter on that and some people advise me against including it. Arguably I didn't need it for the argument of the book. But the reason I kept it was because I didn't find that many good faith treatments of this issue. I think people have really dug in on this and you either have to take the view that there are no differences at all between men and women in psychology or preferences that are rooted in biology. There's none, it's all socialization. Or you have to take the view that there are huge differences and they explain everything. No wonder there are no women engineers, their brains aren't like that. And so you get this overweighting of biology on one side and this denial of biology on the other side and most of the rest of us are just like, well, they're both idiots. We all know there are some differences. And so the reason I put it in I talk about some particular things that are on risk-taking for example, like men are on average more likely to take risks than women. Because I don't think it's right to necessarily say good or bad, I think it depends on the circumstances. Are some of the traits in men less adaptive to the modern world? Like risk-taking, if it's true on average that men are a bit more risk-taking than women, which does seem to be true, is that a good or a bad thing? And I would say it's neither, it depends on the circumstances. And I found this one study I really loved which was that in companies with male CEOs and CFOs, they were a bit more profitable but also a bit more likely to go bankrupt. So they either made a lot of money or they went bankrupt, crudely put. Those with female CEOs and CFOs were not as profitable but they were much less likely to go bankrupt. And what about those with hermaphroditic CEOs? I don't think they were in the study. They were right down the middle. But we're always looking for that. Well, of course, so what does that mean for how you should construct your boards? Now you might say, well, if we want a sort of, I know I'm using the terms loosing that, but a high-testosterone capitalist society, we want lots of companies failing and profiting and crashing and burning all over. We want lots of creative destruction. So great, let's let the men run everything. And if you want an economy that's much more stable, less profitable, but doesn't keep collapsing and throwing millions of people out of work, then maybe you want the women to run the economy. All you want to say is, would it be good to have the best of both and actually have women on boards as well as men on boards and have the mix of skills? So to the extent there are differences on averages, you can try and get a bit of both rather than having to say one is better than the other. In work, what are the causes of men falling behind? Well, we've talked about deindustrialization. I think that's a huge shock to the economy that has happened simultaneously with the rise of women in the economy. It's not, men aren't doing worse in the economy because women are doing better in the economy. That's a really, really important point to make. It's too much a zero sum around that particular question. If I may just say, one of the things that I found most compelling about your book is that it's one of the only treatments I've read of this issue where you are not saying this is zero sum, and so if we want men to do better, women must do worse, which is just madness. Yeah, and that's true, I think, in most cases. So then people would say, to be fair to my critics, someone would say, well, hold on, all those stats you just gave on education were relative shares. So there is a little bit like, if you want 50% of your high GPAs or college students to be men and you're restricting the number of there are, then there is a degree of zero sum to that extent. But as a general proposition, what we want is everyone to flourish and everyone to rise too. And so we've seen this shock to the economy and then I think a couple of other things are important to say on employment. One is that the growth areas in the economy are more in the service sector and especially in health education type areas, psychology, social work, even like substance abuse counselors, obviously for very sad reasons, that's a hugely growing profession. They're all very female-oriented and by and large, becoming more so. It's not just that they're female-oriented, they're becoming more so. Even if men are more likely to be substance abusers? Yeah, and I think that's part of the problem is that, so you have a number of professions now where most of the clients are male, but most of the providers are female. I think that is a problem. Obviously you can argue about that. Another example is special needs teachers. So most special needs teachers are women, but most special needs, most of the students referred to special needs, unsurprisingly, given what we've discussed, are boys. And there is some evidence that actually a match between provider is a good thing. I'd like one more example is psychology, where the share of psychologists who are male has dropped from 39% to 29% just in the last decade. Among psychologists on the age of 30, only 5% are male. So psychology is becoming essentially a female profession. It didn't used to be as those numbers I just suggested show, but it really is. So if you're a guy looking for a male psychologist, pretty soon, good luck finding one. Does that also correspond with psychology? And I can see this in other fields. And this is a stat or a trend that I was taught in a women's studies class sometime in the early 80s, but that psychologists are earning less. That as fields, and I guess there's a question of what comes first, but as a field becomes more dominated by women, its status and its pay tends to decline. Is that going on here? I think it was going on. And there is some evidence for that, that you saw professions as it became more female were earning less. And so this is like pediatrics as it became a province of women. I gotta tell you though, a lot of the studies are looking at things like women into Soviet medicine in the 70s. And so I'm not saying they were wrong, but I'm not sure it's still true today. And so what we have to do is look at professions like law and medicine, which are now 50, 50, or pharmacy, which is now 65 women, maybe 60, 40 women. So you've now got these professions that are really becoming much more, let's see what happens to the pay there. So we can see what happens, but I don't think that's really the main reason why those professions are paid less. So K-12 teachers, for example, and they haven't seen much of a pay rise in the last 20 years. Is that because it's more female dominated? I don't think it is. I think it's for other reasons, about budgeting and unions and so on. I think there are other artificial things going on that are capping teachers pay rather than people