A little over five decades ago there was a problem with bachelor’s degrees in the United States: Men were awarded far more of them than women—by a gap of thirteen percentage points. This inequity was among the reasons that Congress passed Title IX in 1972, barring discrimination on the basis of sex in educational programs receiving federal funds.
The law worked. Along with activism, political organizing, and legal decisions, it turned the tide such that, by 1982, women had caught up. Since then, however, the gender gap has grown even larger—more than eighteen percentage points—in the opposite direction. More women now earn bachelor’s degrees than men, a trend that’s projected to grow steadily.
From 1979 to 2019 the proportion of women who were employed grew by more than 20 percent across all age groups, while for men the proportion fell across all age groups—with men under thirty-five hit hardest. Currently one-third of men with no more than a high school education, a group of about 11 million Americans, have dropped out of the labor force entirely. The negative effects of this are many. Men without jobs are less likely to marry, to maintain relationships with their children, and to have strong social connections.
Richard Reeves, the founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), believes all of this is a problem. But, he hastens to add, the problems men face today aren’t identical to the problems women faced in the past. What was holding women back in 1972—rules, laws, and traditions of exclusion, developed through millennia of explicit and often violent sexism and misogyny—is not what’s holding men back in 2025. Reeves argues that shifts in education, labor markets, and economic development are part of the problem, but the stark differences go far beyond a lack of college education. He notes that boys lag behind girls in school readiness at the age of five, and that the gender gap is larger than the one between rich and poor children, or Black and white children, or kids who attended preschool and those who did not. Boys are six points behind girls in reading scores in fourth grade; by eighth grade the gap is eleven points. When high school students are ranked by GPA, girls are two-thirds of the top 10 percent, while boys are two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent. Young men are more likely to drop out of college than young women.
All of these developments inspired Reeves to write Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. Dedicated to his three sons, the book is intended to sound an alarm. The problems men face are not caused by the increase in opportunities for women, but they are real, he insists, and we must address them for the benefit of everyone.
Reeves, who was born in Britain and has long worked in public policy, was an adviser to Nick Clegg, the UK’s deputy prime minister under David Cameron. He came to the United States in 2012 and has held positions at the Brookings Institution and Canada’s National Advisory Council on Poverty. Since the reelection of Donald Trump, Reeves has been asked a lot about the widening political gap between young men and young women, and he has been blunt. Speaking to me over Zoom from his home in Tennessee, he told me that the Left has shown an unwillingness “to confront the problems of men because of its sense that men don’t have problems; men are the problem.”
Not all conversations are as linear or succinct as they appear. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.—Ed.
Richard Reeves
McDermon: You say boys and men have been falling behind girls and women for about fifty years. What’s the explanation for that?
Reeves: I don’t think there’s a single explanation. For example, I think the reasons boys and men are struggling in the education system are probably not the same reasons we see a decline in the share of fathers who are engaged in their children’s lives.
One issue is that the labor market has been significantly restructured in ways that have made it a bit harder for men to succeed, especially men with less education. In family life there’s been a radical change in the economic position of men, not just in terms of absolute earnings, especially for working-class men, but also earnings relative to women, whose economic positions have improved. That progress for women is something we should all celebrate, and we can’t suggest that the economic rise of women in any way caused the decline in manufacturing and heavy industry. Gloria Steinem didn’t close the factories in the Midwest. But we shouldn’t be naive about the fact that it significantly changes the economic contract that was at the heart of many families for a very long time, where men were the breadwinners. Men have been on the sharp end of a mixture of educational, social, and cultural changes.
McDermon: In my day-to-day life I’ve definitely seen gender stereotyping that has excluded girls from certain realms, but I don’t feel like I’ve seen similar evidence of men and boys being excluded or oppressed. What is it I’m missing?
Reeves: I completely agree that the problems facing men are not largely about exclusion or oppression. That’s why I find the term “men’s rights” so unhelpful. It’s basically an oxymoron. The reason fewer men are attending college today is not the same reason why women were attending college in lower numbers at the beginning of the seventies. Women were not encouraged to go to college. In fact, women were intentionally discouraged, and in many cases legally excluded, from certain spaces. That’s by and large just not true for boys and men. We have two similar-looking gender gaps with very different causes.
Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit, and it distracts us from structural issues. For example, the school system doesn’t work quite as well for boys. It’s not intentional; there’s no feminist plot here. I have never argued that men are being intentionally excluded. Those are all myths—and dangerous ones at that. But that doesn’t mean that boys and men aren’t struggling in systems that are difficult for them to navigate. Can we have a problem without a villain? I think so, but that’s an unfashionable view right now.
There needs to be more investment in male-friendly forms of education and learning. That could include apprenticeship, CTE [career and technical education], and also extracurriculars; these show better outcomes for boys and men. I’m very worried about the decline in participation in sports among boys, so maybe supporting some coaching initiatives. Also fatherhood programs, ways to keep fathers in their kids’ lives, especially if they’re not living with the children. And supporting men’s mental health generally. There is a suicide crisis among young men, who too often suffer from loneliness and disconnection.
There’s little institutional architecture for research programs or policies specifically focused on boys and men. If they exist at all, they’re very small. I’ll give you one example: the American Association for Men in Nursing. They have, like, one part-time employee and no money. Contrast that with the Society of Women Engineers, which has more than fifty employees and a big endowment. There is institutional muscle behind female-specific interventions, which, hallelujah. I think the Society of Women Engineers is doing God’s work. But we need similarly strong institutions getting more men into the HEAL [health care, education, administration, and literacy] professions.
McDermon: You’ve also written about the shift in the labor force away from the industries that once provided many men with breadwinner jobs and lifetime employment. There’s more job growth now concentrated in sectors dominated by women, like caring professions and education. What’s stopping men from embracing those roles?
Reeves: The labor market has significantly changed such that the sorts of jobs that men could do with relatively low levels of education, and for which they were perhaps more physically suited on average, have significantly decreased. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks the number of jobs that require you to lift certain amounts of weight—arguably an area where men have something of a competitive advantage—and those jobs have declined dramatically over the last few decades. Although new middle-class or working-class jobs have come online in areas like health care, the service sector, and education, the transition for men from the old jobs to the new jobs is happening too slowly. We should be not only encouraging men to enter these new fields, but probably incentivizing them with scholarships and outreach programs. Because money talks, and a lot of men fear that those sorts of occupations won’t pay well enough. They might be wrong about that in many cases, but they do need the jobs to pay more.
But there’s a deeper challenge here. Because men have historically dominated the labor market, there’s a stronger sense of what a “male” job is. It may be the job that your father or grandfather did. I recently took my sons to the slate mine in North Wales, in Blaenau Ffestiniog, where seven generations of men in my family worked. The sons did what their fathers did, who did what their fathers did, who did what their fathers did, who did what their fathers did. There’s a strong sense of male identity attached to certain jobs, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. In fact, I sometimes find it quite moving. But that nostalgia is now getting in the way of men’s economic flourishing, because you aren’t likely to be able to do the job your dad or your grandfather did. It just isn’t there anymore. Whereas women, who have moved in big numbers into the labor market only relatively recently, have less of a sense that “this is a woman’s job.” Very few women are seeking to do the job that their mother or grandmother did.
Where I think the debate goes wrong sometimes is when people look at these disadvantages for men and boys and try to find a villain or an oppressor. They’ll claim the “feminist woke takeover of institutions” is causing men’s problems. That’s just horseshit.
McDermon: About thirteen years ago Hanna Rosin wrote a book called The End of Men, in which she asked, “What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women?”
Reeves: It’s a great question. Hanna’s work had quite a big influence on me. I fear this notion that women are better suited for certain jobs could put a damper on what we think the prospects for men are. Right now we’ve got a society that’s dominated by the service sector. You might say that women are more into people, and men are more into things, so of course this service economy is going to favor women, right? Well, maybe, but only at the margins, because we could definitely have a hell of a lot more male teachers and nurses and service workers than we do right now. And men might defy stereotypes the way women once did. There are a lot more women who are well equipped and motivated to be engineers and lawyers and doctors and scientists than many people fifty years ago would have thought.
I cite a good study in my book that looked at the personality differences between men and women and found that women are, on average, a bit more into people, and men are, on average, a bit more into things. The study’s authors said, “OK, so if those personality differences remain stable, what percentage of engineers would be women, and what percentage of nurses would be men?” And the answer was 30 percent in both cases. So they predict that nursing will always skew a bit female as a profession, and engineering will always skew a bit male. Right now only around 12 percent of nurses are male, and only about 15 percent of engineers are female.
McDermon: And in the case of teachers, there used to be a lot more men than there are today.
