What ‘The Future Is Female’ Has Meant for Men

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Old School with Shilo Brooks

Episode: What ‘The Future Is Female’ Has Meant for Men
Host: Shilo Brooks
Guest: Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men
Date: June 18, 2026
Podcast by: The Free Press

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1. Episode Overview

This episode features an in-depth conversation between Shilo Brooks and Richard Reeves, examining the challenges modern men face amid shifting gender dynamics and cultural narratives. Drawing on Reeves’ 2022 book "Of Boys and Men," the discussion explores why boys and men are increasingly struggling—in education, mental health, work, and purpose—and how society’s messaging about masculinity has evolved. The episode also debates solutions in policy, education, and culture to support the next generation of men.

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2. Key Discussion Points & Insights

a) Genesis of the Crisis: Noticing the Problems with Boys and Men

• Reeves’ personal experience as a father and policy scholar alerted him to increasing struggles among boys—academic performance, social adaptation, and mental health.
• Data showed stark declines, such as the steep drop (7x more than women) in male college enrollment during the pandemic, which was largely unreported.
  • “The whole idea of pointing out the challenges of boys and men…somehow that made you suspect, right, you were somehow against women or wanting to roll back to the 50s…” (Richard Reeves, 03:30)

b) The Rise of ‘Toxic Masculinity’ and its Effects

• “Toxic masculinity” entered mainstream discourse around 2016, shifting the cultural lens to view masculinity negatively.
  • “The term masculinity itself is seen in a negative light by both men and women now…One friend’s daughter thought ‘toxic masculinity’ was a single term.” (Reeves, 04:32)
• Brooks observes students solely associating masculinity with toxicity, signaling a shift in attitudes.

c) Evidence for Male Struggles: Data and Trends

• Gender gap in higher education now favors women by 16-20 points; wider than pre-Title IX (06:20).
• Girls are:
  • 2x more likely to be in the top 10% of high school GPAs.
  • On average, a year ahead in literacy.
• Boys are:
  • 2x as likely to be in special education.
  • Facing stagnant or declining wages if they don’t have a college degree.
  • 4x more likely to die by suicide—a rate for young men rising by nearly one-third since 2010.
  • “We lose about as many men to suicide as we do women to breast cancer.” (Reeves, 08:16)

d) Crime, Screens, and Male Disengagement

• While men still commit most violent crimes, overall youth crime has declined paradoxically as more young men disengage from work and school.
  • “1 in 10 men in their early 20s are ‘NEETs’—not in education, employment, or training.” (09:39)
• Reeves hypothesizes that the internet and screens act as a “narcotic” or “male sedation,” pacifying young, disengaged men away from crime (11:44-12:01).
  • “Chris Williamson, the podcaster, calls it the male sedation theory…” (Reeves, 11:52)

e) Early Divergence in Achievement: Boys vs. Girls

• From birth, boys lag behind girls in school readiness and developmental milestones.
  • “Strongest predictor of school readiness was simply sex.” (12:22)
• Gender gaps in reading widen especially in adolescence. Math gaps—when present—favor boys only in affluent families; in poorer communities, boys lag in both reading and math (14:19).

f) Rethinking Gender Parity

• Parity ≠ 50/50: Reeves argues that insisting on perfect gender balance in every field is neither realistic nor desirable, given genuine (average) differences in interests and abilities.
  • “About 30% of our engineers would be women, not 50, but not 5. And about 30% of our nurses and healthcare workers would be men, not 12.” (Reeves, 15:48)
• Attempts to force parity can ignore personal preference and even backfire, as seen in the Nordic paradox—greater occupational divergence in more gender-equal societies (18:44).

g) Gender Representation in Teaching and Care Professions

• Huge societal and policy emphasis on increasing women in STEM; little equivalent focus on increasing men in education, healthcare, or mental health.
  • “Men make up only 23% of K-12 teachers now… male English teachers… are unicorns…” (Reeves, 19:28)
• Brooks and Reeves agree: representation in teaching matters deeply for boys’ engagement and self-concept.
  • “It was my male English teacher that completely transformed my relationship to reading…” (Reeves, 19:57)

h) Political Left and Right: Diagnoses, Blind Spots, and Polarization

Progressive Left: (23:31)

• Discomfort with acknowledging any sex differences—taboo to admit any average differences exist.
• Tendency to frame men and boys as “the problem”—with solutions focused on curbing masculine behaviors (“non-toxic masculinity”).
  • “I didn’t raise my three sons to say: one day my boys, you might not be actually poisonous to the people around you...” (Reeves, 24:55)
• Policy equality typically only addresses disadvantages faced by women/girls, ignoring those faced by men/boys—even in highly gender-equal nations (e.g. Iceland).

The Right: (29:24)

• Over-emphasize sex differences to the point of prescribing rigid gender roles (e.g., Jordan Peterson’s infamous claims about women and engineering).
• Tend toward “bring backery”/nostalgia for the male breadwinner family; risk zero-sum thinking, blaming feminism or women’s gains for men’s challenges.
  • “The idea that for men to do better, we need to somehow curtail or curb the successes of women. That’s just profoundly wrong…” (Reeves, 34:02)

Increasing Politicization:

• Both sides often refuse to see issues affecting the “other” gender, leading to policy tunnel vision.
• Recent political changes (e.g., 2024 election) force reconsideration, especially on the left, as Democrats lost support among young men (27:55).

i) Biology vs. Culture: Facts, Fears, and Policy

• Reeves was urged to omit his book’s chapter on biological sex differences for fear that acknowledging them would be politically dangerous (37:33).
  • “Most of my colleagues didn’t want me to write the book at all…they thought this was a dangerous errand.” (Reeves, 38:03)
• He argues forthrightly: denial of differences does more harm than good, as it prevents effective educational policy (e.g., recognizing later male maturation, risk-taking).
• Biology is real, but culture's role is to channel male/female differences into positive, pro-social directions.
  • “Because there are these sex differences, culture becomes even more important as a way of communicating…how to channel those differences…” (Reeves, 41:20)

j) Rethinking Masculinity and Opportunity

• Reeves proposes a new model of masculinity that is caregiving, engaged, and more open to HEAL professions (Healthcare, Education, Administration, Literacy).
• Not zero-sum: Men adapting to market and societal changes doesn’t mean women have to lose, or vice versa.
  • “The economic rise of women, the kind of success of women, that is not the reason for the failures of men…the idea that more women are working means that fewer men will work, that’s just…the lump of labor fallacy.” (Reeves, 45:06)
• Reeves acknowledges it’s hard—for many men, moving into caring professions or K-12 education is still stigmatized—but history shows it was more common for men to teach, and this should again be possible without loss of dignity (47:13-50:14).

k) Policy and Cultural Recommendations

• Policy:
  • More flexible school start ages: delay for boys can help narrow the developmental gap (51:06).
  • Major campaigns to recruit male teachers, modeled on STEM initiatives for women.
  • Increased investment in vocational and apprenticeship education for boys.
  • Target resources to bring men into HEAL professions and mental health services.
  • Use of Perkins dollars and other incentives to rebalance gender representation in key caring industries.
• Culture:
  • Storytelling and cultural representation are critical: “The stories that boys and men absorb are even more important than the stories that women and girls absorb. Masculinity…is more socially constructed and the primary construction material is stories.” (Reeves, 54:11)
  • Society must communicate to young men that their skills, purpose, and presence are still needed—even as gender roles evolve.
  • Brooks and Reeves lament the loss of single-sex spaces (e.g., the Boy Scouts) that once helped boys find constructive models of manhood.

