Instant Genius - What does it mean to be a man? – Gary Barker

Episode Date: July 17, 2019

In the past few years, traditional male stereotypes have come under increasing scrutiny. These stereotypes often come under the term ‘Toxic masculinity’, which has been widely used to explain certain male actions and characteristics that conform to established gender roles, which do harm to both themselves or the society that they live in. Gary Barker has a PhD in developmental psychology and studies how we raise and socialise boys and men. In the late 1990s he founded Promundo, which carries out global research into men, boys and masculinities, and recently discovered that that in the UK, this these negative stereotypes could be costing the economy an additional £3.8bn a year. He speaks to BBC Science Focus editorial assistant Helen Glenny about why these stereotypes are harmful, and what a new, progressive form of masculinity could look like. Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Is racism creeping into science? – Angela Saini Is body positivity the answer to body image issues? – Phillippa Diedrichs What does it mean to be happy? – Helen Russell Is religion compatible with science? – John Lennox Why aren’t there more women in science? What makes me ‘me’ – Aoife McLysaght Follow Science Focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Flipboard Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Instead of being able to back away and saying, nope, that's really not what my manhood is about. to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team, with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print, and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello, I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. In the past few years, traditional male stereotypes have come under increasing scrutiny. These stereotypes often come under the term toxic masculinity,

which has been widely used to explain certain male actions and characteristics that conform to established gender rules, which do harm to both themselves and the society that they live in. Gary Barker has a PhD in developmental psychology and studies how we raise and socialise boys and men. In the late 1990s, he founded Promundo, which carries out global research into men, boys and masculinity, and recently discovered that in the UK, these negative stereotypes could be costing the economy an additional $3.8 billion a year. He speaks to BBC Science Focus editorial assistant Helen Glennie about why these stereotypes are harmful and what a new progressive form of masculinity could look like. Great. Okay, Gary, can you start off by telling me a bit about you and your academic specialty? Mm-hmm. I have a PhD in developmental psychology and I've been studying for 25 years how it is that we raise boys and how we socialize boys and men and, of course, how that affects women and girls into different ideas about men.

manhood and how that influences our life behaviors and also looking at how do we change it. What kinds of factors seem to come into play of whether we as men gravitate into a harmful or gravitate toward a more healthy, equitable supporting nonviolent ideas about manhood. Okay. And you seem to, is it true that you've done that in a few different cultural contexts? So are you looking mainly at the USA? So I started Pramundo. I'd done most of my graduate. studies work and my initial work with Pramundo was in Latin America. I'm originally from Texas and California in the U.S. and have ties, family ties to Latin America. Having witnessed a school

shooting in my high school in Houston, Texas, seeing some views around masculinitys and, you know, in a place that was supposed to be safe to me in some ways, paradoxically, ironically, it felt safer for me to talk about masculinity and some violent parts of Latin America. that it did in my own high school. So I started Pramundo in Brazil in 97 with some Brazilian colleagues, and our work has grown out of that Global South perspective from now 21 years ago. Okay, so can you tell me a bit about Pramundo on the work that that organization does? Yeah, so it came out of close conversations with key women's rights partners,

HIV activists in Brazil in the late 90s, children's rights activists. activist coming out of Brazil's return to civilian rule after 20 years under a military dictatorship. And lots of conversations that said we can only get so far on women's rights if we engage men in this conversation. And that increasingly led us to a conversation to say, we know, of course, that men's lives are also shaped by these ideas about manhood. And we need also men to be part of this conversation for what it means for us as well, of course, as what it means for women and girls. And we kept asking that question, what do we know about men's take on gender equality? And men's take and men's stake in gender equality. And we were one of, you know, one of a handful of