Reeves: The profession was 33 percent male when Ronald Reagan was president; it’s now 23 percent male. I was criticized by Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, in his book Manhood, for saying we should be encouraging more men to go into those professions. He basically says that men aren’t built that way. Hawley thinks we should be creating jobs for men—manufacturing jobs and so forth—rather than hiring more male elementary school teachers, which is personally very offensive to me, because my son just started teaching fifth grade. So I have a personal reason to say, Screw you, Senator Hawley. If my six-foot-four, soccer-playing son can teach fifth grade, then I think we’re safe. I don’t think it’s made him less masculine.
I’m picking on Senator Hawley, but what critics like him have to explain is: Why was the share of male teachers so much higher when Ronald Reagan was president? Have men changed? It seems unlikely, particularly if you’re making some sort of biological argument. The question is why teaching, especially at the high school level, wasn’t always so dominated by women.
The truth is that professions can become gendered quite quickly. Veterinary science, psychology, and social work have become female-dominated professions, but they were not always that way. If you asked someone forty years ago to think of a vet, there is a good chance they would have imagined a man. I haven’t heard anyone use the phrase “female lawyer” or “female doctor” for quite a long time, I think because half of new doctors and half of new lawyers are now female. But people still say “male nurse.”
The way I interpret this election outcome is not as a particularly strong embrace of Donald Trump or the Republican Party in general, but more as an indication that young men’s votes were up for grabs in a way that people on the Left didn’t consider.
McDermon: I have two boys and a girl, and in their collective eighteen or so years of elementary education, I don’t think any of them has had a male teacher, except maybe for gym. I certainly try to give them equal amounts of love and support, but I will say that, for my daughter, it feels like there’s a ready-made cultural narrative that we, as parents, can embrace: “You’re going to overcome all these obstacles and be strong and resilient!” That language ought to work just as well for my boys, but it doesn’t feel like it. In a way, we lack a cultural message for boys, except for some vague warnings about toxic masculinity and the pitfalls associated with it. How can we establish a narrative to encourage boys and men?
Reeves: That’s the million-dollar question. I saw it with my own sons as well. The script for girls and women is strong, and it’s very different than the one their mothers got. I had this experience with one of my sons when we were walking down the hallway at his high school, headed to the vice principal’s office to talk about his academic struggles. On one side of the hallway there was a big board dedicated to girls and all the programs for them: a women’s college-scholarship night, the girls’ coding club, women in STEM. And the other wall was blank. There was nothing about any initiatives aimed at boys. I should also say that, at his school, the girls were just handing it to the boys academically on pretty much every front. And I remember asking my son, “Do you notice that?” He shrugged and said, “Well, that’s just the way it is.” And it really struck me: Here was this teen boy, head down, struggling a bit. What are we saying to boys like him?
We send a whole list of do’s to girls about assertion and empowerment, ambition and education, autonomy and being your best self. And there’s a long list of don’ts to the boys: Don’t be toxic. Don’t mansplain. Don’t say this. Don’t do that. I think that’s very dangerous for our culture to have only positive messages for one gender and only negative messages for the other. But we’re all struggling, myself included, to say what that positive narrative for boys should be.
We tell girls, “You’re going to face all these obstacles. You’re going to have to smash these barriers and glass ceilings. The world is built for boys and men. It’s patriarchy. So you’re going to have to be resilient, empowered.” But that’s much less true today than it was not too long ago. And I do think that kind of “us against the world” message has provided some of the fuel for women to succeed. And of course we thought boys don’t need to hear that message, because they’re going to inherit the world anyway. We tell them, “The world will be your oyster. You don’t need to worry, because you’re a guy, and society is constructed to make sure that you’ll be OK.” That is emphatically not true anymore. There’s a lag between the messaging we give to young people and the reality on the ground.
We do need to empower and uplift our boys, without in any way backing away from doing the same thing for our girls. The idea of “boy power” sounds weird, because the response to that is “Well, boys have all the power.” To which my answer is “No, they don’t. Not anymore.” And right now a lot of them feel quite powerless and lost and drifting, and they might start to seek power in other ways. We’re getting it badly wrong right now, and we have to rebalance our messages.
McDermon: As we’ve noted, there has been a hesitance among progressives to address this subject directly. Meanwhile, some of the worst people on the internet have built careers and earned renown by talking about these problems, but in a way that is not constructive for society and largely seems to rest on misogyny.
