Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why America Has a Crisis of Masculinity

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

American men have a problem. They account for less than 40 percent of new college graduates but roughly 70 percent of drug overdose deaths and more than 80 percent of gun violence deaths. As the left has struggled to offer a positive vision of masculinity, male voters have abandoned the Democratic Party at historically high rates. Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves, the author of a new book 'Of Boys and Men,' joins the show to ask and answer a number of controversial questions: Why do women out-achieve men throughout education? Why are men dropping out of the labor force? Why can't Democrats win the male vote? And what would a progressive and positive vision of masculinity look like? If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Richard Reeves Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Yossi Salek, and I'm the host of Bansplain, a show where we explain cult bands and iconic artists by going deep into their histories and discographies. We're back with a brand new season at our brand new home, the Ringer podcast network, tackling a whole new batch of artists, from grunge gods to power pop pioneers to new metal legends and many, many more. Listen to new episodes every Thursday, only on Spotify. Today's episode is about men in America. I would say there's about a 5% chance this episode gets me in a little bit of trouble, maybe a 10% chance. And that's because I think it's genuinely difficult to talk about this subject without sometimes misrepresenting myself. So I want to take a little bit of extra time today to tell you about why this episode, this topic is interesting and important to me. In the last few years, I've become interested in the emergence of a gender gap in American politics, where none used to exist.

Since 1980, we have seen a huge gender gap open up in the electorate. For most of the 20th century, men and women voted very similarly. But in 1980, there was this sudden and surprising eight percentage point difference between women and men voting respectively for the Democrat and the Republican, Ronald Reagan. Incredibly, it was only in a 1981 newspaper article published in the Washington Post that the term gender gap was coined. That gap grew from eight points in 1980. to 12 points in 2000 to 13 points in 2016.

Now, how about this for a stat? If you are younger than 43 years old in America, you have never once lived through a presidential election in which a majority of men voted for the Democrat. Now, one way to summarize the situation is to say that each party now lives with its own gender problem. This is glaringly obvious to me when it comes to Republicans. Donald Trump is the very antithesis

of a feminist, the overturning of Roevi-Wade, the backsliding of abortion rights seems to be pushing women toward the Democratic Party right now. But there is, I think, an audience of relatively moderate men in America who are looking for a positive vision of masculinity. And I don't think modern liberals are very good at offering that. I think Joe Rogan is offering it. I think Jordan Peterson is offering it.

I think any number of people I don't particularly listen to or like very much is offering that. it. But I don't think the left is. And for a long time, I've wanted to do an episode that asked why. Today's guest is the Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves. Richard has a new book coming out called Of Boys and Men. And this book does something very interesting. Richard points out that despite the clear legacy of patriarchy in America and all sorts of gender inequality where women get the short end of the stick today, the American man is in a state of crisis, from elevated dropout rates to skyrocketing overdose deaths to gun violence.

And he delicately ties this struggle to the question of defining masculinity for a new age. In this episode, we talk about why women out-achieve men in school, the science of male and female brain development, the politics of gender, and what a positive, progressive vision of masculinity just might look like. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Richard Reeves, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me on, Derek.

The subtitle of your new book of Boys and Men is Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It. And I like that subtitle. I think we're going to proceed precisely in that order, why this is happening, why it's important, and what we can do. But I have to imagine that for some people, Maybe even for most people who tune into this episode. The very existence of this episode, the very existence of your book raises a really important

question that is not answered in the subtitle. What the hell are you talking about men struggling? Like, for every dollar earned by men, women in America earn 83 cents. Men run 91% of Fortune 500 businesses. They control 73% of the seats in Congress. So what is the evidence that you are basing your book? on when you say that boys and men in America are struggling at all? Well, the big answer to that question is two things can be true at once, that there can be

remaining barriers, and you've just listed quite a few, and we can dig into some of the details of it, whilst there are also problems facing many boys and men, and one you didn't mention, but one that's quite close to home for me, I have a wife trying to raise seed capital for a business. only 3% of venture capital money goes to female founders. So we're feeling that one, like, that's, that's, that's, every, every dinner table, I get a version of that question, Derek, with that 97% figure thrown at me. But, but yes, this broader point, I think, is that in a sense, because we have made a lot of

progress towards gender equality, not complete, but significant progress on a whole range of fronts that we might get into, what that means is, that you can talk about gender inequality in more of a two-way, two-way streak. There are some gender inequalities that remain to be tackled for girls and women, for sure. But there are some where it really is boys and men who are at a disadvantage, and especially the most vulnerable boys and men. And so really, I think it's a kind of gift of the progress of the women's movement to be even having this conversation at all.