saying, well, only women do it, so let's pay it less. Hard to disprove that thought, of course. Do men in this, again, kind of pulling in biography at least of my various relatives and they know who they are. They wouldn't be able to listen to this because I don't know that they have internet access. But men, a lot of men, their dream is not to work, is how much do things like disability payments or coming up with a way where you can kind of do that ad hoc life where you're not living a good life, but you're getting by. Does that explain the decrease in employment and things like that? Well, I think you'd have to believe that at the margins, if the alternative to employment is cheaper and or more appealing than it used to be, then that's got to be having an effect. And I think that with the drop in the price of technology in particular and the increase in the quality of technology, I mean, just video gaming, for example, is just stupendously awesome and very cheap and actually provides probably a lot of sense of purpose and structure that people want. But I did look quite hard at the evidence on video gaming and pornography. Those are the ones that are typically pointed to. And I don't really find very strong evidence that either of them are having a big employment effect or that there's really a strong demand among very many men to spend their lives playing video games and looking at porn. I do think that's more of a stereotype than the truth, honestly. And then when you look at what men say they want, men are much more likely to say that marriage is important to them than women, for example. Men who aren't in employment or in family life, their mental health is not very good. So, look, I'm not saying it's... For some men in their 20s, a certain period of time are not suggesting for a moment that you couldn't have a perfectly decent existence with your friends and with some weed and some video gaming. But as a general proposition, it's really not true that that's what most men want or that they're actually seeking and almost no evidence that it's affecting their employment. It doesn't seem to be that it's affecting their supply and the like. Before we go on to what the right and the left get wrong, just in crude political terms, can we talk a little bit about, in the book you talk about specifically as bad as the trends are for men overall and then particularly for lower income or men coming out of lower income backgrounds, the effect on black men is particularly, that seems to be the strongest case. What's going on there? Yeah, so I think if you... There's this term from Kimberly Crenshaw, intersectionality, which is an insistence that we can't just look at binaries. We have to look at compounded advantages and disadvantages. You have to look at race, gender, disability status, class, et cetera. And I think if you take that seriously, then what it means is you look at say black women and men and you don't presume from the outset that because the black men are men, that they are better off than the women. And it turns out that they're not. And so on most of the measures of gender equality that we've talked about, it's much bigger for black men and black women. So in college, for example, it's already two to one, college degrees going to black women versus black men. Black men have only seen about, have been almost no pay increase since 79, even though overall they're trying to catch up after decades of discrimination. And white women now earn way more than black men. They didn't used to, but now for every dollar earned by a white woman, a black man earns 84 cents, which is about the same as the overall gender gap actually. And so these categories are getting really scrambled. And on pretty much every dimension you can kind of look at in terms of health, life expectancy, employment, obviously incarceration, et cetera. Black men are really the ones that I think you can see the most acute version of some of the challenges we've talked about. And that plays out into family life as well. Black fathers in some ways are having to pioneer a new way of being fathers because the idea of having lost the traditional male breadwinner role, that's not a recent loss to a lot of black men. And so in some ways they're pioneering different kinds of relationships with their kids that I think we can learn from. But overall, if you were to sort of be behind the veil of ignorance and you knew your race, but you had to, which gender you were gonna be, I think it's still true that if you're white and you then, on most measures, you're still better off being male, but that's not true for black. You know, black women are much more like to be upwardly mobile, much more like to be employment. In black families, women are the breadwinners in most black families and so on. And so the crude binary around gender really gets upturned when you look specifically at the issues faced by black men. So I think that black men are worse off not despite being men, but in some cases because they're men. Black masculinity is particularly seen as difficult. What explains that? Because I think we would agree that things like, certainly day-to-day discrimination, but even day-factor discrimination is less. Why would the effects on black men be so much more intense? Well, ironically, black men really got hit by a lot of deindustrialization trends we talked about because black men had actually just, I mean, just made it into many of those jobs from previously much less well-paid jobs and broken into those jobs just as deindustrialization hit them. So actually the impact of the loss of manufacturing jobs has been bigger for black men than white men. That's not what you'd think of in terms of general narrative. So they've been hit very, very hard by those trends. Obviously the way the war on drugs and the war on crime became in effect a war on black men. So I actually talk about my godson who was raised in Baltimore, a black neighborhood, it's a black neighborhood now. And I look, he was born in his 80s. So if you look at the cohort of men born in 1980s in that census tract of West Baltimore, more of the men from that census tract were in jail 25 years later than had gotten married. And that was the generation of black men that were just absolutely hammered by some of the crackdowns that we saw. And like we can leave aside the arguments about the effectiveness or otherwise of that. It was absolutely clear that the biggest losers were black men. And I still think that we're struggling with that. And then of course HIV, AIDS epidemic, crack and so on. We're still living with the consequences of that for black men and for black boys because one of the most important findings from the social science of all of this is that boys in low income families or in very poor neighborhoods do worse than girls in the same families and