John Donvan

Hi, everybody. I’m John Donvan. Welcome to Open to Debate, and nope, you were maybe expecting me to say welcome to Intelligence Squared. But after more than 220 debates, we are changing our name, and we’re doing it for a very, very specific reason. And I wanted to bring in our CEO, the CEO of Open to Debate, Clea Connor, to talk a little bit more about this evolution. Hi, Clea.

Clea Connor

Hi, John.

John Donvan

I know, Clea, this evolution comes from our thinking things through, and feeling there’s an issue out there in the culture, and that we may be in a position to help address it.

Clea Connor

That’s right. It was really prompted by a couple of alarming trends. One is historic levels of polarization. I think we all feel that. It’s in our communities. It’s in our government. It’s kind of everywhere we turn.

John Donvan

In families.

Clea Connor

In families, so there’s that, coupled with coming out of the pandemic, a historic erosion of trust in institutions. And we think these two vectors present an opportunity for us to step in and provide some insight into conversations that are just further dividing us. We wanted to lean into this messaging about openness. We wanna think more about being open-minded, open to hearing the other side, open to listening, open to being curious, opening to challenging your own values.

John Donvan

Mm-hmm.

Clea Connor

So that’s a big part of being open to debate.

John Donvan

And there’s a three-way thing going on here, in that there’s one side and another side, but then there’s all of you out in our audience-

Clea Connor

Mm-hmm.

John Donvan

… who are listening to these debates. And by definition, you have come to hear more than one side. That’s why we love (laughs)-

Clea Connor

(Laughs)

John Donvan

… having you, and, uh, really interesting thing. Our… We follow stats on this, is that 32% of our audience changes their mind from one side to the other after one of our debates, which tells us what, Clea?

01:54

Clea Connor

I mean, imagine that at scale. It tells us that debate can be a national model for helping us overcome differences, understand where other people are coming from. I think it can drive empathy, and we’re not proposing something new. I mean, debate’s been around… You know, think about Socrates and Plato, and where the ancients used debate to arrive at our democratic values. And we wanna restore those with Open to Debate.

John Donvan

Sometimes even-

Clea Connor

(Laughs)

John Donvan

… our debaters can change their minds (laughs), and that has happened. And that is going to shape the debate we’re about to do now, our inaugural Open to Debate, debate. So back in 2011, we debated the motion men are finished.

Clea Connor

Yes.

John Donvan

It was the title of an article in a book written by journalist Hanna Rosin, but we found out that over the last 10 or so years, she has actually changed her mind on what she was arguing then, and her thinking has evolved. So to kick off Open to Debate, we thought it would be a great idea to go back and see where the public conversation has moved to now, and also to bring Hanna back to the debate, this time to ask the question, “Are men finished, and should we help them?” So let’s get to it. Thanks so much, Clea.

Clea Connor

Thank you, John.

John Donvan

First up, and arguing yes, that men are finished and we should help them, senior fellow of economics at the Brookings Institute, author of the book Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Man is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Richard Reeves. Thanks so much for joining us at Open to Debate.

Richard Reeves

Thank you for having me, John.

John Donvan

And arguing no, that men are not finished and we shouldn’t help them, journalist and host of The Atlantic’s flagship podcast, Radio Atlantic, Hanna Rosin. Hanna Rosin, welcome back to Open to Debate.

Hanna Rosin

Thank you. Excited to be here.

John Donvan

We wanna ask each of you to take a couple of minutes to explain why you’re answering yes or no to our question. So, Richard, you’re up first. Take a few minutes to tell us why you are answering yes, that men are finished, and we should help them. Tell us why.

Richard Reeves

Well, uh, I come at this mainly as a social scientist, and partly as a dad. I have three boys, all now in their 20s. I’ve raised them in the UK and the U.S., so I’m, I’ve seen the world a bit through their eyes, but largely as a social scientist. And so, I’m very much drawn to the data. I, I’m gonna list some data points. I think this is a, an empirical question, as well as an ethical one, and I’m the kind of person who likes to have a good chart or data point for pretty much every question I get asked, including “how was your day” from my wife. And I’m like, well, I don’t know, median, mean. Ho-, you know, how do you want me to present that data? And if you just followed me on Twitter, honey, then you wouldn’t need to ask anyway.