I don't think it was synonymous. The cause of gender equality was synonymous with girls and women, until incredibly recently, like a blink of an eye in human history. But it is still true. And I fear that unless we turn our attention now to the problems of boys and men, that many of them will fester, and they'll get harder to deal with if we leave them to fester for too long. And so give me some specific examples. Where are boys struggling?

Where is the data that you're pointing to? Well, the three main areas I look at are education. I know that's something that you've written a lot about, Derek, And you've written a couple of very good pieces, one in particular on the growing gap in college and college campuses where we're seeing 60% of the students on college campuses and rising being female. And so we're seeing very big gender gaps in education. And in fact, the gender gap in getting a four-year college degree in the US now is wider than it was in 1972 when Title IX was passed to help girls and women. In 1972, it's about 13% of points more likely that a guy would be getting a degree than a woman, now it's flipped to 15 percentage points more likely that a woman is going to get at that amount. So, so bluntly put, gender inequality in higher education in the US is wider today than when Title IX has passed, but the other way around. And then we're seeing it, you know, among the top scoring GPA, high school students, two-thirds of

them are girls, big differences and big difference in high school graduation rates and so on. Then on the work front, and it's important, I think here, this is going to be true generally, but to add kind of nuances to who we're talking about. Most men in the US today earn less than most men did in 1979. Adjusting for inflation. Yes, all adjusting for inflation. But I was also very careful in my language because it's you, Derek, so I have to be incredibly careful why I say most men now, earning less than most men were then. It's not the same men. But the male wage distribution adjusted for inflation is a little bit down on where it was. So if American men were a nation and we're measuring them by their earnings,

that nation's poorer today than it was four decades ago. That's a remarkable economic fact, and one that I don't think has really sunken into our kind of policy debates. And so there has been this decline in male wages and, of course, a drop in male labor force participation, especially for those of less education. And then in the family, what we're seeing is a really big increase in the number of fathers who are not in a close relationship with their children

for all kinds of complicated reasons around family instability and so on too. But at heart, I think, because of the... incredibly positive challenge that's been made to the role of men as breadwinner, protector provider by the success of the women's movement. But the result of that has been to leave particularly the least powerful men somewhat adrift and disconnected very much from their own children. And that's bad for them. It's bad for the moms and it's bad for the kids. Overall, as I was reading your book and trying to find some way to synthesize what I saw as the struggles of some boys and men in America, it seemed to me that there's this idea somewhat

controversial of a success sequence. And if you go across a success sequence, men seem less likely to succeed in high school, then less likely to take advanced classes in high school, then less likely to graduate from high school, more likely to drop out of high school, then less likely to go to college. If they go to college, more likely to drop out, less likely to graduate from school. And then over the last 50 years, as you're pointing out in the labor force, this is partly cashing out in the fact that they're more likely to drop out of the job search entirely, activity rate or participation rate of prime age men has gone down consistently with every single decade. So that's sort of how I conceive of the problems that we're talking about. Is this happening

in the US only, or are you touching on global themes here? By and large, I think this is an international trend. That's one of the things is that I, one of the reasons I think we have to pay close attention to it, because if it was just a peculiarity of the US, you might say, well, what's weird about our education system? Or can we go and learn, maybe let's go and see what they're doing in France or Finland or, you know, South Africa or Australia. But the basic trends are pretty similar everywhere. The US does stand out a little bit for the extent to which men have lost ground economically. It's not like men have done amazingly well in those other countries, but they've at least made some ground. We haven't seen this sort of backsliding quite the

same way elsewhere. But the basic pattern you've just described with this pipeline, basically, of just like a domino all the way through right from the beginning, actually, from pre-K or even like two years old, all the way through to the 20s. And you say, that's why young men are more like to be living at home with their parents in their late 20s and women are, etc. And so I do think there's this kind of sense of a causal chain running all the way through. But there's also deep cultural questions as to why that should be the case. I think the question as to why it's happening is a different one. But the fact that it's happening in pretty much the same way in pretty much every advanced economy, again, big caveat, right? This is only a conversation

you can be having really in pretty advanced economies. In most of the rest of the world, it's true the statements we made earlier about gender equality really being about girls and women is still true, right? If I'm in Afghanistan, I'm not making this argument. But in advanced economies, the conversation has changed. Yeah, in the book you point to Scandinavia. In Sweden, there is a term, I'm probably going to butcher the pronunciation of it, but Pojcrisen. which means literally boy crisis. In Finland, happiest nation on earth, one of the countries that American education reformers

most look to to say this is the country that we could be if we got education right. There's a massive gender gap in Finland. 20% of Finnish girls score at the highest reading levels compared to just 9% of boys, and that ratio is reversed at the bottom. Boys are three times more likely than girls to score at the lowest reading level.