Reeves: There are some pretty hateful figures online. Their line of argument goes like this: One, boys and men are really struggling. Two, these problems are not being sufficiently addressed by mainstream institutions like education, government, philanthropy, and think tanks. Three, all of these mainstream institutions are run by feminists who hate men and are pushing men down so women can rise up. Four, you should sign on to my reactionary agenda to bring back “real men.”
The first and second points are true. There are real problems, and men and boys are being badly neglected. But the idea that man-hating feminists have taken over is not true; these guys can find some quotes from people on the Left that kind of make it feel true, though. And the idea that for men to rise again we have to push women back down is dangerous, nostalgic nonsense. But to the Left, I say if you don’t want people to be able to plausibly argue that there is a conspiracy of silence around men’s issues in mainstream culture, don’t be fucking silent. Speak up about it. Deal with it. For a problem to become a grievance, all you have to do is ignore it. And grievances can be exploited, especially if they’re not entirely illegitimate.
One of the things that a lot of people on the more reactionary side will point to, and where I’m probably in closer alignment with them than on most issues, is the crisis of male suicide and the inability of the Left to even admit that this problem is hugely gendered. I meet so many parents who are genuinely convinced that their daughter is at a much higher risk of suicide than their son. That’s the message they’re receiving. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’m told I’m wrong when I say it’s four times the other way, and that suicide has risen most among young men. Parents are being misled by media reporting that focuses on the risk to girls. This a public health problem and a great example of the difficulty we have as a culture acknowledging the problems facing many boys and men. This lack of acknowledgment is creating a vacuum, and into that vacuum demons pour.
The answer is: don’t leave a vacuum. The trouble with the reactionaries’ claim that the establishment doesn’t care about men’s problems is that it has a lot of truth to it. The solution is not to blame the reactionaries for saying it, nor to blame men who turn to them in gratitude for at least acknowledging the problems. The solution is to address the issue. It feels like a lot of progressive organizations are going out of their way to make it seem like they don’t care about men. They are doing the reactionaries’ work for them. The fact that the CDC still won’t acknowledge the disparity in male and female suicide rates is a hot-button issue on men’s-rights Reddit threads. I have been begging the CDC to add the gender gap to their suicide disparities and stop all those men’s-rights people from pointing to it as evidence that government institutions don’t care about men.
McDermon: Since November a lot of people have been asking you to explain the reelection of Donald Trump. What have you been telling them?
Reeves: My basic view is that, in politics, something almost always beats nothing. We saw this huge swing to the right among young men because they felt there was something for them on the Republican side. I’m not suggesting that it was substantive policy, but there was a degree of cultural welcome, of playfulness, of transgressive humor. Most important, Republicans went to where men are, not the least of which is the podcast realm. That’s where young men get a lot of their information.
And while the Republicans met men where they are, it was just a deafening silence from the Democrats. The way I interpret this election outcome is not as a particularly strong embrace of Donald Trump or the Republican Party in general, but more as an indication that young men’s votes were up for grabs in a way that people on the Left didn’t consider, and the Right made a stronger appeal for them. I think the fatal miscalculation Democrats made was to think this was going to be an election about women, and it wasn’t. The danger now is that they will decide these men who voted for Trump are all reactionaries and misogynists, and that’s not true. But that interpretation could be dangerous for Democrats.
McDermon: Young men and young women have grown much farther apart politically not just in America but elsewhere around the world, especially in places like South Korea.
Reeves: South Korea is sort of the nightmare scenario. The huge political gap between young men and young women there reflects a cultural dissociation. It recalls the old “war of the sexes.” And, of course, South Korea is now famous for its low fertility rate. I see that as a worrying portent.
The question then is: How do we get past this idea of a women’s party and a men’s party? If I’m talking to Democrats about this, my advice is that they develop a platform with some assertively, unapologetically pro-male planks. They’ve been cast as the party that is not just for women but to some extent against men, and they can’t allow that. And they can’t shame or bully men into voting Democrat either. The party has to disavow any sort of pathologization of men. It has to have something to offer them. The Left has been unwilling to confront the problems of men because of its sense that men don’t have problems; men are the problem. And until those on the Left get past this idea, they will continue to lose votes to the Right.
McDermon: Has the Left in other countries found a better approach?