global South organizations that started doing this work, other organizations in Nicaragua, Mexico, and then some academics who began to write as well about men and masculinities. We connected up with some of that work. And so have come out of this confluence of saying we research what's up with men and boys and masculinities, and we use that research to try to inform evidence-based programming and advocacy to try to see the change that we think we all need. Fantastic. Now, so the term that crops up most in media around this is toxic masculinity. Can you define that for me? Yeah, we've used that word. It's, you know, enter the lexicon. Toxic was the year of the word in Oxford's Dictionary, 2018, I believe. And I think we've all, we've been using that as the shorthand to refer to these

restrictive ideas of manhood that violence is a valid way to respond to a conflict, that we don't seek help, we're emotionally suppressed, that is we don't both express vulnerability and emotionally connect to others. It also refers to help seeking and health-seeking behaviors, that we don't seek health services when we need them, that we think we're inherently in charge. And so the speaking over and the silencing of other than heterosexual male dominant voices, all those things I think we've clustered together and called toxic masculinities. We've tended to avoid that term more recently because while it's a useful shorthand for those of us in progressive spaces, it also immediately turns off the conversation for many of the men who most need that conversation,

because for most guys, they kind of read it as if they're looking at subtitles, and we say toxic masculinity, they hear, oh, you think men are inherently bad. And so I think we've increasingly used harmful ideas about manhood, restrictive ideas about manhood, or just, you know, kind of the colloquial expression, the man box to refer to a set of restrictive ideas that you can kind of get graphically, you know, what those mean. Paul Kivel, an activist on these issues in California, came up with that term a long time ago and several of us have been, several organizations have been, we've been using that more as kind of a colloquial way to get it that doesn't seem like it feels so anti-men

as some men too often read it. And so can you explain why these restrictive ideas about masculinity are harmful and who are they harming? So we've done lots of household survey data on this. One set of data is from a study called the International Men and Gender Equality Survey, that's images. That's kind of become a sort of a gold standard in the field of a household survey with men about where men are in gender equality, their attitudes and practices, life experiences. We do that always with women and men, so we hear what women say about it, what men say about it. And another survey that we've called the Man Box survey, where we've also developed a set of attitude questions that get at this cluster of attitudes

that we either call the Man Box or some folks call toxic masculinity. So, you know, two big headlines for that. One, in spite of all the amazing and important work to promote women's empowerment in the world of these last choose your moment, 20 years, 30 years, Beijing and afterwards, but certainly lots of stuff far before then. On the one hand, lots of men are getting that the world has shifted, that women are closer to their equals, even if they're not fully on board with women being equals. More men in more parts of the world believe that part, they support that idea. On the other hand, we also see lots of support for this cluster of restrictive ideas about masculinity. That is, if somebody threatens my honor, I've got to use violence to win it back. If I need help or I feel vulnerable, I don't tell

anybody about it. I don't seek out health services when I need them. The only real way to be a man is being heterosexual and having lots of sexual conquests. So on the same hand, we've seen lots of guys buy into that. Those are harmful at face value, so that many men in the world continue to believe this is harmful at face value. At the same time, we look at how much that's associated with harmful idea, with outcome practices, if you want to call them that. So binge drinking, suicide ideation, that is, you've thought about suicide, bullying, sexual violence, harassment, sexual health risk, substance use, traffic accidents, that list of eight things that I just made, we find very strong association everywhere we look, the more you believe in these ideas,

the more likely you are to carry out one of those behaviors. Clearly, other things are there. Other childhood experiences, certainly witnessing violence, living in a household where male partners, men in the household modeled these ideas, contribute to those norms, just as those norms contribute to lots of things. It's never a simple causality issue, but the more you believe in these restricted norms, the more you cause harm to others and harm to yourself. And we found that consistently, it holds up theoretically,

even as we do multivariate analysis and find other factors also matter, it stands out and still holds weight. And we also just did a cost study that I could share some details with of, so what question becomes, well, it should matter in terms of what bullying and violence and all those outcomes mean. And we also did a costing analysis of that. looking at how much of certain health costs we can attribute a health and other costs that we can attribute to those norms. So it matters tremendously in terms of how men act in their daily life. It matters tremendously in terms of the harm they cause to others. And the harm that what that also