neighborhoods. So poverty affects boys and more than girls. And so then it becomes intergenerational. And one of the results of the difficulties of black men is to create much poorer black families because there's only so much black women can do of course on their own. And that means that the black boys do worse. What does the left tend to get most wrong about when they're talking about gender related disparities? They deny any biological differences which we've already talked about. Still refuse to see that gender inequality can go both ways. So there is a gender equality, a gender policy council in the White House now. It used to be called the Council on Women and Girls. Now it's called the Gender Policy Council. But they haven't addressed a single gender inequality that runs the other way. It's only focused on those facing women and girls. And I think that's a political error frankly, but also just wrong given some of the trends we've talked about. And perhaps most important culturally, there is a tendency on the left, and here's more the progressive left and more generally to talk about toxic masculinity and to really pathologize and individualize the problems of boys and men and to somehow lump it on them and say, well, if you weren't so toxic, you'd be okay. And I find that term and the approach that's taken there to be quite offensive, frankly. My own kid's high school had an outbreak of toxic masculinity, which definitely influenced me writing about this. Can you briefly recap? Yeah, so what happens? A very liberal public school in Bethesda and a boy had created a list of girls they found most attractive and shared it with his friends. A hot or not list is what they're referred to sometimes. And then a girl accidentally saw it, complained to the principal, the boy was suspended and apologized. Everyone thought that was the end. Then there was a protest. The national media got involved, ended up being on all the major national networks. As an example of toxic masculinity and the fight back from the girls, there were massive public meetings. The boy in question apologized to not only the school and the girls he apologized in person to the Washington Post in exchange for them not kind of printing his name. And the whole thing just went berserk. What was interesting to me, but I'm not defending what they were doing, I would describe that as immature masculinity, not toxic, right? You don't do that when you're 26, you don't do that in workplaces. You learn what's appropriate and what's not, but for boys to share a list of girls they found attractive, for that to become a national media story about toxic masculinity, showed me the term itself has become absolutely useless. It used to be have some use in academia, but it's now just honestly a label that slapped on anything boys and men do that the user disapproves of and therefore useless term. And not only useless, but actually harmful. Or you point out that interestingly, a traditional kind of analytical move on the left is to talk about things in systemic or structural terms. But when it comes to this, it tends to be individual failings that they point out or they cast it in those terms. Yeah, I mean, I wonder sometimes if it isn't a little bit cathartic because it is the only victim blaming left on the left now. I think generally I agree with the search for structural explanations for different inequalities, but this is the one exception that progressives allow themselves, which is they're quite happy to blame men for their plight. And I think that's largely wrong and frankly immoral. I must say I'm neither a right-winger nor a left-winger, but I kind of am with the left on that. When I see men acting badly, I tend to think. It's toxic. Well, it's not that it's toxic, but yeah, they should do something about it. They shouldn't do it. Yeah, yeah. But I retreat from a structural perspective perhaps to a more individual one. Let's talk about what about the right? What does the right tend to miss on when discussing this issue? Well, I think, I mean, to be fair, I think the left traditionally are better at doing some things that would help men like infrastructure investments and so on. The right actually overweight biology very often. And so there's a tendency to see it's the mirror image of the problem on the left to deny it, which is to use biological explanations for gender inequalities that really can't be explained by it. So of course there aren't any women politicians. They don't care about status. And of course there aren't women engineers. Their brains don't work that way. Or take whichever stereotype you want. There's still a little bit of that on the right and you'll see that in the work of even people like Jordan Peterson, where he explained the way the fact that only 5% of engineers were women on biological grounds. And that's, in my view, absurd. Can you explain why that is absurd? You have a chart in the book which looks at the number of women who say they would like to do a certain kind of STEM kind of job. And then what in reality they are. And what's interesting is that in many of the cases they're kind of equal. Yeah, in math and science. Yeah, so what the chart does is it says from Ron Su and James Rounds. What they do is they actually take personality profiles of men and women and particularly on this dimension of people versus things. So on average, men are a bit more into things. Women are a bit more into people. But the distribution is hugely overlap. There are plenty of women into things and plenty of men who are more into people. And so what they did was they said, imagine a world where those preferences were being played out perfectly in the labor market. And they estimated that in that world, about 30% of engineers would be women and about 30% of nurses would be men. Right now it's 15% of engineers are women and only about 10% of nurses are men. Now, I think that's important for a couple of reasons. One, it's not 50%, right? So even under conditions of perfect quality and choice you might not get to 50% in every profession. And that's okay, if it's really the result of preferences and choice. But the idea that 5% is likely to be explained by biological differences, especially when all we had to do was open the doors and lots of women became engineers. And so any moment in history you could take a percentage and say, oh, it's because of biology, right? And I think what you need to do is be much more patient than that. And I'm suspicious of anything where it's like 5%, 2%. Maybe one exception I tested this on my very, very liberal feminist junior staff which is deep sea fishing. And they're like, no, no, the men can do that. That's fine. Because that's like 98% men. I'm like, yeah, that's fine. We have no interest in deep sea fishing. So they were comfortable with like a 2% female representation in certain