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3. Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Discussing Boys’ Struggles:

  “The whole idea of pointing out the challenges of boys and men…somehow that made you suspect, right, you were somehow against women or wanting to roll back to the 50s…”
  – Richard Reeves, 03:30

• On Toxic Masculinity’s Takeover:

  “The term masculinity itself is seen in a negative light…and by both men and women now.”
  – Reeves, 04:32

• On Suicide Rates:

  “We lose about as many men to suicide as we do women to breast cancer…Since 2010, the suicide rate among young men has risen by almost a third.”
  – Reeves, 08:16

• On Male Sedation Theory:

  “Chris Williamson, the podcaster, calls it the male sedation theory…”
  – Richard Reeves, 11:52

• On Male English Teachers:

  “Male English teachers, especially up through middle school, are unicorns… I wouldn’t have used this language then, but oh, masculinity, books, words, poetry—cool. Up until that point, I genuinely thought this was girl stuff…It was my male English teacher that completely transformed my relationship to reading.”
  – Richard Reeves, 19:57

• On Non-Toxic Masculinity Rhetoric:

  “I didn’t raise my three sons to say: one day my boys, you might not be actually poisonous to the people around you…”
  – Reeves, 24:55

• On the Need for Policy and Cultural Change:

  “I cannot take anybody seriously anymore who says, you know what? We need more positive male role models. And they don’t have a policy agenda for increasing the share of male educators.”
  – Richard Reeves, 51:44

• On the Importance of Stories:

  “Masculinity…is more socially constructed and the primary construction material is stories… it is those stories that help us scaffold our way into what it means to be a grown ass man.”
  – Reeves, 54:11

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4. Timestamps for Key Segments

• Genesis of the problem—personal and societal (02:43-04:07)
• Rise of ‘toxic masculinity’ and cultural framing (04:32-05:48)
• Surprising educational and mental health data (06:20-09:20)
• The “male sedation theory” and screens as pacifiers (11:44-12:01)
• Early educational divergence and school readiness (12:22-15:03)
• Parity and gender in professions, Nordic paradox (15:48-18:44)
• Representation in teaching—male teachers and Mr. Wyatt anecdote (19:28-22:39)
• Progressive left’s blindspots, data denial, “non-toxic masculinity” (23:31-27:33)
• Policy shifts on the left after 2024 election (27:55-29:08)
• The right: weaponizing difference, nostalgia, zero-sum risk (29:24-35:09)
• Biology, culture, and why denial is dangerous (37:33-43:29)
• New masculinity and HEAL professions, is it zero sum? (43:29-50:14)
• Policy recommendations and conclusion—stories and cultural renewal (51:06-55:29)

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5. Summary Takeaways

• Boys and men are facing real, underappreciated challenges—especially in education, mental health, and the workplace.
• Both left and right have blindspots and politicize the issue: the left often denies or ignores boys’ struggles; the right over-dramatizes them or proposes a retrogressive agenda.
• Effective solutions require both policy (education reform, recruiting male teachers, flexible schooling) and cultural change (positive legitimization of masculinity, storytelling).
• The answer is not to curtail women’s progress, nor to ignore men’s difficulties. Society must support all its members with realistic understanding of differences, targeted help where needed, and stories that tell boys they are still needed and valued.

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Transcript

[A]

Hey y'. All, Shiloh. Here listeners will know that I believe reading good books makes us better men. Likewise, having civilized debates and good faith discussions can make for a better democracy. That's why I want to recommend the Chart Topping podcast you Might Be Right. Hosted by former Tennessee governors from the left and right, Phil Bredesen and Bill Haslam, it's produced by the Baker School of Public Policy and Public affairs at the University of Tennessee. In fact, the show's named after Senator Howard Baker's principal. To always remember the other fellow Might Be Right. At a time where mainstream news reverts to shouting matches and most political commentary generates more heat than light, you Might Be Right is a great place for even keel conversations about tough topics. If you need a place to start, check out their recent episode on whether There's Too Much Money in Politics. As we approach the midterms, this is a timely discussion featuring Harvard Law School professor Larry Lessing and former Chair of the Federal Election Commission, Brad Smith. It's substantive, civil, and exactly the kind of debate worth having right now. So follow you Might Be Right on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and tell them I sent you. Hey y'. All. Today I'm speaking to Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. His latest book is all about why modern men are struggling and what to do about it. This is Old School. Richard Reeves, welcome to Old School.

[B]

Thank you, Shyla. Great to be here.

[A]

So, you know, I started Old School because students in college campuses where I taught were coming up to me after class thanking me for reading books with them. And a large percentage of these students were male students. And they'd shake my hand and they'd look me in the eye and they would thank me in particular for reading a book in such a serious way, and in a way that it provided them with insight, purpose, meaning, and perspective. And we've recorded 33 or so episodes of Old School. And I've sat down with men from all over all kind of walks of life who do all sorts of different things and listen to them, cried with them and laugh with them. And so as I think about Old School's future and think about what comes next forward in the next generation, I wanted to conclude this narrative arc with you and your book of Boys and Men, which really drills down on the problems that men face today. So thank you. Thank you for being here. And I wanted to start off by asking you this question, when in the kind of course of your thinking, did this occur to you as A problem. When was it that you first noticed boys and men were struggling?

[B]

Well, I noticed my own boys struggling a bit. And, you know, my boys have lots of advantages, but even they were struggling in the school system. That didn't seem that well suited to them, to be honest. They seemed like a bit of a square peg in a round hole. And that was true in the uk, where, as you can tell, I was before, and even in the US So I was feeling it at home. And then in my day job, looking at the trends in education, looking at trends in inequality, I kept seeing data points. And I guess there was kind of a moment when the pandemic hit, and I saw the male college enrollment rate drop seven times more than the female one. And so if there was a moment where I thought, okay, I need to do more on this than just keep noting it along the way, that was a big moment because nobody reported that. That was just not a story, right? And I said, why is that not a story? And then as I talked to people, I came to realize that the whole idea of pointing out the challenges of boys and men, which you do in your series. I'm a big fan of your show, by the way, so it's an honor to be on here. Actually, somehow that. That kind of made you suspect, right, you were somehow against women or wanting to roll back to the 50s or the 1850s or whatever, and that it seemed like it was somehow a dangerous enterprise to even point out the facts about the ways boys and men were falling behind. And that was the point where I felt, okay, in that case, I better do it.