brings into this is the harm that that brings to others around them and that we all pay for it in terms of health services and other negative outcomes. Yeah, so I took a look at that. study that was costing up the price of the man box. In the UK, it was something like, I think, $3.8 billion, US dollars is what it was costing. So can you explain why that's so costly? Where's that cost coming from? So what we included in there, this is a standard health economics analysis where you take factors associated with that outcome and you can attribute how much, again, these things never operate alone. So these norms that we're calling the man box never operate alone. You're also more at risk of certain things if you live in low-income violent neighborhoods and in

neighborhoods that have less social infrastructure. There's lots of other factors in there. But at least we could say the kind of the argument you could say scientifically is if these restrictive norms of masculinity didn't exist, the UK economy would be, would have that additional that $3.8 billion U.S. dollars that is costed there would be removed if nobody held those beliefs. And so where did we get those costs? Those come from the amount of traffic accidents, suicide, bullying, depression, sexual violence, binge drinking that you can attribute to harmful masculinity. And then the cost factors are how much each of those six factors cost in terms of hospitalization and other health sector costs? lost life where health economists have a number they use across countries of how much a life is worth or costs. And they also have to do with lost productivity, so how much work you lose

if you experience one of those things. Clearly, that doesn't count, you know, the time cost of women who pick up the pieces when men's lives are broken, shattered, and lost. It doesn't cost the emotional cost to women and men who are, you know, victims of traffic accidents and lots of other outcomes. So it is a very, it's a rough calculation, but it holds up in terms of health economist analyses. And it also, we consider it kind of a minimum. That is, it's likely to be even higher than that. But we think it gives an illustration of saying these things are real. We can attribute a monetary and life cost to them that needs to be taken into consideration. Yeah, it really hits at home when you put a dollar value on it, even though that's not the most

important thing that's lost. No, exactly. But if you, you know, I think it is useful to think, hey, that would, that would make a huge dent in the deficit of NHS in the UK, for example. The number we came up with in the U.S. is double the annual budget of our Centers for Disease Control, which is the prevention arm of our public health sector. So, you know, to put that into what it does allow us to say is we pay a lot of attention in health sectors of things that drive harmful outcomes. And among the things you should be paying attention to is harmful ideas about masculinity. And we know something of what we can do to shift those. So you can't just consider this sort of an extraneous variable that you can't actually influence. One, you need to pay attention

to it. And two, we've got some ideas of what you can do to change those norms. Yeah. So we'll get on to talking about what we can do to change those norms. But first of all, let's just talk about masculinity. So you mentioned that people can, you get criticism because people interpret the term toxic masculinity as saying that men are inherently bad and that it's an attack on masculinity in general. But what is good masculinity and what's bad masculinity? Yeah. I mean, I think what, you know, if we do that in a conversation with a group of young men or adult men and most of the world, if we ask you to list what do you think a good man is, what usually ends up in that list? things like honor, being true to your word, protecting those who depend on you, providing for those

who depend on you, being a provider, in spite of the fact that we've too much divided the world, that men should be the providers and women should be the caregivers, and that's changing a huge amount, that is positive, that most men feel like if I've brought individuals into the world, I'm a co-parent, which 80% of the world's men will be or are, most men see that that's, they believe they should be there taking care of them. Most men, we also find in lots of settings, don't think it's okay to force a woman to do something sexually that's against her will,

in spite of the fact that a small minority can cause a lot of harm if they believe that and act on it. So most of these qualities of what, you know, I think most women and men would agree, those are good qualities that men should have. Most of us believe women should have those qualities as well. They're not too different in many cases from what we'd say are good qualities of women.

But they're typically about honor, responsibility, integrity, and often the same men will hold the negative view, as well as he'll hold some of those positive views. We're all kind of walking contradictions. I think that's another piece of our research. It's just how much masculinity is also situational and how much of it is performed. We perform before different groups of men and women who we think are watching us and judging us based on our versions of manhood. And we often perform it different in different spaces. Look at the man who might pick up the bar stool or whatever else and use it. Instead of being able to back away and saying, nope, that's really not what my manhood is about.