Uh, and so, that’s the mindset that I, I’m bringing to this, and really, it’s just that the data on education, employment, family life for boys and men is sufficiently strong now to suggest that, absolutely, they’re in trouble, uh, and need help. And I’ve been influenced, uh, along this journey by extremely good books that have both quantitative and qualitatively really summarized this very well, including the book The End of Men by Hanna Rosin, uh, which had a big influence on me, and is very interesting to me to see kind of Hanna’s journey away from that. Because I think in that book and the accompanying essay, sh- she did a really good job of kind of summarizing kind of what was happening, but things haven’t gotten better since.

It’s not as if, you know, in the 10 years since, things have, have gotten better. In many ways, they’ve gotten worse, so just a few things that lead me to believe that as a group, it is worth looking at, at boys and men now, and helping them. So, for example, since the turn of the century, suicide deaths among men have increased by about 28%, and there are four times higher among boys and men than they are among women. And the suicide rates only rose for boys and men between 2020 and 2021. For 15 to 24-year-old boys and men, rose by 8% in that year alone, and this is all data collected by the, the CDC.

Fiona Shand, an Australian researcher, looked at the words that men use to describe themselves before taking their own lives through suicide, and the two words that were most commonly used by those men were “useless” and “worthless.” And I think when we have the sorts of levels of suicide we have, not only in this country but in the UK, where it’s the biggest killer of men under the age of 45, and that those are the two words those men are using, we should be paying more attention.

But there’s a whole bunch going on beneath the surface, and again, I’m challenging a bit kind of Hanna Rosin mark one, if you like. But in 1972, women accounted for about 42% of college degrees. This is NCES data, and at the time, we passed Title IX to promote women and girls in education. We created the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, and those movements were hugely successful. Women now account for 59% of college degrees. This is at both, uh, bachelor’s and master’s level. So in other words, we have a bigger gender gap in higher education today than we did when Title IX was passed. It’s just the other way around, and it seems to me that if we thought it was a problem then worthy of addressing, I ha-, we have to really explain why it isn’t also a problem now if the gender inequality’s going the other way around.

In the labor market, many men, especially working-class men and men of color, have seen very difficult economic circumstances. So most men today in the U.S., uh, uh, in 2019 rather, earned less than most men did in 1979. They’ve actually gone backwards economically. Of men with only a high school diploma, a third are out of the labor market. That’s 10 million men, and we see all of this playing out in different ways, in family life and in culture. Does it mean we shouldn’t care about women and girls? Of course not. Do I care about the fact that only a quarter of our representatives are women? I really care about that. Do I care about the pay penalty that mothers in particular have to pay in the labor market? Absolutely, but we can think two thoughts at once. We can do two things at once.

We can care about more than one thing at once, and just as it would’ve been irresponsible, and remains irresponsible not to care about the problems of women and girls as a group, so it would now be irresponsible to fail to care about the problems of boys and men.

John Donvan

Thank you, Richard. And now, Hanna, you’re up. You are answering no to the question “men are finished, and we should help them.” So tell us why.

Hanna Rosin

So this is Hanna 2.0 talking.

John Donvan

(Laughs)

Hanna Rosin

Uh, I understand the irony of me, the author of The End of Men, arguing that no, men are not finished, but I did write that book over 10 years ago. I did debate over 10 years ago, and a lot about my thinking has changed since then. When I used to talk about the book, women would come up to me and say basically something like, “End of men? Are you kidding? Like, what about every single American president, and every head of state, and not to mention all the CEOs?” And I, Hanna 1.0, used to say what Richard now says, “You can have two thoughts at once. You can help men and women.”

But as time goes on, I’ve come to feel that when you sign onto the statement “men are finished,” or “men have ended,” it feels like what you’re saying is that men have lost their power, and that just feels really, really not correct, and increasingly less correct. Like, for example, since I wrote that book, the rise of the old-school he-man autocrat all over the world, a Supreme Court decision that made women, in one day, feel like they pretty much have no power at all, and then a culture shaped by unaccountable tech companies that are virtually all led by men.

So are certain working-class men lost and floundering? For sure. Are certain black men specifically getting crushed? No doubt. But as the resolution says, are men, like, capital M-E-N finished? I just can’t sign onto that anymore.