[A]

Your book was published in 2022. You talk about the pandemic. I can remember being in a classroom in 2018 or so, and I was reading Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew with a bunch of students, and they were using the term toxic masculinity to describe the character Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew. And So it was 2018. I saw, well, something is going on here. Like, this is a. I've never heard that term. And so I'm just. Did you see a kind of buildup to this? Or how did we get there?

[B]

It's interesting. The term toxic masculinity basically was invented in 2016. So a couple of years before, when you're talking about it, it didn't exist before that, except as this very, very marginal academic term. Actually, it came out of studies of hardened criminals. That was where it originally came. But it suddenly exploded onto the stage and it became a term that was being bandied around such actually now that if you look at the survey evidence, the term masculinity itself is seen in a negative light and by both men and women now. And I think that's because it has so often had this prefix toxic added to it. So we've had a decade now of hearing the term masculinity with the word toxic in front of it at least 50% of the time. And in fact, there are. I was talking to a friend recently who tried to persuade his daughter that you could use the word masculinity without the word toxic. She actually thought it was just one fixed term. He's like, well, it is a separate word. And she's like, oh, I've never heard it used on its own. And so I think that speaks to the cultural challenge that we've had over the last 10 years or so, which, bluntly put, has taken the form of not seeing boys and men as having problems, but seeing boys and men as being the problem. I think that's been a dangerous trap.

[A]

So there might be people out there who say, there's no there there with the boys and men problem, who say, you know, there's no. You do such a good job in the first chapters of your book just marshaling data and evidence. And so before we get to the conversation about the nature of the problem, I wonder if you might just share with us some of the data, some of the most surprising data from the beginning of your book when you go on to prove that, no, this is a problem, There is a there, there's something that's changing and something is different.

[B]

Yeah. Well, I really appreciate starting there, Shiloh, because I do think it's incredibly important to start with facts, with data, and sometimes that can seem quite boring. You know, my book has charts in it, for God's sake. It's. It quotes Nobel prize laureates like Gloria Goldin. And in fact, one of the internal mottos of the think tank I now run, the American Institute for Boys and Men, is keep it boring. And as my son said when he overheard me saying that one day, he said, well, you're the man for that job, dad. But the serious point is, like, let's at least agree the facts, then we can talk about what they mean. The gender gap in higher education now is about 16 to 20 points in favor of women getting four year college degrees compared to men, which is wider than the gap in 1971 and 1972 when we passed Title IX, when it was the other way around. So there is A bigger gender gap today in US universities and colleges than there was when we passed Title ix, but it's the other way around. That's a pretty striking reversal. That reflects a lot of what's happening in high school. So girls are twice as likely to be in the top 10% of high school students. The top 10% measured by GPA. On average, girls finish school about a year ahead in literacy than boys. That's very relevant to your work. So there's a year gap on average in literacy. Boys are twice as likely to be in special ed. And then if we look at other areas like the labor market's been really tough, especially for men without a college degree. There hasn't been much of a wage gain, essentially flat wages for men without a college degree for the last few decades. That's a hugely important fact. That means there's a lot of men out there who are economically in a worse position than their fathers were. And then the last thing I'll point to is the most tragic in some ways, which is the suicide rate, which is four times higher among men than women. We lose four times as many men to suicide, so about 40,000 men a year, which just to put that in context, that's about the same as the deaths from breast cancer. So we lose about as many men to suicide as we do women to breast cancer. They're different problems, of course. And actually, even since I wrote the book, the thing that probably worries me most now is that we've seen a rise in the suicide rate among young men, men under the age of 30 of almost a third just since 2010. I don't use the word crisis very often because I think it's an overused word. But it's hard to see us losing so many more thousands of young men to suicide every year and not use that word. And we don't really know why. Before, the suicide rate was being driven more by middle aged men, particularly those who were struggling economically through the Great Recession. But this rise in young men since 2010 is a bit of a puzzle. And I think it's a tragic trend and one that candidly, I don't think is getting anything like enough attention, despite some of our best efforts.

[A]

And isn't it also true, I mean, this has kind of always been true, that men commit the majority of violent crimes in America. They're in car incarcerated at higher rates than women, although I think women incarceration rates are rising and they suffer from addiction at higher rates than women as well. So I mean, there's a lot there,

[B]

there is, I mean, the deaths of the addiction rates, alcohol and suicide, much higher. So the so called deaths of despair that social scientists were talking about, between three and four times higher among men. And you're right about the violent crime point, which is that it is overwhelmingly committed by men. Always has been, always, everywhere in the world, every point in history. But of course, violent crime has massively declined over the last few decades. I think one of the great paradoxes, mysteries in some ways of the recent few decades is that we've seen an increase in the share of young men who are disengaged. So to give you another stat, 1 in 10 men in their early 20s are not in work or education. So they're called neets, not in education, employment trait. So that's like we're. That's the cultural decimation of a generation in itself. So when you get lots of disengaged, disenchanted, lost young men, what you see is a rise in the crime rate, always. Except now, this is the only time that I know of in recorded human history when we've seen a lot more young men struggling and the crime rate going down so precipitously. And I think, what do you think? Because the young men are going. Well, I think honestly, this is maybe a bit of a hot take, but I think that unlike in previous eras, a young man who is lost, disengaged, has somewhere to go now that previous generations of young men didn't have, which is the Internet. And so they're not on the streets, crime, breaking stuff, fighting, et cetera. Good. But they might be in the basement, and that's arguably better from a social welfare point of view, but it's still not good. And so the hot take here is that for all our concerns about the screens, maybe they've saved us from what would otherwise have been the deeper social consequences of what I call the male malaise. But ironically, I suspect that if the crime rate was going up and we were seeing a lot more antisocial behavior of young men, it would be higher up the political agenda than it is now.

[A]

So the screens are kind of a narcotic in a way. I mean, you go and you become addicted to that and it pacifies you in a way.

[B]

Yeah. Chris Williamson, the podcaster, calls it the male sedation theory, that this is kind of, which is exactly the language that you're using too. And I've increasingly come to believe that there is something to that.

[A]

But in your book you really go back to the kind of the genesis of this problem in elementary school in the home. So how early do we begin to see. And you present some really interesting statistics about boys and girls and achievement and that kind of thing in school. How early do we begin to see a divergence there?