Let's get into why. And let's limit the question here, specifically to education. As you mentioned, there's been extraordinary progress in gender inequality when it comes to men and women. A hundred years ago, in America, certainly, we discouraged women from getting high school college education. Men used to earn the vast, vast majority of bachelor's degrees. But today, men have clearly fallen behind women in high school, in college, in college completion. Why do you think this is happening? So I think that the very successful, of the women's movement, in taking the breaks off women's educational attainment, has revealed

the fact that the education system is inadvertently structured in favour of girls. Now, I'll talk about why that's the case, but the inadvertently point is very important. This was not a feminist plot. A hundred years ago, a bunch of feminists didn't sit around and design the education system this way and then pretend to be men in order to make it happen, because of course it was men creating the education system. But one thing that, and I've talked to a lot of sociologists and educationalists about this, who were working on these issues in the 70s and 80s, nobody expected girls and women to blow past men. Everyone was focused on get to equality, get to equality. No one expected the line to keep going. But the line keeps going and it keeps going, and it's great

overtaking as has happened in education. And I think the primary reason for that is that the education system is somewhat more female-friendly. The main reason for that is because girls mature earlier than boys, and the biggest gap in maturity occurs at the most important years for educational attainment, i.e. adolescence is when, are you going to go to college or not? How are you going to get out high school? You're going to make a transition. You're going to graduate high school. What kind of class is you going to take? You're going to do AP. Have you even felt, I've raised three boys. Have you even written a college essay? Yeah, I had one son who literally would only apply to colleges that didn't require an essay on the grounds that that would be extra work, right? And so, again,

upper-middle-class boy, he's fine, he's at college, but that difference, and it's in these non-cognitive skills. We can dig in a bit more on this if you like. And so the result of that is that once the brakes came off, girls just blew past, their natural advantage in the education system could only become apparent when they started going to college. It was only when we took the But now the brakes are off, the storming past, hang on, okay, actually, let's look at the education system. One way that I thought about it is I was reading both your book and this essay and the Atlantic that we're going to talk about in just a second is that education policy in the U.S., and certainly around the world, used to be explicitly patriarchal and anti-female. And so men dominated women on an uneven playing field, but as policy created more quality of opportunity in the education space, it meant that young female brains, and a young male brains were competing on a more even playing field,

and on that even playing field, young female brains just started kicking ass, right? And so I'd love you to tell me a little bit more about why this is happening, just one level deeper on what is happening in girls' brains and boys' brains that would explain why, and again, for people listening, if this were just happening in the U.S., it would make no sense to look at some biological explanation. But the fact that it's happening in every advanced country that has taken away the patriarchal barriers to education, that they're seeing young women blow by young men,

it leads, I think, naturally to us looking at slightly more universal explanation. So one level deeper, why might we be seeing this difference between boy and girl brains? Yeah, so I love the way you put it, which is by leveling the playing field, if you have one team that's naturally better than the other,

they're going to win. But that was only apparent once you leveled the playing field. Even among the women, I was looking at the data recently, even among the women who did go to college, like back in the 60s and 70s, which was a 10th, tiny fraction, the median woman that went to college back then was married within a year of graduating and generally leaving the labor market.

Just to say that it was a different world, even just like in my lifetime is an understatement. So what we've learned more is the biggest difference between male and female brains is not how they develop in terms of where they end up. There, I think, both sides just overstate the argument. There's no difference or is a huge difference. The big difference is when. And so what you're seeing is particularly in this prefrontal cortex, which is a part of the brain

that's about planning, it's about deferral of gratification, it's about the balance between what psychologists usefully, I think, refer to as the gas and the brake, right? the gas is just all gas, go, go, go, party, take risks, do whatever. And the break is like, maybe not, maybe I should turn in some homework. Maybe I should worry about my GPA. Maybe I should think about college. And so adolescence is a period where there's more gas than break, but A, much more true for boys than girls, but critically, girls get the balance right much earlier than boys.

And so there's something between a 12- and 24-month gap in the development of areas like prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, cerebellum, etc. There's no controversy about this in neuroscience. There's a controversy about how much the distributions overlap, how consequential it is, and so on. But this is one area of neuroscience where there's really no controversy at all. Partly because girls hit puberty earlier, partly just because their brains seem to develop earlier. The pace of maturity is just not controversial. Put that into the classroom.