Now, Richard quotes the same data that I did, the compelling data about college graduations, that women are just much more successful at going to and graduating from college. But a question I’ve increasingly started to ask about that data over the years is, “In the grand scheme of things, like, does it really matter?” If you take that data and stretch it out a few years after college, what happens to those women? And this is where I wanna talk about a study by Claudia Goldin and Larry Katz, who looked at American business school graduates.

And at the point of graduation, the salaries and prospects of these very, very, uh, high-achieving men and women are exactly the same. And then 10 years out, they start to diverge, and then as soon as they have their second child, the women’s earnings pretty much fall off a cliff. And these are the same women who could be masters of the universe. They, they could be very powerful, and they shift all their energy to caretaking.

Now, if men were finished, I argue that would not happen so consistently. We would by now have some infrastructure in place to anticipate this and mitigate it, but instead, I feel like we just keep rece- repeating the same patterns over and over again, and not really looking at them. So yes, college is interesting, but if you just widen the lens 10 to 20 years after, it’s pretty clear that men are not remotely finished.

Now, I wanna look at the second part, which is should we help them. Richard’s book contains some very compelling statistics about male desperation. He talked about suicide rates, just overall how men are more orchid than dandelion, like more fragile, less able to bounce back, which actually, Richard, when I was reading it, made me wonder, like, how did we all collude in this mass delusion that men are strong and women are weak for so long (laughs)?

Um, anyway, I, uh, I think it would be hard-hearted to object to very targeted programs. Like, you find a town that lost a lot of manufacturing jobs, and maybe you boost a vocational program that teaches, like, clean energy skills. But I do object to broad gender-based policy statement that we should help them. For one thing, it feels like we’re perpetuating what political economist Nicholas Eberstadt called “the infantilization of men,” something we’ve been doing for a long time. And I’m… Apologies here to my two sons. Uh, we just haven’t been openly calling it that.

I think when I wrote my book, this idea of men as beleaguered was kind of new and bracing, but now, leaning into that idea, it, it feels counterproductive, because there are whole universes on the internet dominated by people like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson telling men that they are beleaguered. And it’s become this rallying cry that’s destroying our civic life.

So I’m all for structural changes that could help them, help men, but I think they should be gender-neutral and help everyone. Like, let all kids start school at age seven. Make daycare free or affordable. Redefine what a family is. Expand parental leave. Have unions. Have less shame around mental health for boys and girls, but not programs that are targeted by gender, which I think at this point just perpetuate an already-bad cycle.

John Donvan

Thanks, Hanna Rosin. So let’s get into the conversation, and I wanna go back to you, Hanna. Just clarify for us whether Richard is right that things have not gotten better for men since you wrote your book 10 years ago. Are you saying that they have gotten better?

Hanna Rosin

No. Specific things have not gotten better. Things haven’t gotten better for anyone. Like our job market hasn’t gotten better. I mean, the mere fact that women can navigate their way through an incredibly punishing capitalist system doesn’t mean that things are good for them. It just means that they’re a little more resilient at navigating their way through this extremely difficult economic moment that we are all living in. So no, I wouldn’t say things have gotten better. I don’t think you could argue that.

Richard Reeves

I mean, I think things have gotten better for, for some people, especially at the top of society, and that includes, by the way, you know, women at the top of society, including significant increase in the share of women in senior management, et cetera. And I think it’s just true that whi- white, college-educated women have actually, you know, continued to see very significant social and economic advances. Two things I’d respond to. One is that, uh, Hanna’s view about does it matter, and she quotes the Goldin and Katz paper, which is an excellent paper.

And one of the things that was interesting about that paper is that the women who are most likely to step away from the labor market 10, 15 years out were the ones with the highest-earning partners. And so, the women with the most economic power and choice were the ones who stepped away from the labor market for a while, and it did affect their earnings, because we haven’t restructured the labor market. But I do think that adds an important nuance to this, because what it’s showing you is that, arguably, the most economically powerful women in the history of the world were taking time out the labor market because they wanted to care for their very young children. And those who had high-earning husbands were doing that.