So then from a practical point of view, how can men recognize toxic masculinity in themselves? How do you know when you have a problem? Yeah, I mean, and what we do in kind of group education spaces and try to do it with, you know, video clips and getting, trying to get brands on board with holding up a mirror and helping show other ways of being men is, you know, it's one thing if I come to you and say, you've got some toxicity in you. You know, and try having that conversation with most men. That's kind of a, yeah, right, I'm going to invite you to a bar to have a conversation with me, aren't I? I'm going to come back to that session that my workplace is doing about how men can be allies in this. If I start the conversation that way, I've kind of told you you're kind of a walking flaw and you're sort of a deficit from the beginning versus saying, you know, how are these ideas, you know, tell me about people who matter to you, who matters to you in your life, and how's

that relationship going? What are some stuff that you've come up against that haven't worked so well for you? And then we come to a space to say, you know, occasionally I lose. my temper. Occasionally I feel like I've got to talk over. Occasionally I find myself trying to push my daughter toward, you know, that somehow she's got to be subservient to a man. I don't know where that comes from. And we can talk a little bit about, probably you do know where that comes from. You probably saw some of that with your own father, perhaps, or your own mother maybe even reinforce that. So I think it's trying to start with a belief that even men who have carried out

some harmful forms of violence. So men in batterer intervention groups, men who have purpose, men who have perpetrated violence, we'll start a conversation with, I see you've got, you know, on your keychain there, a picture of your son or your daughter. How's that going for you? Not always, clearly, but that is one way in. But I think it's trying to start with the belief that more men do want to tap into what they feel is that good side without getting into morality about it, but getting into what most of us objectively could say, these are positive attributes of manhood and womanhood and humanity. Most individuals want to gravitate toward that.

How do we create a space that says, I call you out for the harm you've done, and we need to have a critical reflection about that, but I want to call you in to the fact that I believe that manhood is not inherently bad and dominant or domineering and harm creating, that we can start from that common humanity, rather than I'm looking at you as you're flawed. And then I've put my defenses down, right?

And I've started to say, oh, yeah, I can see how these things have caused harm to me. Get a guy to go through the thought process I just went through. Let's think about a moment you've been bullied, you bullied, you stood there in silence when you saw somebody else bullied, but you knew inside the right thing to do was to speak out, that woman who was belittled in the meeting that you felt you couldn't speak out. because none of your, none of the other men in the room did. That party you were at in university or high school or choose your place, where you saw the way that group of guys was treating that woman who had had a few,

too many drinks. And you, you kind of knew what they would say if you stepped in so you didn't. Helping guys kind of go through those scripts that all of us have seen and getting them to walk backwards and say, what could I do differently? and what was it that suppressed me from being the better man, the better person that I would have wanted to be? So that's a bit the thought process we try to get young men and adult men to go through in a group education process or with a video clip and then some questions to think about yourself to do in a workplace when we're invited to be a partner with the workplace to do training around sexual harassment, training around engaging men as allies in this work. that's the critical reflection we try to get guys to go through. That example that you used about, you know,

someone stepping in at a party if they see some guys, you know, not treating a woman well or something like that. Is that that a really good example to highlight the duality of this? Because, you know, stepping in to help someone out can be a very masculine action. It can be brave and it can be insurgive. And it's a way of, I guess, bringing out all those positive traits of, of masculinity for good causes. Right.

And how to do that in a, you know, that can, the, the risk as well there is to say, this is not you stepping in, you know, sometimes a guy will say, well, I would, you know, I'd step in and, you know, whack him one and say, nope, that's, we're not trying to do an Avengers movie here, right? This is raising your voice to be supportive, not raising your fist to show that to, you know, to beat up the bully doesn't end the cycle of bullying. to beat up the harassing man is using another form of male power against another man. We're trying to break that cycle.