Take a between one year and two-year gap in the development of these skills around planfulness, self-organization, future orientation, and then ask yourself, which group's going to do better. So put that way, it's blinding the obvious why I can answer doing it so it's better. And part of the reason is biology. And it's very important to say that is not to say something wrong with boys. Having just published this piece in the Atlantic, getting some stuff on social media, oh yeah, so you're pathologizing boys. You know, you've been saying there's something wrong with boys. And I was horrified because I think it's literally the opposite of what I'm trying to say, right? It's not like my sons could

control their prefrontal cortex development. It's more just recognizing the difference. Right. So the point that you make in this article, you just reference in the Atlantic, the article is called Red Shirt the Boys, why boys should start school a year later than girls. It begins with, I think, very wisely, a series of facts, the facts of brain development, the fact that a six percentage point gender gap and reading proficiency seems to open up around fourth grade and stay there for several years. Your solution to this is to hold. boys back one year. Tell me a little bit about this plan and how it would work. So the attempt here is to try and make the developmental age of boys somewhat closer to that of girls, especially in the critical years of adolescence. And the way to do that is to stagger their chronological age. So age is just a rough proxy for development anyway. I mean, it is incredibly crude anyway, just saying, oh, six, you're ready for school. But if you've got this pretty clear difference between boys and girls, it's particularly important, I think, to bear in mind that

the girls are just developing a bit faster. So a 16-year-old girl is not developmentally the same as a 16-year-old boy. And so if we can build in an understanding of that difference right at the beginning and register at the boys, i.e. put them in a year later than girls. That means the boys will on average be a year older chronologically than the girls in their class, which means that developmentally they'll be closer to them. So it would level the playing field. Now, it may not look like a level playing field because from the outside, you're just seeing, well, you're 15 and you're 15. But once we look inside the brain, what we see is yeah, yeah, but 15-year-old boys are not the same as 15-year-old girls. And although there's good neuroscience for this, there's also

common sense. One of the interesting things I've discovered when I talk about this book is people to go, well, duh, like, every, yeah, like, tell us something we don't know. I said, okay, so we know that. What influence does it have for education policy? Because if we think that's so obviously true, do we not think that maybe we should take it into account in the way we run education policy? And so that's the thinking behind the idea of having this staggered school entry. Has it, has anybody tried this before? Are there pilot programs within the US or around the world that have attempted to redshirt an entire gender? in that area and seen what happens.

Because I'm so curious about the beginning and the end. At the beginning, this means that boys are in daycare a year longer. And at the end, it means that freshman boys are all a year younger than the freshman girls at college. And it might be neurologically, scientifically appropriate, but it is also weird. And so I would just love to know, I guess here are two questions for you. I'm sorry, I asked the question, the stupid thing, which is then to make a comment. Question number one, has anyone tried this weird thing?

And then question number two, do we know how weird it might be to create this scenario in the labor market in college? Well, as far as I can discover, no one's done it in quite this clearer way. And as you can imagine, I looked pretty hard. What's happened is that it's sometimes been done a little bit by stealth, and actually in the Atlantic piece that you just referred to, I did some reporting on private schools, and in private schools it is pretty much an open secret. Now, they don't redshirt all the boys.

They will redshirt the younger boys in particular, but it's pretty common practice. But how would we test this? Would you want to do a few pilot programs first before we rolled this thing out nationwide? If the Education Secretary called me right now, after listening to this and said, okay, I'll do it.

I'm going to do it nationwide. First of all, he doesn't have the power to do that, of course. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. What I want is a small school district with a huge gender gap, where we can just phase it in, maybe try a third of boys at once, do careful evaluation. Because I honestly, look, we don't know, because the studies of red shirting so far, have basically been because of other kinds of policies that have almost randomly put people into these classes, and you can see the gender differences. So we haven't had a proper and a full evaluation. I do say that. The other thing to point out is, you say it sounds weird. You know what's really weird?

putting boys and girls into different schools. Imagine a world where you never had done that. Everything had always been co-ed and someone came along and said, you know what we should have, we should have single-sex schooling. Or maybe the other way around, maybe if you'd only had, and the number of people who said to me, this is a crazy weird idea. What we should have is single-sex schooling. And I was like, you think my idea is radical? Just to wait a year to send them to the same school. You want to literally segregate the entire education system and send them to different schools. But I think it's again the sort of thing where you can easily imagine a world, would seem weird if it wasn't already being done so much. I agree. I think that we are all

prisoners of familiarity and assume for whatever reason that the world as it existed when we were young adults is the way that the world should exist. And whatever has changed since we were young adults is some horrific, right, and strange. Obviously that's true. Obviously true. This is especially true in music. Yeah, everyone always feels that any change in music since they were 23 years old is capital W wrong. For me, it's everything since Duran Duran, honestly. But I don't really want to incur your Roth.