Reeves: It’s still washing out. I’m encouraged by the approach being taken by the Labour Party in my old home in the UK, where we haven’t seen quite such a big gender divide. The Labour Party promised a men’s-health strategy and did not allow itself to be pushed into taking a position on issues around boys and men. There’s a House of Commons inquiry into boys’ education. There’s been more willingness by the center Left in the UK to at least admit there’s a problem and to start addressing it. The Labour health secretary, Wes Streeting, is a young, progressive gay man, and he’s said publicly that he is as worried about men’s health as he is about women’s health. That’s a very important message, and it blunts the potential claim from the Right that “they don’t care about men.” I think the Labour Party’s success on this issue shows you don’t need to do much to make that claim sound absurd.
McDermon: For most of my life, and especially since the turn of the century, the subject of aimless or thwarted masculinity has been a huge part of our culture. So many of the “golden age of TV” shows—The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad—are explicitly focused on this. You have male characters discussing their feelings of aimlessness and inadequacy, and the main characters’ masculine qualities—or qualities that are coded as masculine, like aggression, ambition, and dominance—essentially make them unfit for our society. It feels like there’s a broad failure to imagine “manly” men who are not ultimately destructive to the culture and themselves. I wonder if we can begin to imagine a different masculinity.
Reeves: I’ve thought quite a bit about this. Masculinity is always under construction, much more so, I think, than femininity. What it means to be a successful man varies from one cultural moment to the next. Masculinity is more fragile, and not in a pejorative sense, but just because it is more socially constructed. I think that’s always been true. It’s why cultures historically have worked very hard to turn boys into men with very clear markers and tests and rites of passage. Boys don’t become men by accident.
The questioning of masculinity is almost a permanent condition. The shows you mentioned point to the potential downsides of a narrow definition of masculinity—the “man box,” as it’s sometimes called in progressive, scholarly circles—and to show how damaging that can be. The challenge now is to move from deconstructing masculinity to reconstructing masculinity. This is where a lot of people disagree with me. They say, “No, we just need to get rid of it altogether. How about we just evaporate it? How does androgyny sound?” Honestly, I used to be more in that camp, but the agenda around masculinity can’t just continue to be what’s bad about it: “Don’t do this. Deconstruct that. Get out of the man box.” This rising generation of men have heard that. They might now be starting to rebel against it. And I think that’s because we’re not doing a good enough job of moving from don’ts to do’s.
I had an interesting conversation at Wabash College, one of the few remaining men’s colleges. Their honor code is called the gentleman’s rule. Every year they have the incoming freshmen attend a session where seniors talk about what it means to be a gentleman in modern society. Those are very rich conversations, and by the end of their time there, many students have become quite thoughtful about the meaning of gentleman. I actually have come to treasure that word. It’s used a lot by African American groups that work with men. There’s something positive about this idea of gentleness, of learning how to conduct yourself socially. I had this quote in my book from J.F. Roxburgh, the headmaster of Stowe School [an English private boarding school—Ed.], saying we need men who are “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” That gets at some of these virtues we’re talking about. The challenge for us is to talk about the virtues of masculinity and not just its vices. Too many people have been afraid of doing that. To say that there is anything intrinsically good about masculinity has been difficult. All the work to demolish the negative aspects of masculinity has ignored what might be good about it.
Peggy Orenstein, in her 2020 book, Boys & Sex—she’s also written one about girls and sex—asks late-teen boys and young men, “What’s good about being a boy or a man?” They can’t answer. They’re stumped by the question. That wasn’t true when she asked the same question of girls. We’ve created something of an empty set. I don’t know about you, Daniel, but I think it’s awesome being a dude. I didn’t get to choose it, but I really like it. When I say that to people, they’re like, “Oh, that’s a bold thing to say.” But is it? I desperately want my sons to feel good about themselves. I also don’t want a society where my sons go around thinking about how masculine they are. To get past that being such a strong identity, you have to feel very comfortable in it, and that’s hard to do when people tend to pathologize or problematize it.
McDermon: In your book you write about the struggles of Black boys and men. Do they face distinctive issues, or are the issues that affect boys and men in general just more pronounced for some groups?