So it's also working that how do you step into that situation in a way that voices your dissent without adding to a cycle of violence and domination? So it's tricky as well that we don't want to just say that the secret is for you to go, you as men need to go beat up the harassers. No, that's not the pathway. Right? So there's a dance there, so to speak. There's a delicate dance of saying, dissent together, we're not trying to repeat cycles of violence as you step up and step in. Yeah, absolutely. Now, do you think that this is a new problem? I know that violence towards women always seems to have been around,

but mental health issues and high suicide rates and things like that, that seems like more of a modern problem. Have you seen a change over the past 20 years that you've been working with this? Well, it changes and, you know, it comes in cycles and increases and decreases, right? So we see, you know, it shifts where it takes place. So, you know, in the U.S., we've seen an increase in the numbers, you know, the population rate has increased slightly. It's also shifted among which populations it's taking place. So in the U.S., we've seen an increase in the 20 to 40-year-old white male population. in the U.S. is now the highest rate of suicide in the U.S. Typically, those are with a firearm. Typically, there's no sign of, there's not necessarily a mental health issue that's been diagnosed before. We know some of that has to do with economic and emotional stress.

Often, when research is done and go backward to see what crisis was happening in that man's life, often it's been about loss of work, loss of a partnership, estrangement from a child. So the rates have increased slightly, but what we do notice is some shifting around of where it takes place. There's been an uptake of it in, for example, rural men in India, where we've seen a lot of loss of livelihoods in terms of rural farmers. So we've seen pockets of it shift in terms of where it goes. It's typically, I mean, for the last, you know, suicide specifically, has definitely, been there, but often seen as

studies from 30, 40 years ago talked about a risk factor for suicide is being male. But what the issue is, it didn't unpack and say, well, there's nothing biologically driven that would cause men to kill themselves more that we can find in the research. So clearly, there's got to be something about masculinity, not necessarily about being biologically male.

So how do we understand that? I think what has happened is there is an issue of it's become more visible. We've been able to look at that and say, if the data says there's no biological marker that would cause men to be more prone to taking their lives in ways that are terminal and immediate acting, there must be something there about context and socialization. So I don't know that it's necessarily gone up. What has happened is we've seen pockets where it's increased of specific groups of men, but in other countries that's been, say, in China, that's been an increase among young women.

Is that about economic pressures? Is that about the huge migration from rural to urban areas and the social isolation coming with that question mark? We have theories. We don't have kind of irrefutable data on that. But what we do know increasingly is to say this is also about masculine norms. The patterns of suicide and men's mental health issues,

we're now more clearly able to see how much masculinity is a piece of them. The American Psychological Association launched about last year, if you saw that, the report on young men and mental health. Looking through hundreds of solid social science research pieces, finding, like our study has, this very strong association between harmful ideas about masculinity and specific mental health issues. It is never the single cause, but it is one of the drivers, and it's also a huge impediment of men seeking help. So I don't know that it's gone up. I think we've become more aware of how it's a factor in both driving certain forms of mental illness, and it's also a

factor that keeps men from getting the help and the services they need. Okay, so let's go into talking about solutions. What can be done? What sort of evidence-based solutions do we have that can tackle this problem? Yeah. One that we've got the most evidence-based around is well-done critical group education discussions. We've consistently found around the world, randomized control trials, level of data can drive lasting changes in attitudes as well as in behaviors. Sometimes those are related to sexual health in terms of behavior outcomes, sometimes related to men's participation in caregiving, certainly reductions in certain forms of violence, men's violence against a female partner. We've seen evidence around bullying interventions as well. So, an easy, you know, one that we

know works pretty consistently is group education. We know that's expensive to scale up. If you want to reach thousands of young and adult men across a workplace or a given educational setting, those are expensive to take the scale. We also know that some well done media approaches can shift norms, whether those are public service announcements that are consistent, long enough, repeated in enough spaces can also make a difference. Again, when they've got some positive action-oriented messaging. So some ads in the U.S. about the importance of men and women talking to boys about sexual violence and gender-based violence. There's some evidence that showed enough repetition of those with a positive enough message did lead to some changes in