No, we've used each other. For me, it's Coldplay. So I had to imagine that some people listen to this say, all right, there is this clear inequality in achievements between boys and girls in school. But there's also a gender gap in earnings among men and women in their 30s. How do you get achievement inequality

which leans toward women when they are, say, 10, 15, 18, but then another entirely different kind of achievement inequality that leans toward men when they're 35, 45, 55. What's happening between these years that explains how the school achievement gap becomes a male earnings gap? Well, the simple version is that we have a school system that's structured in favor of girls and women,

and we have a labor market structured in favor of men. and we have to fix both. And there is sometimes a bit of an element of two wrongs maybe making a right here in this debate, which is upsetting to me. Sometimes that is the feel or sometimes reaction to this. That's bad, so we're going to have this bad as well. It is getting, I think, one of the reasons

why the gender gap has narrowed, although more slowly recently has been the rise in education. There's two reasons why it hasn't really flowed all the way through. One small one is that women are more likely to go into occupations with quite high levels of education, but relatively low levels of of pay, teaching being a classic example, where you've got to get at least a four-year degree, many teachers have a master's degree, but they're not hugely well-paid. And so the relationship between the level of education is somewhat different for women. For men, social work is another

example. We could talk about others. But the really big reason is that no matter how much education women have, and in some ways, the more education they have, the more likely they are to take time out of the labour market when they have children. And so the pay gap is to a very, very large extent now a parenting gap. Having a kid, if you look at the data, you know, you see these charts of earnings going up and you'll have seen these charts, you know, the male one just goes up, and then you just see the female one going up, tracking pretty well through the 20s actually now, male and female wages. And then this incredible crash kids. So having a child is the economic equivalent of being hit by a meteorite if you're a woman. But it doesn't make a dent

in men. And the reason for that is because of the gendered division of labor around parenting. And so you take, I mean, Claudia Golden has this great work on this that you're probably familiar with, but looking at these Harvard MBAs, these Michigan JDs and so on. And what you find is that these women with arguably the most economically powerful women in the history of the world, right, if you've got a Harvard MBA, I'll make that claim. Fifteen years later, most of them are working part-time, or not at all. Only the minority than working full-time. Wait, what What happened and what happened is kids. And so they've really got to get into the division of labor around Charcot.

But that's the main cause of the gender pay gap now, is this difference in the allocation of care work. I think the fact that the education market is biased for some biological reasons toward women and that the labor market is biased for often legal and cultural reasons toward men is a really profound insight that does a lot to cut through the discomfort that I think a lot of people feel when they have to regard these inequalities that lean toward women when it comes to education achievement. It feels uncomfortable, I think,

especially for liberals like me, to even approach this issue because there's this risk of being seen as a men's rights activist, right? And it's like, no, like, it's not about men's rights activism. Like, men have the rights. This isn't a rights issue.

It's an education policy issue. And since it's policy, it's something we've already made up. And we can always reason make it up. It's our rules and we can just rewrite them. I'm really interested in your work to change the subject or move the subject a little bit further throughout throughout lifespans toward dating markets. And this is another really interesting way that these inequalities that you've mentioned matter. So historically, women tend to marry across and up economically. And historically,

men have married across and down economically. And I'm not trying to be normative here. Like dudes out there, marry smart, rich women, period. I'm just saying this is what is historically normal. But one thing that you're telling me when I connect a couple dots is that we're going to have an issue here. If colleges graduate two women for every men, and that is what's happening today in 2022, there's going to be a market crisis for this theory of heterosexual marriage. Do you think we're already seeing problems here with a scarcity of college educated men or surplus of college educated women? No, I don't see it yet. That doesn't mean that we won't see it, but I'm less pessimistic on this front, actually, than some other people are. I think that it'll require some norm shifts.

You know, we've just passed a tipping point where now in most marriages, the wife is more educated than the husband. Doesn't mean she's earning more for the reasons we just talked about, but she's more educated. It's been true for black couples forever, by the way, but now it's true for all married couples. And so I think this kind of norm is going to shift such that people are going to become more comfortable with marrying across certain terms of education. And especially if there's a kind of different relationship between education and economic power more generally. And the reason I'm not too pessimist about it yet, and this actually goes back to, I think, an article that you may even have commissioned, Derek,