[B]

Well, honestly, from the beginning, from birth, actually, just on some of the early scores that you take. Even after birth, boys are struggling a bit more than girls. And actually, one of the reasons why it looks like we actually have slightly more boys than girls is because the mortality rate of boys is higher than girls. Infant mortality rate. On every measure of school readiness, boys are way behind girls. And in fact, there was a good Brookings study, Brookings, where I used to work, showing that if you look at all of the factors that affect school readiness, family structure, income, parental employment, et cetera, the strongest predictor of school readiness was simply sexual. So that controlling for everything else, it was just the best way of knowing whether a kid was ready for school. Was boy or girl more than class, more than race, more than income? And so it's all the way through. It seems to widen at various points. So you see some narrowing actually through elementary school. It seems to widen again when you get into adolescence, and particularly around issues like reading, which is obviously dear to your heart and literacy. That's when you start to see it opening up again is in early and mid adolescence. And then there's again a little bit of a catch up towards the end. So the boys are behind all the way through, but they seem to be most behind in those very early years. And then as you get into early and mid adolescence, so middle school and then early high school, where you see huge gaps, especially in things like grades, There isn't much of a difference actually in things like SAT and act. There isn't really a gender gap on those, interestingly. So it's not that girls are smarter than boys or in case it needs repeating the other way around, but when it comes to things like grades, there's just an ocean of difference between girls and boys, which every parent or probably person listening to this will be like, yep, that tracks.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. And isn't it true also that girls catch boys in mathematics, but boys don't catch girls in reading?

[B]

You will catch up some, but then the boys overtake again a little bit towards the end. So the story is. So honestly, I went into this and I think a lot of people have this sense of like, well, you know, the girls are ahead in reading and literacy, but the boys are ahead in math, and it probably balances out. Well, that's not true at all. The girls are way ahead in reading and literacy and the boys are a little bit ahead in math, if at all. And the other big difference actually is that the boys are only ahead in math in more affluent families and households. If you go into poorer areas, Shawn Reardon's work from Stanford shows this very clearly. In kind of poorer areas like the bottom third or the boys are way behind in math as well.

[A]

I think some people might hear us talking about this and think that what we are troubled by is that there's not gender parody. You do a really nice job in the book of talking about the fact that gender parity might not be the goal for people who kind of subscribe to the school, that gender parity is the target at which we should aim either in education or more well known in the professional world that there should be as many female engineers as there are male engineers and as many female doctors as there are male doctors. Of course one would have to say there should be as many male pre K teachers as there are female pre K teachers and as many male psychologists as there are female psychologists. Both of those of course are not true. Why is gender parity not maybe the target at which we should be aiming?

[B]

Yeah, parity as in the sense of just 5050 everything strikes me as the reason it's difficult to talk about this is because that is not going to happen in a whole bunch of areas, some of which you've just listed. And that is because there are some genuine differences between the kind of preferences and skills of men and women. On average, of course the distributions overlap, et cetera. So the fact that on average you're going to get more men interested in issues like engineering, the people versus things definition is what the psychologists call it doesn't mean that my sister in law can't be an engineer. And she is the fact that women are on average more interested in caring or early education professions doesn't mean that my son can't be a fifth grade teacher. And he is. But what it does mean is that those professions are not going to be 5050 unless you did some pretty dramatic social engineering. But they're also not going to be 3%, which is the current male share of kindergarten teachers. Right. It's not going to be 5%, which was the share of female engineers in the 70s. What will it be then? If it's not 50% and it's not zero? And the honest answer is it will vary by profession, but I'm pretty convinced by some research showing that on the examples that we both just used here, something like engineering, maybe in something like healthcare or education, it's probably about 30%. So in a world where people were choosing their occupations roughly in line with what we know about these differences between men and women, about 30% of our engineers would be women, not 50, but not 5. And about 30% of our nurses and healthcare workers would be men, not 12. Right. And so the reason why people are worried about this is because sometimes people use these genuine differences on average to say that's why women shouldn't be engineers, rather than saying that's why we're not going to get 50% of our engineers. Women. That's a very different claim. But unfortunately, in a quite a polarized world, it's just much easier to either say everything's socialized, everything will be 50, 50. Equality equals androgyny. That's a very clear position. It's just wrong. I will say one other thing which is based on some empirical work, which is it's called the kind of paradox, the gender equality paradox, which is you see the biggest differences in those occupational choices that we just talked about in the most gender equal countries. And so in the Nordic nations, for example, across Scandinavia, there are actually bigger gaps between women and men in STEM jobs and non STEM jobs than there are in less equal countries. And so the interpretation that I think is appropriate to bring to that is like, well, maybe in Norway and Sweden and places like that, there is a sufficient level of equality that people feel comfortable choosing occupations based on what they actually want to do rather than what society is telling them to do one way or the other.

[A]

I was kind of in a college of engineering teaching the humanities in the late 2000 and tens, and there was a big push to recruit women into STEM fields and they did a nice job. I mean, the percentage really did increase in the College of Engineering of women enrolling in engineering disciplines. But there was no, as far as I'm aware, similar recruiting effort in the College of Education to get male teachers to come teach literature or K12 or whatever. And so I'm curious if you think, just in general, we see the disparity of women in these professions as a bigger problem than we do of men. And why do we do that?

[B]

Well, I'm so glad you raised that. I've actually just helped launch the Male Educator Network and Policy Institute, a national organization to focus precisely on this issue of getting more men into education And Shiloh, I think, particularly I was thinking about you and I was looking at the data saying that men, men make up only 23% of K12 teachers now, whereas it was 33% when Reagan was president. And the subject area that men are least likely to teach conditional on being a teacher is English.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