household-level data, nationally representative in the U.S., of men's and women's intentions to speak to boys about sexual violence and gender-based violence. We have some growing evidence around environmental changes. That is, if you change the structure around men, and this would fit into some of the Nudge theory work, for example, that if you change some of the structures around men, we can start to see changes. So examples of that, at a prenatal or antenatal visit, if you say, we make the space available for you, man, to be involved here with your female partner

when she's pregnant, assuming she wants you to be there. That's a key rights-based issue. It's her decision if she wants you there. But if we set up that clinic room, so it says, we want you here, man, the receptionist, the person who then invites your partner into the room, says, and is your partner coming? And then we get you in the consultation room, and there's a chair for you. The health provider ask your name, looks at you, says, hey, father, she's established, let's say it's usually a female health provider, she's established that you are the partner, you're the father, the mother wants you there. We can then encourage you to come back for a follow-up visit for your own health needs, and we found that we can get high percentages of men who will come back

to that more than almost any educational effort we've tried. Other examples of that would be approaches where we say, hey, man, do you want to take your paternity leave versus we have the HR department go in and say, man, you're taking your leave. I've come here, you know, I've come to look at a calendar with you of figuring out when you're going to take your paternity leave, not if you're going to take it. Similar experiment is the use it or lose it daddy days that the Nordic countries have done around men's paternity leave. They used to have those be transferred. days, that's what the UK still does, lots of countries still do. The Nordic model says if you make those days non-transferable, that is, the man cannot give

those to his female partner for her to take more days, men tend to use more of them. If you add to that, campaigns visible male leaders in the workplace who are taking their leave, we see that you can create sort of a cascade effect of more men believe that they should be taking their leave. Now, we need men to actually do the hands-on care work when they take leave and not just be hunting and fishing, we actually need them to do the care work when they take the leave. But I think those are some other approaches we find work. Bystander interventions, a category that, you know, I just described kind of that bar or the sexual harassment example. We do find those

can work as well. Training, modeling, promoting, speak up when you see something, speak up in meaningful ways can begin to shift norms and practices in a given setting. So if you do that, in a college campus setting or you do that in a school setting or a workplace setting or a sports club setting enough young men sensitized to I should speak up about it we've also seen some evidence that those can work so that's kind of our cluster of greatest hits so far there's a lot of there's a lot of promising examples our biggest challenge has been how do we take those to scale to be meaning you know to be big enough in their reach so that we actually see the the needle beginning to shift so that we've got more guys speaking up promoting equality, questioning harassment

they see other men doing, taking their paternity leave, believing healthy masculinity versus toxic versions. So for things like group education classes and the media approaches with the PSAs, what age group are you targeting? What's the most effective time to get people to change these beliefs? Yeah, I mean, you know, I think it's more finding different, to teachable moments, I guess, in some ways is where we try to find. So, you know, we think we need to be repeating and including these messages over the life cycle. So it matters, you know, for young children, it matters to have some interventions that are around training daycare workers to be, to question their own views around gender. So they're not channeling

boys into aggressive, you know, gun play, sword play. Nothing necessarily wrong with those, but just making sure that we don't channel those into boy play all the time, that we make those spaces available for boys and girls and that we channel boys and encourage boys

to also do kitchen play and doll play and play that involves you know, the color pink and with unicorns and princesses as much as if they also want to play with trucks and swords. And the girls also feel the safety to play with swords and fire trucks if they want to as well. And we also know just how much, you know, a huge supporter or repressor of gender equality in early childhood is who does the caregiving.