way way back when on marriage, an upper-middle-class marriage for the Atlantic that I wrote. And what I see is college-educated Americans are kind of holding marriage up in the US. And I think that's because of their shared desire to invest in their kids and for their kids to do well. And so I think that the dynamics around marriage, particularly for upper middle class, women are going to remain strong. I don't foresee this. I don't foresee a marriage crisis in the future. But I'll be honest, I'll be watching the trends. We haven't seen it yet. But then again, we maybe wouldn't quite start to see it yet. And I do think you're right that in the dating markets, you are starting to see some of those effects in cities in particular of these

kind of disqualiberal. And it's partly about women and men changing their norms, about what makes someone unmarigable. Let's bring in class because I think it's important to say something very, very clearly here, which is that it is low-income men, and especially non-white, low-income men, who are seeing the biggest challenges. So in 2019, Pew Research Center surveyed 130 countries, and they found that the U.S. had the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households. That's out of 130 countries, the highest rate. Almost a quarter of American children under the age of 18 are living with just one parent, that's like four times higher than Japan. And of the roughly 11 million single parent families in the U.S., three and four of them are single moms. So it seems to me that

even if you don't see a looming matching crisis among men and women, we should point out that there is already a crisis of solo parenting. Well, I think you're right to point out that's really where the crisis is. I mean, there's this growing class gap in marriage, as you've correctly suggest 40% of kids now born outside marriage. And so for kind of working class, and increasingly for middle class Americans who are seeing this really sharp decline in marriage. The question then is why,

and what does that tell us about what's happening with boys and men in particular? And then the result is this fatherhood crisis. What I think is happening is that what the previous glue for marriage was economic dependency. It was women were economically dependent on men, in order to survive themselves and to raise kids, right?

And the central goal of the feminist movement of post-war years was to make that not true, was to make marriage a choice, not a necessity, was to give women enough economic power so that they were not relying on a man. And I think there's very few women today, regardless of their political background, who don't think they should get in the labour market

and not have to rely on a man. That's incredibly important. Now, that economic independence has had the consequence of asking a very, big question about the role of men. And if we continue to see the role of men as primary breadwinner, or even sole breadwinner, in a world where that's less and less true, in a world where 40% of women now earn more than the median man. Okay, so it's not 50%, but it was 13% in 1979. The distributions of male and female wages are getting really close. In 41% of households,

a woman is the main breadwinner. In 30% of married couples, the woman earns as much or is not more than the man. So this is a seismic change in the economic glue that used to be at the heart of marriage. So then the question is, why marry? Why do I need him? And we don't really have a good answer to that question yet. And so particularly in parts of our economy where men aren't doing so well, they effectively get benched because they're not living up to what is now an obsolete model of fatherhood and provision. And so they might bench themselves, they might get benched by the mum, etc. And what I think we need to do is reinvent fatherhood as a social institution that is compatible with gender equality. You have a chapter in your book about how the problems that you're writing

about specifically affect poor, non-white, and especially black American boys. And I just had this conversation with the Harvard economist, Raj Chetty, about this concept of father presence from his work. And this points the idea that for young, poor, black boys, it's incredibly important what share of households in their neighborhood have a father in those homes. It's even more important than having a father in your house, just the presence of father-like mentors, father figures around you,

seems to have this effect in terms of lifting up the odds of these kids entering the middle and upper middle class. So maybe let's just hold a bit on this. Talk a little bit about the degree to which you see that this is particularly a problem that affects young black boys. Well, I think it's so important to do it through the lens you just talked about,

which is to use that ugly but useful term intersectional applied correctly in this view, which is to say, I think one of the problems of this debate is if you're a white upper-middle class person looking around, you're going, what problem is the boys and men, right? But the danger is that we're so busy leaning in

that we're not looking down. And what's true at the top is not true in the middle of the bottom. It is particularly not true for black boys and men, and Raj's research finding was about black boys. The gender gap, you just referred to, the 82, 83%, a pay gap. It's about the same gap between white women and black men. White women out-earned black men by about as much as men overall out-earned women. White women didn't used to. They ever took black men in the 90s just blew right past them.

So we've got to think about this in this cross-cutting way. And black boys and men, I think, are worse off, not despite being men, but because they're men. I think they face a racialized form of sexism. And working class boys of all races are where you see the biggest gaps in education, economy, family formation and everything. And what Raj's work tells us, I think, is that the role of fathers is not just defined in this, you need to be in the household. You need to be, like the whole present, absent father thing is missing the point. It's really about the relationship between fathers, including stepfathers or social fathers and their kids, especially their boys. And what you see there is that fathers do seem to play, and these social fathers,

use that phrase, particularly in adolescence. They really seem to be very powerful in terms of helping boys to learn, learn their limits, etc. And so I think we're now at a point where you can say, without too much risk of controversy, fathers do matter in ways that are complementary to, but in some ways also distinct to mothers. And so we should actually be supporting fatherhood as an institution in its own right. I want to bring in politics a bit here. There is a gender gap in American politics right now that is larger than it has ever been. Republicans absolutely dominate among men and particularly among men without a college degree. Democrats dominate among women have since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and today they particularly dominate among