things. Okay, I'm with the girls on that one. I'll lead it, but I won't catch it. What else does the right get wrong? I think that the reaction to what are genuine issues for men by actually just modeling an immature form of masculinity as a kind of, you know, third finger to the left. And I think Donald Trump is almost an avatar of that. And almost in reaction to what's happening, so to celebrate a form of masculinity and Josh Hawley is on this train now as well, which is in my view, boorish adolescent. I mean, I know what 16 year old boys are like. I used to be one of raise three and I look at a lot of what's happening and I see it as that. And what that does is not just wrong, but I think that it takes these real issues and it just weaponizes them into a grievance. So it turns a problem, turns it into a grievance. And that's a problem for our politics, but it then also leads nowhere in terms of solutions. There's no solution on the right. Can you explain what you mean? Like what's something that Trump or Hawley did, you know, that is particularly illustrative of this kind of boorish bullshit response. Well, I mean, of course, there were some of the famous tapes that came out from Trump and the way he acted around and towards women, which I'm not saying he necessarily himself then went out of his way to celebrate, especially as president when he was running, but certainly many of his supporters did. And so it did come to symbolize what I see as an adolescent masculine reaction to the political correctness as they perceived it on the left, but I think what it troubles me about it is in terms of policy, if you read Josh Hawley's speech and he has his own book coming out called The Manhood, Recovering the Masculine Virtues. What are his policies? He wants to bring back manufacturing jobs. Good luck with that Senator. And he wants a marriage bonus in the tax system. So he wants to penalize people who aren't married by making them pay higher taxes. So people who are married pay lower taxes, which is bonkers. And so that's it. That's all he's got. And so what they're doing is they just take they're tapping into this issue, but they're using it to weaponize what I would see as a death sentence. Is he going to subsidize the study of World War II among men? I think that would be good because this is a widely observed trend that when you reach a certain age, even as World War II recedes further and further in the past, you become obsessed with every documentary, every book, every movie about World War II. Well, in the UK, it's still World War I, so we're still behind you. We have to catch up. Okay, so, well, let's talk about solutions and then we're going to go to some questions from the audience, but let's work through your solutions. You have three kind of big ideas, right? Let's start with the first one, which has to do with, we'll speak slower for the men in the room, but it has to do with basically keeping kids out of school or keeping boys out of school an extra year. Yeah, so just as default, I think start the boys in school a year later. We sort of half did that with one of our kids and really should have just gone the whole way. And obviously, especially if they're young for their year, but given that we do have this pretty clear difference in the pace of development between girls and boys, then just starting the boys a year later would level the playing field, somewhat developmentally. Does it really though? I mean, what's the effect of that ultimately? I mean, I get the idea of it, but why not two or three years? I mean, if they're that far behind. Well, because the evidence for how far they are behind varies. And so I think a year is, I mean, some people think a year is crazy radical. So let's start with a year and then see what happens. But the only evidence we have so far is from kids who have been, and boys, especially who've been held back a year. I don't actually like that language. You've started a year later and they do seem to, is the boys the benefit? So they do seem to get some benefit from that extra year. So I don't know how this exactly work. I'm talking to some school districts about it now, but it could be an extra year of pre-K. Interestingly, private schools are already doing it. I got the data from a well-known East Coast private school. Can you name a name? No, I can't, unfortunately. They shared their data with me, which was kind of them. And they gave me the birth dates for the kids in the school. And among the graduating seniors, 30% of the boys were old for their year. In other words, they shouldn't have been in that year and it's only about 5% of the girls. And so at some point along the way, maybe at the beginning, the boys had been had a later start. And it turns out this pretty common practice in a lot of private schools is for the boys to start later. And this is one of those ideas where you say it's a policy wonks and we're like, I would have to evaluate it and the distribution is really overlap and it's very irreverent. And then you say it to all the educators, every principal to take over. Absolutely. My older son, we ended up moving before he started kindergarten even, but we were in Texas. And it was common for parents to hold boys out an extra year because they wanted them to be bigger for sports. For sports, yeah. And it was a widely acknowledged kind of practice. Yeah, so that's the other reason people have historically done it. But then I'm gonna say like nobody's looking out of Texas. You know, the boys are doing really well there, right? That's right. That was a very different reason to do it. And what I'm suggesting is to do it for academic reasons, not athletic reasons. Your next reform. Well, in education, I would say briefly, more male teachers and more vocational education. I think a thousand more technical high schools would be a good idea. That seems to be particularly beneficial to boys compared to girls to have more vocational education. I think that would be great. I want a huge campaign equivalent to the one we've had to get more women into STEM, to get more men into what I call HEAL, which we've already talked a bit about, Health Education Administration Literacy. These are huge jobs. For every one job we're gonna create in STEM, we're gonna create three in HEAL. Of course, health and education are huge sectors. And again, very, very, very female dominated and becoming more so. So I think we do need male-only scholarships to get into some of those areas, just as we've had female-only scholarships into STEM. I would like to see some that are specifically targeted. I want male-only scholarships for people going into early years education, especially for my son, but more generally. And then when it comes to the family, there's a couple of things. One is, and here I know I'm gonna lose a libertarian audience for sure, I would like