And so male English teachers, especially up through middle school, are unicorns. And then we wonder why we see these huge gender gaps in reading and reading for pleasure and stuff. I mean, for me, just to be personal for a moment, it was my male English teacher that completely transformed my relationship to Reading, Mr. Wyatt. And for a while, I was actually in a remedial English class. I was the kid whose mum had to take him back to school to get the book that I'd been told to read. And I really struggled. And one of the huge changes in my life was Mr. Wyatt, who sounds a bit like you. We did Shakespeare, we did the Tempest, we did Andrew Marvell's love poetry, we did some war poetry. And Mr. Wyatt was a Korean war veteran. You know, definitely the older side. He used to drive the school bus as well. He was a curmudgeon of the highest order, Shiloh. But Mr. Wyatt would get a classroom of mostly working class kids, boys even more than the girls, reading poetry. And occasionally he would get a bit tearful around it. And I was like, oh, oh. I wouldn't have used this language then, but oh, man, masculinity, books, words, poetry, Cool. Up until that point, I genuinely thought this was girl stuff. Right. And it was Mrs. De Wyatt at the front of the classroom teaching us poetry. So that you can tell, this is very personal to me, this kind of lack of male teachers. And it is striking, as you say, that we've had these huge efforts, and in fact, a thumb on the scale in many cases, to get more women into stem, especially in these faculty jobs. And great, because they were underrepresented in those professions. And the same in policing, by the way. Why isn't it just as important that our teaching profession looks like the kids are teaching? Why, if representation matters, why doesn't it matter in teaching and in healthcare? So what's actually happened is that we've successfully broken down many of the gender stereotypes around some of these other professions. Women now make up the majority of law school students, the majority of medical students. We're seeing a huge rise in the share of engineering, et cetera. I'm not saying job done, but wow, massive achievement. But meanwhile, fewer men in teaching, fewer men in mental health care. And so those professions have become gendered much more strongly. And again, I'm a father of a fifth Grade teacher, too. And I think it is high time to either say, representation doesn't, doesn't matter and stop doing all the stuff we're doing for women, which is not my view, to be clear. Or representation matters just as much in teaching as it does anywhere else. Or if not, why not, why doesn't it matter?

[A]

Yeah. Well, I'll tell you this. I'm going to pour one out for Mr. Wyatt tonight. You know, I'm going to, I'm going to make a tribute to him, to him tonight.

[B]

God bless him. God bless him.

[A]

You know, we're not saying every teacher needs to be female or male or anything like that, but to have one over the course of an education for a young man is not such a bad thing. And that's kind of the needle that you're trying to move. It doesn't have to be 50, 50. Let me ask you about a really interesting part of your book. This is the part where you go into the different ways that broadly speaking, the progressive left, or just the left kind of in general and the right characterize the problems around masculinity. And maybe first we begin with the left. What, how does the left see the masculinity problem? And what are the blind spots? And after this, maybe we talk about the right and their blind spots.

[B]

Yeah, I think there's a few. And I'll highlight a couple. One, because we've already touched on it, which is this discomfort with sex differences, that there are differences between boys and girls and men and women. Somehow there's a commitment, particularly in Progressive Academy, to a blank slate view. And that gender and even sometimes sex, it's all socialized. And so many of the things we've talked about already, they're just very reluctant to admit, look, there are these average differences. And to build policy in this gender blind way is not a good idea. So I think it's a visceral reaction. Interesting. The chapter I had on sex differences in my book is the one I was most urged to take out. People like, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Like the term biological essentialism is thrown around with a ban abandoned whenever you say, well, there are some differences, you know, so I think that's a big blind spot. And the second we've already touched on too is this deficit framing on the left, which really found its, its language in toxic masculinity, but also the patriarchy, mansplaining, etc. There's even a report in the UK that talked about boy splaining like boys in school thinking they know more than actually boys are much less likely to put their hands up in class now. Right. So it was so upsetting to me, like really boy splaining. And so it was all deficit framed. And so the left basically had a view of boys and men, which is a, they're the problem and so they have to be fixed, they have to fix themselves, will be fixed. And it was entirely framed around what they should not do, what they should not be. And so the best that could be offered was, oh, well, we're in favor of non toxic masculinity. And I had a few problems with that. One was like, okay, well that's not a very, very inspiring vision. Right? I didn't raise my three sons to say one day, my boys, you might not be actually poisonous to the people around you. You could be not toxic. Right? That's not a very inspiring vision for a young person, number one. Number two, there was no definition of non toxic masculinity that was distinguishable from femininity. When you actually tried to get people to say, okay, so are there aspects of masculinity that are good? Because if you tried to say, the American Psychological association got famously into trouble with this, they said, well, if there are things like good risk taking, courage. No, no, no. Are you saying women can't do that? Right. So it collapsed. And actually in the end, the left, I think, ended up just having been really struggling to just come to terms with the fact that boys and men were struggling. And where that led them to fatally was a view that if you're talking about gender and you're talking about gender equality, you can only ever do it one way. So the Gender Policy Council and the Biden administration, the work of all of the gender organizations, they are blind and in fact intentionally blind to any gender gaps that run the other way. Right? The ones we've just talked about, they don't count as gender inequalities. Even though in Iceland, which is arguably the most gender equal country in the world now, the single biggest gender gap, bigger than any other gender gap, is the one in education where boys and young men are behind women. But that doesn't count when they measure gender equality. And so it's just this, basically, it's like looking at the world through one eye and only seeing the gender in a inequalities that run one way. And I think that made the left on this issue of gender seem completely out of touch. There are a lot of women out there, a lot of mums, out there who sure want equality at work, but who are dead worried about their kids at school and maybe worried about their husband's mental health. Right. In the real world, people are perfectly capable of holding two thoughts in their head at once and being worried both that the school system isn't serving their sons, which it isn't, and the labor market continues to offer challenges to them as women. Right. Both those things are true. But the left at its worst refused to allow us to even discuss the ones that are affecting boys and men.

[A]

Yeah, I get a lot of letters from those moms and those wives. And I'm curious, do you think, I mean, look, you wrote the book in 2022. A lot has happened since 2022. I put it in politics. Do you think the left today has got the message, has a different strategy, or has learned from that misstep that you talked about just now?

[B]

I certainly think some have. I mean, honestly, I did not expect that we would have, you know, leading Democrat governors with pretty serious initiatives around boys and men now. So Gavin Newsom in California signed an executive order ordering his administration to work on some of the issues we've talked about, male teachers, male mental health, et cetera. Wes Moore has an initiative on boys and men, and we have a full time fellow working alongside Governor Moore, Gretchen Whitmer, Spencer Cox. And Virginia has actually become the first state to create a boys and men commission alongside its Women and Girls Commission with unanimous bipartisan support in both houses. I think maybe two votes against the lower house and then signed into law by the new Democrat governor. And so it really has shifted. And let's be honest about this. The results of the 2024 election affected the way that folks on the left thought about the issues of boys and men, because that's what I was getting at. They lost so many. They lost in no small part because they lost the votes of young men. So I think that has created a different kind of environment around this issue, candidly than there was before. But I also want to point out that some of these folks, including Governor Moore and others, were actually working on this even before that.

[A]

Tell me a little bit about your views of the way the right viewed this problem. You mentioned the 2024 election and the success that Trump had with the male electorate. But talk to me about the blind, both the way the right treats it and then the kind of blind spots as you understand them on the right.