women with a college degree. So the parties are sorting not only by general, but also by education, even as gender itself is kind of sorting by education. How much does that concern you? It really concerns me. It's one of the reasons I wrote the book, Derek, to be honest, because as you see this kind of compoundedness of education and gender, and to some extent, race too, then you're seeing the parties really, I think, splitting along these lines you've just identified,

not quite a women's party and a men's party, but trending in that direction. And I think that's troubling for all kinds of reasons. And one of the reasons I think it's particularly troubling is because I think that it means that men, if they feel like their concerns are not being addressed or at worst dismissed as just symptoms of misogyny or toxic masculinity from the left,

that's going to push them kind of further to the right. Then, in order to win, the Democrats think we've really got to double down on the votes of college-educated women. And so they'll have policies which will really be aimed at that. I mean, actually, loan forgiveness is a great example of a policy that's obviously incredibly pro-female. Leave aside arguments for and against it, but two-thirds of college debt is held by women.

Whereas the Apprenticeship Act has been stalled in the Senate for a year and 93% of apprentices are men. And so it's quite easy for politicians like Josh Hawley and others to then sort of weaponize this discontent that we're feeling. and perhaps at a less obviously bad level, even people like Jordan Peterson and so on, they're really tapping into this sense of discontent. And I think absent a responsible conversation about this,

inevitably they become, I think, really quite good fodder for the riot that then makes the right even less attractive to women because it's adopting a kind of masculinist reactionary policy which basically says it's feminism's fault. And so you end up with a situation where one party is turning their backs on boys and men, and the other party wants to turn back the clock on women and girls. That's a pretty invidious choice for anyone to have to make,

and you can see that trend worsening over time, and both sides are responsible here, and both sides can step up. I think the Democrats in particular, just there's such a political opportunity for them to do a few things aimed at boys and men, and it would just take the wind out of Hawley's sales and others. Well, so let's talk about this.

I'm a liberal. You know that. I think most of my listeners know that. But I do feel like one thing that my side is often very reluctant to do is offer a clear and unapologetically positive vision of masculinity. We do it sometimes. I just, it seems like we're not reluctant to criticize men who misbehave. And that's a good thing. But I worry as if it's like we've abandoned the stage upon which a very positive vision of masculinity might be performed. And a lot of jerks. I think, have like rushed toward the stage that's been left open. And they are now performing their own version of masculinity in front of an audience of men that really want something represented for them. And maybe I think a good place to ground this part of the conversation is to ask what you think of a term that has clearly set up residence on the left and become a big part of our vocabulary. What do you feel about the phrase toxic masculinity? I think it's a terrible phrase that should be consigned back to the, margins of obscure academic journals from whence it sprang in 2016. It was an academic term

with a decent definition used in ceremonies of criminal justice and incarceration to define some issues facing particularly incarcerated men. And then it burst out and it just became indiscriminately slapped on any kind of behavior that the user found objectionable in ways that has actually now I think definitively shown to push boys and men away from the rather than inviting them in. And so I think it's actually been an incredibly unhelpful development. And the real problem that the users of it have is that you say, okay, they'll see, are there bad things about masculinity? Sure.

Especially if it's immature. I much prefer the phrase mature masculinity. So certain aspects of masculinity that everything else equal tend to go with being men, like a higher sex drive, like a higher appetite for risk, higher potential for aggression. I don't think those are controversial, certainly not in scientific circles. then how are they expressed? Are they expressed at all? In what ways can be expressed better? That's the real question. How do you mature into those roles? And the same is true of femininity. If you say, okay, define non-toxic masculinity in a way that's distinct from femininity. Then people get into real trouble. The American Psychological Association got trouble because they put out this whole thing about toxic masculinity.

They got attacked for it. So they retreated. They said, no, no, no, no. There are lots of positive things about masculinity. And so everyone said, great, what are they? They went leadership, courage, and decisiveness. And then all the feminists came for them saying, are you saying that women can't be equally good leaders and decide us? So it's just this horrible mess. So just need to get away from that framing. And put those two words next to each other, it's just, it's not going to help the cause.

It's not going to invite men into the conversation. And the last thing I'll say on it is that it is in danger of being the only kind of victim blaming that the left permits itself. So men all like to die of COVID. Why? Because of biology. But no, it was toxic masculinity, mask wearing, drinking. smoking, whatever it is. Boys aren't doing well at school well, it's because they're lazy.