really generous paid leave for both mothers and fathers on an equal basis. I think it's very important that it's on an equal basis and it's attached to the individual father and mother and not transferable between the two. Finland's just done something similar. So again, if you think Finland is a great model, then I suspect it will do. And we all do. Everyone in Israel loves Finland. We're just dominating the pre-taping conversation. Yeah, I know how popular Finland is, especially here. But also the way in which unmarried fathers are treated in the US right now is really unconscionable. In what way? In the every US state, if a child is born outside marriage, which is now 40% of kids, by the way, a child is born outside marriage to presumed legal default is full sole custody for the month. The dad has to prove paternity and then go to court. In the meanwhile, they'll come after him for child support and those two processes are entirely separate for unmarried fathers. So we have one bit of the government that treats them like a walking ATM. And then the other bit where he has to actually literally fight for access to his kids. If you're married, the system works pretty well because the divorce laws do both of those things together. You do the money bit and the access bit and you kind of figure it out. And now in most states, the default is equal custody. Yeah, and it's a huge change. Actually fathers are now getting about a third of the time with the kids after divorce. There's just been an amazing positive change. Is there evidence that that makes men more responsive as fathers? The trouble is that because we've seen a change in the class gradient in marriage, it didn't used to be a class gradient in marriage, it's a big one now, is I think that people selecting into marriage are doing so largely to raise their kids together. So if the marriage ends, the commitment to the kids survives it. So I don't know whether the trend, I think that people who are like pro being a engaged parent are more likely to get married in the first place. And so it's hard to tell whether the divorce law is contributing to more engaged fathering or whether it was just more engaged fathers getting married in the first place. And you can't get divorced unless you get married, of course. Could you talk a little bit about, the nursing statistics are really interesting because nursing is something that is within reach of a lot of people based on the education that's necessary and the proclivity to do it. And there are so few male nurses. I mean, and you know, it is clearly, it's a feminized vocation and things like that. Walk through how you would go about making it more acceptable socially for both men and women further to be more male nurses. Yeah, well, you know, what does that process look like? You're right in your description about it. I blame Florence Nightingale for a lot of this. She's a real bitch. Yeah. Well, I wouldn't go that far. I think she did fine work in the Crimea for us Brits. But she did basically say men can't be allowed to be nurses. I mean, she's on record as saying men can't nurse. And she professionalized the nursing profession, but she did so absolutely on female grounds. So it's not a new problem. It's less true in other countries, by the way. So if you look at a lot of African countries, for example, there are a lot more men doing nurses. You can say male nurse, by the way, is just so indicative, right? When was the last time you said female lawyer or female doctor? So it shows how far we have to go. And a disproportionate number of the nurses we do have are actually immigrants as well. So it's not necessarily American men who are becoming nurses. And I think that's because of this, just this strong sense of being gendered. So what do we do about that? We have to reduce what Claudia Golden calls the auras of gender that surround professions. But that doesn't happen by itself. So I'd start with nursing faculty. 100% of nursing faculty are female. If the people teaching the subject are all women, it's going to get... It's hard to persuade boys that they should study that subject. So I would like to see some incredibly strong moves to get more men teaching it. How do you do that? Well, you throw money at it, to some extent. I mean, in just the same way, there are incredibly strong financial incentives for women going into STEM. And there is massive affirmative action happening to get more women teaching STEM. So everything else equal, a woman applying for a job teaching STEM has got twice the chance of getting the job as the equivalent man. Because there's this huge push to get more women teaching STEM. Great. Well, maybe we could have the same ratio the other way around for men teaching nursing. You would also say that for K through 12, particularly K through 8. Yeah, especially middle school teachers, elementary school teachers and English teachers. Men teaching English seems to have a particularly big effect on boys learning English in the same way that women teaching math have historically helped girls doing math. So I can imagine, you know, we'd have specific scholarships to encourage more men to consider teaching as a profession and especially if they chose to do something like English. It's all been about STEM up until this point. They're really neglecting English. Yeah. And I have to say as somebody who was always, English came easier, language came easier to me than math. I am still puzzled by people who find math easier, whether they're male or female. It just makes no sense. They're idiots. And I think they're lying about it. But what else, what else is, you know, and, you know, and when you say something like, you know, how do you sell affirmative action for male nurses or for faculty for male nurses? Well, I started off trying to sell it on labor market grounds. So I was looking at, look at the labor market trends. That's where the jobs are. Here's a bunch of men that need work. Here's a bunch of jobs. Why don't we get more of them to do that? And by the way, teaching and nursing have some labor shortages right now. And so we're sort of trying to solve them with half the workforce. So it's felt like just from a labor market perspective, I actually now think the much better sell is if you've ever been in a hospital or a care home or wanted to psychologist, you quite often do want someone of the same sex as you. You know, you do want someone. So I've actually, you know, had a conversation with this woman from a very kind of liberal magazine and she was. Can you name a name? Yeah, I can. Actually, this case was it was salon magazine. It was Mary Elizabeth Williams and she, she was talking about the experience of her father in a care home and how there were literally no men to help him go to the bathroom. And you can imagine if you're a woman, you probably want a woman