Richard Reeves – Why Men Are Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

The Michael Shermer Show Archives

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What’s wrong with boys and men these days?

Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even worsened. Our attitudes, our institutions, and our laws have failed to keep up. Conservative and progressive politicians, mired in their own ideological warfare, fail to provide thoughtful solutions.

The father of three sons, a journalist, and the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Richard V. Reeves has spent twenty-five years worrying about boys both at home and work. His book, Of Boys and Men, along with his American Institute for Boys and Men, tackles the complex and urgent crisis of boyhood and manhood. Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions that turn the page on the corrosive narrative that plagues this issue. Of Boys and Men argues that helping the other half of society does not mean giving up on the ideal of gender equality.

Reeves says that gender equality is not a zero-sum game. We can do more for boys and men without doing less for women and girls. We can be passionate about women’s rights, and compassionate towards the struggles of boys and men. Of course there remain many gender gaps where women and girls remain at a disadvantage, especially in terms of pay, senior positions of leadership, access to venture capital, and so on. But in advanced economies, there are also gender gaps where boys and men have now fallen behind, especially if they are Black or from a lower-income background.

Richard Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Before founding AIBM in 2023, Reeves was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution where he focused on policies related to economic inequality, racial justice, social mobility, and boys and men. Reeves is the author of several books, including Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It and Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to do About It. Inspired by his own experiences as a father and policy expert, Richard founded the American Institute for Boys and Men to bring awareness to the challenges facing boys and men today and to develop evidence-based solutions. In June, philanthropist Melinda French Gates announced she will be donating over $1B over the next two years to support women’s rights, and one of the recipients was the American Institute for Boys and Men founded by Richard Reeves to the tune of $20 million.

Shermer and Reeves discuss:

• The gender gap in higher education is wider today than it was in 1972, when Title IX was passed, but the other way round, with men earning only 42 percent of degrees
• In the average school district, boys are almost a grade level behind girls in English language arts (there is no gap in Math)
• The risk of suicide is four times higher for boys and men than their female peers and has risen by more than a third among younger men since 2010
• Male deaths before the age of 65 resulted in over 4 million years of potential life lost in 2022, three times the number for women
• Employment rates among Black men are lower than for white men, white women, and Black women
• Couples whose first child is a daughter are less likely to have more children than those whose firstborn is a son.
• Adoptive parents are willing to pay about $20,000 more for a girl than a boy, according to one U.S. study.
• Mothers of sons are often treated as if they have contracted a chronic disease, as Ruth Whippman reports in her book BoyMom. When she told a friend that her third child, conceived through in vitro fertilization, was going to be her third son, the response was: “I could understand it for a girl, but why go through all that just for another boy?”
• Progressive left excoriating their “toxic masculinity” and a reactionary right telling them to “man up” and resist the “feminization” of society
• Ruth Whippman’s Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture by Niobe Way talks about the “Boy Code.” This code consists in the privileging of certain masculine attributes, including “stoicism, independence, assertiveness, thinking, and crunching numbers,” and the devaluation of “soft” capacities, such as “vulnerability, dependency, sensitivity, feeling, and the analyses of words and language.” She also indicts the Boy Code for a range of other social and economic pathologies. “‘Boy’ culture is rooted in ideologies that intersect with one another,” she writes, “including but not limited to patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia.” Ms. Way laments the “masculine bias that undergirds neoliberalism” and claims that “because ‘boy’ culture is in bed with capitalism, money is valued over love.”

However:

• Income inequality: why do women make .84 cents on the dollar compared to men
• Fortune 500 CEOs: only 10.4 percent are women
• Congress: 72 percent men, 28 percent women
• I thought the future was female?
• Education
• Work/Labor market
• Family
• Marriage
• Divorce/custody/spousal support/child support
• What the political left gets wrong about boys and men
• What the political right gets wrong about boys and men
• Solutions: Fatherhood as an independent institution.

“In a zero-sum political environment, merely drawing attention to the problems of boys and men can be seen as somehow downplaying the ongoing challenges facing girls and women. This is why Democrats, in particular, are so reluctant to directly address male issues. That is a recipe for bad politics…”

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