So the importance of men doing hands on care, whether it's in the context of child care in the daycare setting or in the context of the home. So it's both, you know, what environment do we do in early childhood? School years. We know there's a, you know, there's a moment when boys are particularly policed to go to the male peer group that, you know, says bullying is okay, the homophobic taunting of the other, you know, watch a five-year-old before he's gone into primary school or preschool setting and watch him six months later. The research is really clear and just watching our own sons, how much we know the world's. pushes boys into a hard and tough guy version of manhood when, you know, six months before, he was much more open to a gender, you know, a gender open world to call it that. So what do we do in the school setting? Call boys out in thoughtful ways. Begin to do some lighter versions of

bystander stuff of that's not okay, good touch and bad touch, how we call out bullying, how we can model more, you know, using your voice as opposed to using your fists and things that teachers can be trained around and ways that we can build that into the school curriculum so that we make sure that, you know, what we read to our children, what our children are seeing, doesn't channel into these rigid ideas about manhood. The group education approaches, we find tend to work better, not that they don't matter for younger children, but they work even better when you begin to reach this critical thinking moment, right? Which we take. typically have in adolescence, the ability to kind of take a justice, moral values approach and look at,

this is unfair. These versions of manhood cause harm, how can I critically reflect and take that into my own life? It also matters a huge amount that we deliver these when young people are beginning sexual experimentation, particularly, so again, in the teenage or adolescent years, really important that we have some messages there. Later on, we find fatherhood tends to be a really key one in terms of when men are kind of paying attention to the world that's about to shift massively for them. We find that can be a vulnerable moment when they're kind of willing to, oh yeah, I'll go hear what you guys have to say. First job, can you build that, you know, as a moment into, here's some things we need you to know that at the workplace we don't tolerate

these kinds of behaviors that might have been okay in your, you know, your lad group over here, your peer group, your fraternity group, as it might be in the U.S. So I think it's about trying to find those teachable moments over a life cycle. It's not just a, it's not a vaccine. It's more like if you, you know, from a public health approach, I think it's important to think of this as it's nutrition. You don't just do it once. You kind of establish good patterns, you know, early on and you try to keep reinforcing them rather than there's some vaccine moment that if we give you, you know, group education or exposure to this campaign when you're 12, you're done for life. I think we see it more akin to nutrition, lifelong habits, lifelong patterns.

We've got to repeat. Yeah, for sure. Just one last question. Is there any sort of parting advice you want to leave us with, particularly for men? So the majority of our readers are men. Is there a certain piece of advice that you would give people? Yeah, I guess, you know, it's a suppose the biggest one would be, you know, I think we should not, we as men, should not be afraid of gender equality. I think it's too easy to turn into kind of an us versus them. And rather than saying men, our lives become better as we embrace the things that feminism and gender equality is brought on. We get to be full-hearted, open-hearted, connected, happier, healthier human beings who have better sex lives, frankly, and better intimate lives and

better connections with others. If we embrace this version of manhood that is about being accountable and respectful, believing in equality, we become better human beings for it. It's right, you know, just full stop. Men should be on board with this because it's the right thing to do. But I think we also don't have to shy away from saying, this is good for us as men. this is a better way of living when the human beings around us are not afraid of us, but see us as carers and caregiving and respectful and supportive and equitable. It doesn't take a lot of, you know, it doesn't take deep science to figure out that our lives get better as men when we buy into that version of manhood.

So I think that perhaps is something both as a challenge to women working in the space to say it's okay if men find benefits in feminism that our lives get better too. It doesn't always have to be hitting us over the head with the pieces of harm we've caused, which still has to be done in some cases, but to say it's also okay to promise men a better life when they embrace these versions of manhood.

That was Helen Glennie, talking to Gary Barker about harmful male stereotypes and what can be done about it. We have more fascinating interviews with people at the forefront of science in BBC Science Focus magazine. In this month's cover story, we explore what the future of space exploration holds.

There is, of course, much more inside, but if you just can't wait to get hold of a copy, then check out our many, many previous science focus podcast episodes. Each of them is still well worth a listen, and we'd love to know what you think in the comments section. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team. With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly,

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