to help you go to the bathroom and vice versa. And so I actually think that from a social welfare point of view saying to parents, wouldn't it be great to have more men teaching your sons and coaching your sons in schools? Wouldn't it be great to have more male nurses so that if you're in hospital and you need actually that kind of care, especially more intimate care, you could have a man and then so on. So I think that's a better sell now, which is to say what kinds of professions do we want? Do we really want them to just be all female? And as soon as you talk about it from the point of view of the user of the services, very few people actually want that. So do we need some affirmative actions and scholarships and money? Given where we are, I would say yes. We did the same the other way around. So I think it's time to do it this way. What about the Votex stuff? Because, you know, there was a time and again people of a certain vintage role remember a time when, you know, going to the vocational technical track of your high school was not odd and it wasn't looked down upon or anything. It was, you know, just part of the reality. Reinscribing that into education seems very hard and it also, I have to say, somebody who would have been slotted into that kind of thing had I been born at an earlier time because of, you know, my parents' education levels and stuff like that. I worry about it because, I mean, it makes obvious sense. We need a lot of people who can fix, you know, air conditioning and heating systems and do plumbing and, you know, various kinds of trade jobs. But, you know, how do you put that back into a system where people are, you know, very uncomfortable with the idea of being tracked and kind of pushed into what are considered working class upbringing or professions? Yeah, I think there's a history of tracking, of course, which is through in the U.S. perspective was seen through the lens of race as well. I think one of the unfortunate consequences of the recoil away from that has been actually to leave a lot of boys and men struggling. I think it's important to say that the Votec stuff can be the trades you just talked about and there are some good trades there still to be had, but it can also be in some of these healthcare professions. I mean, there's a lot of Votec that can lead you to sort of healthcare qualifications, even short of being a nurse, being a healthcare aide and things like that. And so I actually would like to see Votec becoming a little bit more balanced, more generally. But the other side is like, I think you just do it. I mean, the evidence that the demand is there is huge. If you look at the states that have a lot of technical high schools, they're all over subscribed. Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example. So there appears to be demand and if they're high quality and the students are doing well afterwards, of course, parents are going to line up for that. And so I think to that extent, let's just let the market decide and I would love it if there were more places where it was an option. The boys and girls. A question of say something with health aids and whatnot. Are the people at the top of the pyramid, they don't want to give up, they don't want to increase the supply of people who are basically doing their job. So doctors don't like nurse practitioners and bumps all the way down. How much of that is a factor in a kind of rigid labor market for these types of professions? Well, I think it's a factor and I think you probably know more about this than me, but the Rothwell's work on this I think is quite powerful too, which there's clearly some rents in a lot of these professions. They clearly don't want some of these barriers to be broken down. Whether that's a specific problem for boys and men, I couldn't say, but is it a problem in those sectors for sure? What it does mean is that we put artificial caps on your ability to rise up the occupational ladder by insisting that at a certain point you need a certain qualification and that's not always true. And you've just given a couple of good examples and it may be, and here I'm speculating maybe you could attract more men into those professions if they didn't think that they were going to get partway up and then get stuck because they didn't get a four-year college degree. Let's have some audience questions. I notice a lot of men hands are going up. That's okay. Isn't that okay this time? I don't know how I feel about that. I'm going to walk as far as I can with this cord and some of you can get partway, but let's... Sir, you had your hand up. What's your question? The proud boys have obviously been politically toxic for a long time, but Gavin McGuinness seems like a reasonable person and he's... He... You obviously have never met him, but... He initiated this movement with the idea that, yes, men are being specifically targeted or criminalized. And same thing with western culture, that it's unnecessarily being described as toxic masculinity. So how do you feel about that? And we'll also point out that the proud boys you get beat in by having cereal pelted at you or punched while you name breakfast cereals. And his initial prospect seems reasonable. I don't know. Tell me a bit more about him. Why do you think he's reasonable? Necessarily toxic. And western culture isn't the worst thing in the world. And so he kind of founded this organization, which of course got way out of hand. But he founded this to defend both boys and western culture. So of course, if that's the extent of his views, that would be fine. And what we've done is we've created a vacuum by making it possible to say things that should be uncontroversial and they sound because of a failure for other people to even engage with them at all. And so if you're silent on issues like the problems facing boys and men, then it's very easy for people like him to come along and say, see, there's a war on men. There's a war on boys. The whole society is being feminized and we're crushing the male spirit and blah, blah, blah. And it's all bullshit, frankly. But it can be made to sound plausible if people aren't engaging with you and saying, yeah, there are issues with working class men and yeah, we do need to worry about this. And by the way, the whole toxic masculinity thing could definitely go too far. If we're having that conversation, then it wouldn't create the kind of room that I think he and others are able to create. Because on the face of it, he says stuff that men aren't inherently toxic and not everything about western culture is bad. If that... are those shocking statements? Well, only in a context where you've allowed too much space to be created in your political culture. Okay, another question. Thank you. I've known Gavin McGinnis for almost 20 years. And you're wrong on every single thing that you just said