Reeves: I think both are true to some extent. At the intersection of race and gender you see the sharpest edges being confronted by Black men. To an extent that’s because some of the challenges facing boys and men are just more acute for Black boys and men. If schools aren’t doing such a great job, that seems to affect boys more than girls, and Black boys more than other boys. The same is true for family instability and growing up in a poor neighborhood. All of those things are much more likely to negatively affect Black boys. But there is also something quite specific about the experience of Black boys and men in the US. You don’t see it in other countries in quite the same way. Because of the history of the US—and its relationship to Black Americans in particular, not least with regard to things like criminal justice and policing—Black men face a form of gendered racism. We can find evidence of it in things like implicit bias tests, or tests about which demographic groups are considered most threatening. This challenges conservatives who argue against the idea that there is still a very strong strain of anti-Black racism in the US. It’s the beating heart of American racism. But the evidence that Black women and girls are doing so much better—not only better than they did in the past, but also better than Black boys and men in the present—is challenging to a more progressive view that women are worse off than men; ergo, Black women are worse off than Black men. There is no statistical variable in which that’s true. So the evidence flips the script in a way that is uncomfortable for both sides. But I don’t know how anybody can look at the data and not come to the conclusion that there is something specifically dire about the outcomes for Black boys and men.
McDermon: I can recall when a big focus of public policy discussions in America was the “failures” of particular cultures. The, I would say, racist suggestion was that Black culture was particularly to blame for the inability of Black boys and men to live up to expectations.
Reeves: When I was talking about this particular idea of toxic masculinity to my godson, who is Black, he was like, “Welcome to the party.” That idea of cultural inferiority has been thrown at Black men for a very long time because we fail to see some of the structural barriers that Black boys and men face in the economy and in the labor market and in education. For example, one of the disadvantages Black boys often face is not having a good relationship with their father. But I don’t think that means somehow there’s a Black “culture of fatherlessness” or a “culture of irresponsibility.” In fact, I see the opposite in the data: there’s a very strong desire among Black men to be engaged fathers. It’s just that they struggle to do so for all kinds of systemic reasons, including the court system, the child support system, and the criminal-justice system.
I also think there has sometimes been a reluctance on the Left to confront some of those issues around family life that are clearly affecting Black boys. So I’m trying to be evenhanded about it. We shouldn’t look away from issues around family life, even as we avoid the trap that so many conservatives fall into of blaming “culture,” whatever that means to them.
McDermon: Family formation seems to be a big factor in the struggle of men. The highly educated and affluent have continued to marry and sustain more-traditional family structures, while for decades the poorer and less educated have seen their marriage rates plummet. What, if anything, can change that?
Reeves: What we’ve seen at AIBM is that the class gap in marriage has become a class chasm. It is quite extraordinary. We just published a paper by Benny Goldman, Clara Chambers, and Joseph Winkelmann that shows, among other things, how college-educated women are marrying non-college-educated men only if the men are doing well economically. It really does look as if men’s economic prospects make a huge difference to their marital prospects, particularly in poorer communities. It’s generally conservatives who say they’re worried about marriage rates, while the Left is typically more interested in economic policies to help low-income people. So it’s a great irony that improving the economic prospects of men from poorer backgrounds is the best way to boost marriage rates. That includes Black men, but it’s certainly not restricted to them.
Most kids born to non-college-educated parents are now born outside of marriage, so a pressing challenge is how we can ensure that fathers remain engaged in their kids’ lives, even when they’re not together with the mother. This is something family law has not kept up with. We published a piece by June Carbone and Clare Huntington about how divorce courts do a pretty good job of treating separated parents as both providers and caregivers, but the family courts, which deal with parents who never married, don’t do a very good job. The child support system just deals with the money side of it, which is completely disconnected from parents caring for and having access to their kids. And since the majority of non-college-educated parents are not married, that’s around 40 percent of all kids.
Finally, paid parental leave needs to be available to fathers as well. We need to send a strong signal to fathers that they matter, whether they’re married to the mother or not. One way to do that is to make sure that paid leave is not just transferable from the mother to the father, but that there is specific, independent leave just for dads.
I desperately want my sons to feel good about themselves. I also don’t want a society where my sons go around thinking about how masculine they are. To get past that being such a strong identity, you have to feel very comfortable in it, and that’s hard to do when people tend to pathologize or problematize it.
McDermon: One of the indicators you cite of men’s changing status is that they are far more likely to die so-called deaths of despair, such as from drug or alcohol abuse. Men have long had shorter life expectancy. Is there something new here that we can address?
Reeves: There’s always been a life-expectancy gap between men and women, but, interestingly, it varies hugely over time and from place to place. It’s much wider in some countries than in others. It was much narrower in the past than it is today. There can be a tendency—you see this in the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report—to somehow treat the average five-year difference across the world in life expectancy as somehow biologically fixed, which is completely untrue. There’s a lot we can do to narrow the life-expectancy gap by better understanding what’s causing men to die younger.