[B]

Yeah, there's a couple. So one is actually the mirror image of the left's refusal to acknowledge sex differences, which is that too often on the right, they not only acknowledge the sex differences, but overweight them and say that they can explain a lot more than they really can. So Jordan Peterson, for example, who's written on this issue and is pretty well known at this point, he explained the fact that only 5% of engineers were women. He said, because women aren't interested in those. Women are interested in people, not things. Now, he's right about the fact that there is that average difference, but he's wrong to suggest that that could explain such a low share. And so they weaponize the. The actual differences between kind of men and women to explain much stronger patterns of gender behavior and sometimes, frankly, very strong gender prescriptions about what you should and shouldn't do in ways that I think were unhelpful.

[A]

Isn't it also true that the left. You mentioned Kimberle Crenshaw and you talk about intersectionality at parts of the book. So wouldn't it. I mean, in a way, I'm tempted to say the right learned that from the left, that the right learned weaponizing difference from the kind of rhetoric, identity politics and those sorts of things. And I know you mentioned some of that in your book. So I'm just curious if you think the left is in any way guilty of the weaponization, the way you're saying the right is.

[B]

Yeah, that's very interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way before, but I think that there's this kind of weird horseshoe thing going on. I think some of the kind of cultural left, if you like, especially around issues of identity. Actually, those lessons have been learned by some folks on the right and applied in a different way. I actually have my issues with the way that Kimberly Crenshaw and others use their own theories of intersectionality because they've decided in advance that women are always worse off than men. And when I look at, say, for example, the gaps between black women and black men, that's just not true on most measures. Black men are worse off on most measures than black women. I will say back to our earlier agreement about male teachers, is that the American Psychological association, which is one of the most progressive organizations in the U.S. it's very, very progressive. They think more male teachers would be a good idea. They've said as much. And although Senator Josh Hawley, in his own book on manhood, disagrees with me directly on many issues, he does say, but he may have a point about more male teachers.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So when we think about the case for more male teachers, what I often say to people is, okay, we've lost everybody to the left of the American Psychological association and everyone to the right of Josh Hawley. But surely we can work with the people in between. Surely we can work with the remaining 98% of the population or whatever it is. Right. That's a pretty big tent, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The other problem with the right is it correctly identifies the challenges of boys and men in many cases. I do think, to be fair, that has been more true of conservative writers and scholars than on the left. I think that's true. I think I have to acknowledge that Christina Hoff Summers and others were writing about this issue long before I was. I think the problem was that they then wanted to blame feminism and blame women and say it was the rise of women that was causing the fall of men. I think that's empirically wrong and unhelpful. And there was a kind of bring backery, a kind of nostalgia. Right. Conservativism always has to be alert for this instinct for bring backery. We need to bring back the whatever it is. And in this case, it's the traditional family where the man was the breadwinner, head of the household. Men used to know their place and women used to know their place. It was a simpler and easier world. Sure. It was also deeply unfair. And we ain't going back. I don't know. This is not getting enough attention, but Donald Trump could probably claim to be the president that has done most to increase female employment more than any other employment. Women hold more payroll jobs than men now and have just hit a record high in labor force participation. All of the jobs created in 2025 went to women in the US because of health care, essentially. But Donald Trump has actually. I'm not saying he did this, I'm not saying it was his president, but it is nonetheless an interesting fact that he has massively increased female labor force participation. And interestingly, even in his first term, you may remember this moment, I can't remember which state of the union it was, where all the Democrat women dressed in white to sort of mark suffragettes, to honor the suffragettes. And at one point in his speech, President Trump pointed out that we've created X number of jobs and most of those jobs went to women. President Trump himself said that. And you could see all the Democrat women not knowing how to react.

[A]

Right.

[B]

There was this pause. There was this really interesting pause, like, and then they kind of looked at each other and went, yay. And they decided they had to applaud. Right. Because creating more jobs for women is Great. So even though there's this kind of idea of this traditional kind of family, in practice, the labor market, including under Donald Trump, has continued to see a surge of women into the labor market. And women now account for 40% of the breadwinners in the US that is not going to be turned around even if we wanted to. And so to the extent that the agenda that the right has for kind of boys and men, to the extent that it's a going back agenda, it is both flying in the face of all of the social and cultural trends we see right now. And it risks them seeing, like they do think it's a zero sum game, and that actually for men to do better, we need to somehow curtail or curb the successes of women. And that's just profoundly wrong and makes them come across as like the anti women party as well as the men's party in the same way that the left comes across as the women's party and therefore the anti men party. And what I think everyone's hungry for is a politics that's just for both.

[A]

I'm fascinated by the contemporary politics that you're talking about here. And I'm just curious if, you know, this book is not that old. It came out in 2022, but so much has changed since then. I got the sense at certain points in the book that you said earlier that the left had really misunderstood some things. You said that, and that's just clear. And you gave very good reasons for that. But I'm curious today, if you were writing the book, would you write it a little bit differently? Because in some parts of the book, I see you trying to persuade, in a way, left elites that this is a real problem. And so, you know, and, and taking tactics to kind of do that. And so I'm just curious today, given what you've just said about Trump and the women and the whole, would you, would you do something different today?

[B]

It's a great question. Well, it's certainly true that I was quite strategic about trying to make the book as persuasive as possible to the commanding heights of the cultural elite, let's put it that way. I hoped for a respectful openness from leading figures of the center and the center, left, right. And why is that? It's because I thought that's where the movement most needed to, to come from. That's where the gap was biggest. And I couldn't get anyone to publish the book. Brookings ended up publishing it, but no one would publish the book. But then Barack Obama puts it on his reading list in 2024. So 2021 can't find a publisher. 2024 is on Obama's reading list. Now that sounds like I'm bragging, and maybe I am a little bit. So give me a little bit of grace around that. But more the point I'm making. That's a big cultural shift, right? That tells you how fast cultures can change, actually. But I was careful about which arguments to take on, which fights to pick, and quite strategic about the way the book came out into the world, because I had seen other books that landed in ways that were not helpful. And if you're engaged in a persuasive project rather than a polemical project, then that's a different kind of editorial project. And I was quite mindful of that. Polemics are fun to write. They actually sometimes get more attention. But in the end, I think polemics typically aren't that persuasive, at least not in the short term. And so I definitely tried to land it in a way that would work.

[A]

You said something fascinating a few minutes ago. You said that when you wrote the book, the chapter that people, your own, maybe colleagues, most, wanted you to not include is the one on biology. First, I want to ask you, why is that? Why did they, or whoever they is, want you to remove that biology chapter? And second, what is the real, in your view, relationship between biology and culture in its cultivation of the human person, male and female?