about him. But as far... Oh, no, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm wrong or he's wrong? No, you're right. In that case, I agree with you. And I'd be interested in what Nick thinks too, but what do you think from what you guys are saying as far as trajectory is concerned, where do we see men 10, 20, 30 years from now? Yeah. Well, I think it's slightly depends on how we react in this... in this moment. These are not... these trends are long-standing. And I think there are some signs of hope. I think there are some signs that we're rethinking some of these questions, even just this conversation we're having is that we're willing to talk about some of these issues. So I am hopeful that if we invest in different kinds of education, as Nick and I just discussed, that that will get better. I think we will reform some aspects of family law. I do think that there... is a difference of fathers in a way that perhaps was a bit harder five years ago. And so I think there's... the group I'm really looking at, honestly, are 25 to 34-year-old men. Because the older men have been hit really hard by some of these late-market shocks. The younger men haven't so much. They're coming into a world where the dating market's completely changed, the economy's completely changed. We have seen a drop in labour force participation but I'm also seeing a lot of signs of hope in that group. And so I don't know. Hannah Rosen wrote this book, The End of Men, which I quote a lot. And things have gotten worse since then. And she said, oh, things will get better. And they haven't yet in many ways. So I don't know. But I would say kind of watch the young men speaking incredibly anecdotally. One of the things that does make me pretty good is my own sons, who I think are trying to sort of be pro-social, that they're not apologetic about. They're incredibly egalitarian relationships. They're tired of all the cultural bullshit. They just want to get on. They want to flourish. They want the women around to flourish. They just want to get on. And so I feel a little bit of a sense that we're coming out of some of the worst of the difficulty of even talking about the issue. If we're talking about it, I think we'll get better. It is fascinating with the labour force participation rates. There's a generational difference where people over 55 are working a lot more than they used to under about 40 or 45 are working less than they used to. And not only because they're a college either. So that's a strange trend. Yeah, could you speak more about the basically the gender power when it comes to economical power wage gap I don't know the kind of a percentage of people in the board rooms in tech, in finance, in gaming world, in I don't know where Hollywood etc. Is this all a myth that the left is talking about like how this kind of disparaged women are. And if you can talk more about the kind of major crimes and how does that informs us to trust men less. On the question of what's the real story around gender power and power race depends where you're looking. If you're looking at the apex of society including in politics and corporate life you still see huge gender disparities favouring men. I think that's part of the problem this conversation honestly is that you look around in the elite, you're like well wait, only 44 women running fortune 500 companies. Only one in four members of congress, women. And so what are you talking about? And actually my wife is raising money now for a start-up so I know very personally that only 2% of venture capital money goes to female founders. So if you look in certain places you do see huge gaps and work to be done but if you look elsewhere and you look at working class families in particular and you look further down the economic distribution the story is very different. And so actually the big change in economic power has been much more at the top and less in the middle and at the bottom rather than necessarily between men and women but I think it's important to say that the feminist movement recognised that the key goal was to secure sufficient economic independence to make marriage a choice, not a necessity to break the chains of dependency that had historically been really at the kind of heart of traditional families I completely support that goal and I think it has been very significantly achieved in advanced economies and I think all the stats show that and that is a profound change in our society and in our culture which we have to come to terms with but it relates to the second part of your question which is that the conservatives who are writing about this in the 70s we were talking about George Gilder before we started this what they warned was if the men become economically less necessary they're going to form marauding bands of kind of Mad Max style crazed, we're going to have massive violence it's going to be a huge problem you're going to have basically savagery these guys are going to go off the rails if they don't have this purpose they're going to go off the rails completely wrong violent crime is halved in the last few decades but actually crime rates are way, way, way, way down including from men and so the thing that the conservatives were worried about was these men would be marauded around in an uncivilized band, the opposites happened there's been a huge drop in crime now, that's not to say we don't need more of a drop in crime but it is important to note that along with all the problems I've talked about the violent crime rates have and of course in recent years there's been a spike and there are all kinds of issues around the US cities right now but as a general proposition one of our great achievements has been this extraordinary drop in violent crime we have time for about one more or two more how do you feel about single sex education when you talk about how schools are hustled boys, it strikes me that they always have been to a certain extent that you've got to sit still and also that so much what's happened lately is getting rid of grades getting rid of competition in schools was boys love and they've gotten rid of that and boys love to compete on video games they'll spend hours doing it but you have to write an essay about how they feel and that's what school has become more now so why not go back to a more single sex education well I think the positive part that also eliminates the red-shirting problem to some extent it does because they're at least developmentally with their peers I like the idea that it would ensure more male teachers and the idea of educational success and excellence and masculinity were not somehow odds with each other I think that's important my own English teacher was male and I think it mattered that he was frankly so I'm not against it people want to do it it's great but I looked really hard at the evidence as to its