There are new factors. Men are much more likely to die of COVID, for example. But the increase among American men in deaths from accidental overdoses since the beginning of the century has been absolutely huge. Since 2001 it has amounted to the loss of an additional 400,000 men. That’s about the number of men we lost in World War II.
Men are more likely to die from cancer, from cardiovascular disease—from all kinds of things. We need an office of men’s health. The Affordable Care Act should have covered something similar to the Well Woman visit for men. There’s a lot that could be done. But we have to start by acknowledging that there’s a sort of fatalism about the life-expectancy gap. I’ve heard people say, “Well, men are bound to die younger,” but that hasn’t always been true. Also the gap can be two years, it can be six years, it can be eleven years, depending on where and when you ask the question. There’s nothing automatic about the fact that men are dying so much younger than women.
McDermon: Historically parents have prized boys over girls, but among American elites recently, there is some evidence of parents preferring girls. Couples with girls are less likely to have additional children, and some prospective parents with access to fertility treatments are using IVF to ensure they have a girl.
Reeves: You see this in adoption too. There’s a very good paper showing a preference for girls among adoptive parents—even among gay men, interestingly. Certainly in more economically elite circles, there does seem to be this preference for girls. We don’t quite know why. Perhaps there’s a sense that it’s going to be easier to raise a girl in the current culture. And maybe there’s a growing realization that a daughter is going to have slightly better educational or economic prospects. I see this as an indicator that we are not doing a good enough job with our boys.
In the lead-up to the 2024 election Dan Cox from the American Enterprise Institute asked voters, “Do you think society’s doing enough to help boys become successful adults?” And he asked the same about girls. Democratic voters thought society wasn’t doing enough to help either. They were about as worried about boys not getting enough help as they were about girls, which surprised me. Republicans were much more likely to say that we’re not doing enough to help boys. That probably tells us something about the perceptions of parents and potential parents.
McDermon: You’ve said that men are struggling to improvise masculinity without a script. How do we establish a script for something that has been problematized and deconstructed for so long?
Reeves: This is a really difficult question to answer, and my view on this has evolved. I think we’re rightfully afraid of the idea of a single script. We don’t like the idea that there’s only one way to be a woman or a man. I’m very reluctant to say, “Here’s the new and improved masculinity according to Richard Reeves,” because, of course, we want lots of diversity of choice.
We do have to find ways to signal to boys and men: “We need you, and not just as an androgynous human. Society needs you as a man.” The old way of doing that was to promote the idea of the man as a head of household, a provider, a protector, and obviously that’s out of reach for too many men. Perhaps this is one of my more socially conservative views.
There’s always a bit of a contest for the allegiance of young men. Who are they going to be allied to? To which cause, which purpose, which tribe, which family, which community? It’s why I worry when we don’t have these male-specific roles. To give you two examples from my own life: I’ve been publicly critical of the Boy Scouts for going coed. The Boy Scouts of America no longer exists. It’s now Scouting America. I see this as a problem, because I think boys and girls can both benefit from some single-sex spaces. This is a huge problem for men, too, because one of the reasons men would turn up to be Scout leaders was because only men could do it. I became involved in a Scout group because I knew it had to be guys doing it. It worries me to see us move away from these specific calls for men to participate.
Here’s the other example from my personal life: I’ve just signed up for Big Brothers Big Sisters. I live in Tennessee, and the waiting list here for Big Brothers is three times longer than it is for Big Sisters. It’s like nine months instead of three months. The reason for that is because more boys get referred to the program, but they have so few male volunteers.
We need to have multiple scripts—rather than a script—that say to men, “The tribe needs you.” One way it needs you is as a father. Fatherhood matters, not just for the kids, but for you as a man. So I think that fatherhood is an incredibly important part of this story and doesn’t only have to involve marriage. I also think we need to invite men to be mentors, leaders, and coaches. I would love to see a Coach for America program to get more men back into coaching. We need some male-specific calls, as well as some roles that, if they aren’t exclusively male, then unapologetically lean male and are celebrated for doing so.
Every human society has known that you don’t turn boys into men just by waiting a few years. That there have to be rites and roles. The boys and men have to be told by the tribe, “We need you to do this,” whatever that “this” is. For understandable reasons, we’ve been reluctant to make those male-specific calls. We have to do it in a new way now, one that’s compatible with gender equality, but we still need men.