[B]

Well, I should be clear that most of my colleagues didn't want me to write the book at all. Shiloh. It wasn't just they didn't want that chapter. They thought this was a dangerous errand. I think it was one good reason and one bad reason not to talk about sex differences. The good reason was that I then go on to say, like, I want more male teachers. I want more men in healthcare. And so the argument would be, if you're trying to say, look, like men can also be teachers, elementary school teachers, why would you then have a chapter on the fact that there are sex differences which are going to mean that you will not get 50% of elementary school teachers? You're kind of making your own argument harder. I got that. But then a lot of other people were saying, actually, the truth is there are so good faith treatments out there of this issue that having one out there. And I'm proud of that chapter, I think it is a good faith treatment of the issue. The bad argument was, even if there are these differences, because no one really said the facts were not true. No one serious Says that there are actual sex differences on some of the things I talk about in risk taking, sex drive, aggression, et cetera. What they say is, it is not helpful to acknowledge those differences. It is not helpful to have those differences out in the open. It is better, even though they're there and they're true, to pretend like they're not. And I just think that's a really bad argument because it's true. And it matters for a lot of things we're talking about here. Like if it's true, for example, as I, that boys mature later than girls in the education system, that's a big biological differences. They're about, you know, they hit puberty a year later. That affects all kinds of development. Just. Oh, that's just a flat fact. Surely that's relevant to education policy and the stuff we talked about earlier, patterns of occupational choice. It matters not only for policy making, but also how we view the patterns of society. And if you don't acknowledge it, then you just sound a bit out of touch, candidly. But that was the argument. The argument was, this is politically unhelpful. And people will use. They'll say, oh, even this Brookings guy admits men and women are different. And the. The kind of reactionaries will weaponize that. I just think that's absurd thinking. I think the idea that on any issue, you should somehow look away from it and hope that no one else notices. It's as if sometimes, particularly in scholarly circles, maybe if we don't talk about it, people in the real world won't notice it. But I'm like, no, people in the real world always notice it. They notice boys and girls difference. They might notice that your immigration policy isn't working. They. They notice things. They notice that the price of things is going up. Just the elite remaining silent about an issue does not make the issue go away. What it actually does is make it seem like the elite doesn't care about that issue. And that vacuum is very dangerous because then it allows people to come along and correctly claim. And here I'll come back to my issue, specifically correctly claim. It doesn't look like the elite care about the problems of poison.

[A]

Is your view that biology is a percentage of it, and then culture is a percentage of it, and both matter? I mean, that's a more nuanced view. And I kind of. You do a nice job of articulating that. I wanted to kind of get you to situate people on that debate.

[B]

Yeah, it's actually one of the things that frustrates me most about this is this idea that somehow acknowledging that there are natural differences, that there are biological differences, means that you're somehow making culture less important. Right? So if you use the traditional language of nature and nurture, well, by saying nature is what matter, that makes nurture less important. I think the opposite is true. I think that because there are these sex differences, culture becomes even more important as a way of communicating to us how to channel those differences, how to express those differences in ways that are good for society, that are pro social. Right? So to make this more concrete, let's take one of the big differences between men and women is that men on average are more risk taking. They take more risks than women. Right, that's just true. Again, on average. Well, given that, what's the role of culture there? And actually the role of culture is to acknowledge that, especially among young men, right? But say, okay, here's a group in our society who, they like to take risks. So do we want them taking risks with their own lives or the lives of others? Do we want them taking risks on crypto or sports betting? Do we want them taking risks with drugs, et cetera? No. Okay, but they are going to take risks. So how about we get them to be entrepreneurs? How about we get them to take risks in the business world? The beauty of a well functioning culture is that it helps to scaffold and channel those differences and those inclinations of men and women in ways that are good for the society. But it won't do that if you deny that they're there in the first place. I mean, denying that men are more aggressive than women is a terrible approach to the prevention of crime. I've really come to believe that the denial of sex difference is doing a lot more harm than good. And that the fear that, that, that those differences will be weaponized by reactionaries is understandable but massively overstated now. And it's now the opposite that's doing more harm. It's the denial of sex differences that's doing more harm now than the weaponizing of them.

[A]

There was one part of the book where I wasn't able to gain as much clarity as I would have wanted, and that is that you maintain throughout the book, you just said it a moment ago, that the kind of men, women, gender resource competition, as it were, is not a zero sum game. It's not a zero sum game. But then at the end of the book, you propose a new model of masculinity, a kind of model in which men are more caregiving in the family. A model in which they go into the heal professions. For people who don't know what heal means, it's healthcare, education, administration and literacy professions. And so it's this kind of new model of masculinity. And you talk about the ways in which there ought to be paternity leave and just other kind of incentives for men to. To and jobs that are more friendly to family life for men. But that seemed to me to indicate that the gender competition for resources is a zero sum game. Namely that men are going to have to change. You see what I mean? In other words, that there's this. They can't do the things that they were going to do. There's a kind of limited way in which they can function in the world. And so they must change to accommodate the fact that the thing that they want to be and do, they can't be and do. And so two questions about that. One, doesn't the necessity as you see it, for men to change indicate that there is a zero sum game? And second, I'm not so sure, at least so sure as you are, that men would enthusiastically embrace, given what you said about biology, the heel professions, that men want to go and be nurses. And you talk about this or that men want to go and sit with, you know, three year olds and give them, you know, Ritz crackers or that. Men that. That's not some affront to their dignity.

[B]

Yeah. And that is a criticism that I have taken very seriously and had leveled quite a lot. So I should say, first of all, I should apologize if there was a part of the book that wasn't clear to you. It reminds me of. So my wife read drafts of the book. She was a very good editor for me. And there was one evening where she would write these written comments down the side. I would print it out and then go to the dinner table and ask her. And one of them, I said, you've just written this line down, this whole page here, honey. And I think it says, opaque boring does not add value. And my youngest son was at the table and looked up and said, are you talking about dad again? But it was just opaque boring. I'll never forget this. Opaque boring does not add value. So I'm like, okay, that's. So you're not the only one. Yes, exactly. And of course she was right. But it was sharp, edited criticism, let's put it that way. I think my point is that just more broadly, the economic rise of women, the kind of success of women, that is not the reason for the failures of men. The Idea, just take the labor market. The idea that more women are working means that fewer men will work. That's just the lump of labor fallacy. It's just economically illiterate. This is not how labor markets work. You just expand and you can have more workers. And I suppose it was part of the persuasive tactic too, because I do think that one of the reasons why people are worried about investing more in kind of boys and men is they somehow think that will come at the expense of investments in women and girls. So, for example, do I want more investment in getting more men into heel professions, into education? Yes. I want public investment. I want philanthropic investment. Do I want less investment about getting women into the areas where they're still underrepresented? No. So there's a lot of work to do, especially women in tech, actually. And you know, we haven't talked about this, but maybe we should have efforts around publishing, too. I mean, publishing is actually at least the publishing industry is as female skewed as K12. Education is.