And so these are kind of individualized explanations that would never pass muster for other groups. And what it allows both sides to do is miss the structural problems that we've spent most of our time talking about in education, the economy and the family. So what is your positive definition of masculinity? Well, I think that the first thing to do is to recognize there are some differences between us that are biological. Don't want to overstate them, but they are. And so I've raised three boys to adulthood, and I'm a man, and I have a dad and a brother, and so on too. And I think there are some aspects of masculinity that are positive, like I'll take one of the APOs, like courage, willingness to

take risks. The Carnegie Foundation put out every year the Civilian Hero Awards. And those are awards that go to people who've risked their own life to save the life of another, who is not a family member and not as part of their job. Last year, 71 awards were given out and 66 went to men, mostly young men. And I can tell you, that is not for want of trying to find women, because the Carnegie Foundation really want that become more gender equal. But they just can't find that many 19-year-old women that have run into a burning building to save a mother and a two-year-old or have drowned saving a seven-year-old who was drowning in Italy. They just can't find them. And so, look, that's a small number, but that's great. And I think we should hear a little bit more

about that. And just as it's a huge problem where we see these horrific kind of shooting events and so on, too, it's also true that men very often do put their lives on the line because they have a slightly higher appetite for risk. Fine. It's not true for all men, and it's certainly true for some women, too, the distributions over that. I want to be careful here, because I think there's all sorts of reasons for why the gender gap has opened up between the parties. I think abortion is a huge part of it. I think the fact that government spending is dominated by health care and education, which are sectors that disproportionately employ women has meant that the party of larger government naturally attracts more of the female vote. But I also worry that a party that talks about

toxic masculinity, so much more than it talks about positive masculinity, is going to naturally find itself repelling male voters. And I think there's a big open lane here for someone. John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, maybe Warnock in Georgia, to a certain extent, honestly, Joe Biden, just like dudes with the potential to represent strength and courage and also not be misogynistic dicks.

Even in your rarefied liberal Atlantic circles, Eric, and my rarefied brooking circles, that's what most people won, right? And so, but it's just not being offered to them. And I agree that, like, the danger is this dynamic sort of just gets a bit locked in,

where if merely talking about the problems facing boys, and men and saying, hey, we maybe should deal with some of these. Hey, maybe, like, we haven't talked about this, but hey, maybe vocational education would be good, particularly for boys and men, or maybe getting more male teachers would be a good idea, right? But even just sort of saying, because boys are really doing, we're really struggling at school.

Like, if even saying that means, oh, you're on their side, then the dynamic gets locked in, because we silence ourselves on the issue on this side. We leave the issue to the other side, and vice versa. And I guess it's one of the reasons why I steeled myself in the end to just

stay with this project and write this book, because they genuinely felt as if we can't have this conversation, then we can hardly complain if the issues get left. If responsible people don't deal with issues, irresponsible people will exploit them. It's an axiom of life. Everyone should read Josh Hawley's speech to the conservative, whatever it is, conference about masculinity. And you just said, boys and men are in trouble because the left hate them, and they're branding them toxic, so you should vote for me, and I'll maybe create a few factory jobs or something. It was a brilliantly affected political message, even though it was completely vacuous, because everyone felt the truth of the first of those,

and the left has done just enough to make the second idea that the left hates men plausible enough, not so much as by what they say, but what they don't say. And you've just mentioned that, I think, too. And so it just leaves that ground open in a way that's politically, I think, incredibly dangerous. And we'll regret it 10 years from now if we allow this dynamic towards a men's party and a women's party to keep developing. In the meantime, we all have husbands and brothers and sons and fathers. It's not like men and women are living on these separate.

Upper Islands, where the problems of men and boys are somehow not affecting women. When I talk to my most liberal friends, women, like just feminist to their fingernails, they're really worried about their sons. And this is upper-middle-class ones, where the problems are at their least. So I think the appetite is there, potentially, for a better conversation about this. But it has to be started now, because a lot of these trends are starting to lock in. I've just mentioned, like, 76% of K-12 teachers, though. are women and that number's rising.

But we're not even talking about that. We're not talking about, would it be a good idea to have more male teachers? That's not even on the agenda because the right don't really care about public education and the left think any discussion of men makes you a men's rights activist. The book is of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves. Thank you very, very much. Thank you for having me on. Great conversation, Derek.

I loved it. Thank you for listening. Plain English is produced by Devin Manzi. If you like the show, please go to Apple Podcast or Spotify. give us a five-star rating, leave a review, and don't forget to check out our TikTok at plain English underscore. That's at plain English underscore on TikTok.