effectiveness there is none so it doesn't do any harm single sex education but it doesn't really seem to do any good either is that true for women though too because I've heard a lot of people get all the boys out of the classroom so there used to be some evidence this is going back to the UK now where it seemed to not make any difference for boys but it seemed to help girls and the reason it helped girls was you get all the disruptive boys out of the classroom and let them focus on their studies but if you look at the studies that would be done in the US of any quality you really just don't find any good outcomes the problem to be really boring about it for a moment is the kinds of people choosing to send their kids to single sex schools are not your typical parent so there's massive selection effect in there anyway the studies that looked at it hard are just like I don't see it and by the way my idea of starting schools a year later in school is trivial by comparison to separating the entire education system we're obviously not going to do it for most of our kids let's have one more question and we'll continue the conversation after but sir thanks what with the increase in out of wedlock births and the resultant lack of father figures at home how big a factor do you think that is in the decline of more traditional masculinity the evidence was stronger than I expected to find that fathers matter to their kids as fathers I didn't honestly expect to find the effects to be I assume your three sons were telling you that all along yeah why are you still here dad you're so important to me please spend more time with me please share more of your wisdom with me yes I'd love to spend two hours on the phone what happened during the battle of the bulge yeah dad dad tell tell us again how you learned about but including for girls actually but it seems particularly in A in adolescence that actually fathers do seem to kind of come more into their own in those kind of teenage years with both girls and boys and especially important for boys as to why and I don't think it's so much in my view about like quotes traditional masculinity you know because I was a stay at home dad for quite a while but I hope I was still modeling a way of being a dad that my kids could learn from my own dad was very much a traditional one but but it was really just that sense of contributing to being a being a provider in a broader sense provider of care more generally and so it is a problem that if men don't have anymore this traditional bread-winning role which increasingly they don't that they don't get benched as a result the problem is if we continue to frame being a successful dad in those terms given the changes we've seen in our society and economy fewer and fewer men are going to be able to tick that box and the result is to make them feel redundant not just economically redundant but culturally redundant and of no use to their family anymore and I think that's disastrous not just for the men but also for the children in their households not just as breadwinners and we've got to get past the idea that father's role is restricted in that way and that they're in their kids' lives whether they're married to their mother or not that they need to be in their kids' lives and they really matter and there's been such a reluctance among politicians to engage with that Barack Obama didn't want to do it for reasons of scaring the left Donald Trump couldn't do it because God knows he didn't want to talk about family and fatherhood and so the result is there's a real lack of leadership in the way that they do as well well maybe when Herschel Walker becomes the senator from Georgia problem solved finally we'll have a role model who contains multitudes I guess as a final kind of comment can you talk about has there ever been a time when masculinity or maleness hasn't been in crisis and so I don't want to dissuade I think everyone should read your book I don't think everybody should take it seriously I didn't say buy I just said read but no they should buy your book as well and if it's a choice between buying and reading just buy the book but what does it say that we have always been stumbling from one crisis in masculinity where either men are too masculine and have no emotional life and thus visit horrors upon society or and there are no longer to people say traditionally masculine I really don't know what that means others have been in the most cliched way so what do we do with that I will say the first thing is I'm very careful not to talk about a crisis of masculinity I think the closest we get to it is in response to the last question around the role of fathers I think that's the closest we get because it's just cheap to say the crisis of masculinity and as you say there's basically been before World War II after Arthur Schlesinger has a piece in Esquire from 1958 the crisis of masculinity how rising female power so the two things I would say about that one is what it tells us is that masculinity is always to some extent fragile it has to be socially constructed it has to be culturally constructed and so when was the last crisis of femininity so that does speak to something which is that we know at some level that masculinity is a work in progress and that finding models and scripts for masculinity that work with the modern world is hugely important the difference this time around I would say even though I don't call it a crisis of masculinity is that previously all these crisis of masculinity have not really been accompanied by any apparent ill effects on the men they've been earning well they've been running companies they've been employed etc whereas now actually there are some material problems facing boys and men and so this time around if you were to say it was a crisis it's not just a crisis in the febrile imagination of the public intellectuals who want to sell a book or an article there's actual problems in actual men's lives and that is genuinely a departure from the previous so called crisis alright well final question your name is Richard V Reeves what does the V stand for well I first of all want to say that the V was inserted because I kept getting confused for my name is historian Richard Reeves and asked to give talks about Nixon and Kennedy which he was an expert on and I would go and give talks on Nixon and Kennedy but I was exposed as not knowing very much relatively quickly so the V is there and actually the the name is Vaughn or if you'd like it in the Welsh I'm half Welsh is Vaughn and it's a name that's been in my Welsh family for as long as anyone can remember and is it a boys name well we're going to leave it there I want to thank Richard Richard V Reeves Richard Vaughn Reeves the book is of boys and men why the modern male is struggling why it matters and what to do about it thank you so much