[A]

Absolutely.

[B]

And so again, I think that's another industry, and journalism and teaching and policing, where I actually think that gender representation really does matter. In aggregate, though, it's win, win. It's better for families if women have more choice and opportunities, and it's better for families if men have more choice and opportunities. I think as a basic axiom, the second one is harder, which is this idea that, and this is what actually Senator Hawley said about my book, is that I'm trying to change men. Rather than changing the labor market to suit men, I want to change men to suit the labor market. I think there's two things to say that one is just, you know what, and I mentioned what a spectacularly amazing president for women's jobs President Trump has been. I think it just tells us that that's just the way the labor market works. That's the way the labor market is going. And this is even before AI it is going into more of these health and social care roles. There are not going to be as many jobs in the traditionally male professions. Not all of them, of course, but that's just true. And I guess what I would say is, yes, it's true that because these jobs aren't as masculine, male coded or as interesting to men, whatever language we use means we won't get 50. 50, sure. But I think as long as the jobs are described the right way and treated the right way, there's nothing inherently undignified about being a man in those roles. You've seen NFL players now going into nursing. There was a good story about that recently. I mentioned my own son who's a fifth grade teacher and an athlete, and he has the kids arm wrestle him at the end of each day and if they beat him, they don't have to do their homework. But as he correctly points out, he's 6 foot 4, 6 foot 5, he would probably claim, and an athlete. Right. So these fifth graders always lose. Right. And I'm sure he's breaking a whole bunch of rules doing that, but he's like a very kind of masculine coded figure. But he's a fifth grade teacher too. And so I think how gendered these professions are is partly how female or male they become. Right. You don't hear people say lady lawyer much anymore. Well, at least I hope you don't. Because this kind of idea that a female, oh, she's a lady lawyer, or I'm an engineer or a lady doctor. I saw a lady. Right. Well, 50%. But we would say male teacher or male nurse. And why? Because they are still in such a minority. And as I said earlier, not just in a minority, but shrinking share. I think the challenge back would be okay, so how was it that in the 80s, when Reagan was president, in the Cold War, 33% of our K12 teachers were men, and now it's 23%. Has something happened to masculinity? Has something happened to make it somehow less dignified for men now than it was then? And if so, what? And I think the thing that's happened is that we've just allowed it to become very skewed.

[A]

You know, schools of education play some role in the fact that teachers are no longer male because schools of education are full of, you know, in some ways a lot of theories that are not really about teaching anymore. And I think the men who like Mr. Wyatt, who love to teach man, Mr. Wyatt loves Shakespeare or Mr. Wyatt loves Faulkner, or him, is that he loved. That's what he loved. He didn't love teaching as a theoretical question, you know, education as an inquiry, a social scientific inquiry. He loved the material. He loved Homer. That's what I love. Right. And I think when you get men interested in books, that's what it is. And unfortunately, education has gone a different direction with respect to how we train teachers and what education is. But let me, let me conclude with you. Tell me, you know, the one or two policy prescriptions that you think would move the needle most, were they implemented.

[B]

Well, I do think the more flexible school starts allowing parents and educators to choose to give kids the gift of more time before starting school, especially for boys, would be huge. The evidence suggests to me quite strongly that because boys are just behind developmentally, giving them that extra time, giving them an extra year of pre K or whatever to catch up, would pay dividends later for sure. We've already discussed male teachers. I want a campaign the same as we had for women in stem. I think it should be a national campaign. I cannot take anybody seriously anymore who says, you know what? We need more positive male role models. And they don't have a policy agenda for increasing the share of male educators. And I hear what you say about, like, we're not gonna get to 50, 50, and it's not for all men, et cetera. But you know what? Some of our presidents, some of our greatest men, were educators. They were teachers in exactly the spirit of Mr. Wyatt and that you just described, right?

[A]

Absolutely. Yeah.

[B]

Actually, men have historically been amazing teachers to their own kids, to kind of everybody. Right. That desire to pass knowledge on and to shape and to equip young people for the world ahead. I could make an argument that that is more stereotypically masculine than feminine.

[A]

Right.

[B]

So more male teachers, for sure. More investment in vocational training, just like apprenticeships, shot class, technical high schools is huge. I do think getting more men into these healthcare and education profess questions will be really, really big in terms of moving the needle. But I've come to realize that, look, I have a whole bunch of. I could bore you silly with some of the policy stuff we're doing, and I'm excited about a lot of it. Using Perkins dollars to get more men into healthcare professions, et cetera. But actually, I've come to believe that this is really a big cultural problem. Come back to the conversation we had earlier about culture and policy, too. That that isn't within easy reach of public policy. And as a public policy scholar, it's always a temptation to define the world within the domain that policy can reach. But I actually think that the sense that so many of our boys and young men have, that they're not in a climate, in a culture that welcomes them for who they are, that gives them a sense of path and purpose. Governor Newsom's men's initiative is called Path and Purpose for Young Men. And that they're needed. That the tribe needs them, that we need you. That we need you and all your skills and all your brilliance, that for all of the changes in the world, you're still incredibly precious to us. And to capture that energy and enthusiasm and sure, some of it is more masculine in its output. Find a good place to put that and make these boys and young men feel like we still need them as much. And that's a cultural thing. It's why I'm so mad at the Boy Scouts for not being the Boy Scouts anymore, right? Becoming Scouting for America and going co ed. And I get it. But Girl Scouts still exist because I do think we need to find ways to culturally communicate to our boys and young men. Not that we're going back to a world where their sisters are going to have fewer opportunities than them or their roles are going to be determined for them, but we're also not just going to jettison them. That we're not saying the future is female, that we're not saying, thanks for the last 10,000 years, guys. We got it from here. We have got to make our young men feel that we still need them. And this, I think is a great link to your work, which is the stories that we tell about boys and men. The stories that boys and men absorb is even more important than the stories that women and girls absorb. Because masculinity, pro social masculinity, what it means to be a man is more socially constructed and the primary construction material is stories. And so the kinds of boys and men we end up with is to a very large extent going to be downstream of the stories that we tell them and that they read and that they consume. I suspect that your work around stories is even more important than perhaps you realize, especially for boys and men. It is those stories that help us to scaffold our way into what it means to be a grown ass man.

[A]

Well, Richard, thank you for that. That's the most moving thing I think anyone's ever said about my work and I really do appreciate that. It means a lot to me. And I want to thank you for what you're doing on behalf of boys and men everywhere and especially as it relates to teaching. And so I encourage everybody. Check out Richard's work. Where can they find a website for the institute you founded?

[B]

It's just aibm.org, as in americaninstituteforboysandmen.org Richard

[A]

Reeves, thank you so, so much for being on Old School.

[B]

Thank you for your work, Shana.