Now, I don’t see that as necessarily a horrible step backwards. I think we can actually have a better conversation about the fact that, well, aren’t they lucky to have those choices that so many working-class and middle-class families would kill to have? But I think there’s gonna be a really deep disagreement between us about the so-called man-os-phere, or the reactionaries. Hanna’s already mentioned Andrew Tate and others, and the sort of sense that you are, you know, them telling men, “You’re beleaguered.”

John Donvan

Yeah, take a moment, uh, for people who don’t know who Andrew Tate is, or Jordan, Jordan Peterson-

Richard Reeves

Yeah, okay.

John Donvan

… what they’re out there saying.

Richard Reeves

So most people probably do know who Jordan Peterson is, Canadian psychologist whose book 12 Rules for Life, I think the last time I looked, it sold about five million copies. It’s just become a global phenomenon, speaking in, in part at least, about the fact that young men are struggling in today’s society. And he then, to my mind, gets the diagnosis as to why that’s happening wrong, as well as the prescription. Andrew Tate is a Romanian-British internet influencer who, until he was de-platformed from TikTok, had 12 billion TikTok views. And he posts short-form video content which, at its worst, is just straightforward misogyny. And he’s just been released from Romanian prison, uh, where he and his brother had spent some time for alleged rape and trafficking. So that gives you a sense of who he is. In a representative poll of U.S. teens last year, he was described as the most important influencer on the internet.

John Donvan

So I, I think Hanna is saying that their messaging is problematic, and you’re saying their messaging is problematic.

Richard Reeves

Yeah, but what I’m s-, what I’m gonna go on to say is that we’re creating the market for them. So Hanna’s view is the books like mine or hers, that the point t- to the ways in which boys and men are struggling in society actually fuel the flames of that reaction. I think exactly the opposite. I think that if mainstream institutions don’t acknowledge and address the problems of boys and men, if they’re real, that creates a vacuum in the market into which demons pour, like Andrew Tate and others. We are doing their work for them. Andrew Tate said, “The people who run the world don’t care about boys and men. So when I point out that many boys and men are lost and struggling, they silence me, because they don’t wanna hear the truth.” When Andrew Tate says that, if you go online and you find the suicide statistics, or the college statistics, or anything else showing that actually many boys and men are struggling, and you don’t see mainstream institutions addressing those issues, it makes Andrew Tate sound not-crazy.

John Donvan

Mm-hmm.

Richard Reeves

And so, we are doing their work for them by failing to responsibly and calmly address these issues. We create the market for the reactionaries.

John Donvan

So, Hanna, what I think I hear Richard saying is that the you of 10 years ago and the Richard of today should be hitting on this message that men and boys actually are, um, significantly disadvantaged, um, absolutely, and also vis-a-vis women.

Hanna Rosin

Well, maybe we should address if they are significantly disadvantaged. I mean, I have so many thoughts. What you just said about Goldin, and what you said about Andrew Tate, to me, are related. Like, I hear what Andrew Tate says out of his mouth, but what Andrew Tate and, and Jordan Peterson actually believe is that men should be men, and women should be women. And I don’t know that any sort of, like, specific policy programs are gonna change that. Like, that’s just a worldview that seems to be extremely popular, and seems to be, in some ways, a pervasive cultural force all over the world that we can’t seem to break through, and I would argue is what pushes those upper-class families to continuously repeat that structure where the woman ends up being the one out of, drops out of the workforce, even though they are both making the same degree.

So I just think it’s a little naïve to think that, oh, if we have some policy programs, then Andrew Tate will suddenly become a reasonable person, and all his followers w- would suddenly become reasonable. I think there just hasn’t been enough voice to this idea that, in fact, there is this huge cultural force continuously preventing women and men from actually having equality. Instead, it’s become emotional debate about victimization.

Richard Reeves

Right. So-

Hanna Rosin

So Andrew Tate fuels around, like, who’s, who, he will always find evidence that men are being victimized. I don’t think there’s much that can change that.

Richard Reeves

No. So to be clear about my position on this, I don’t think that the policy (laughs) solutions that we’ll get to are, are what will address this gap in the market we’re creating. I think that just acknowledging it and addressing it… So, for example, like, should the White House gender policy council… And I think, Hanna, you would just get rid of the gender policy council altogether. So, but there’s another view which is that, okay, let’s have a White House gender policy council, but let’s make sure that it’s addressing some issues where the gender gap goes the other way. Right now, we have a gender policy council that only considers gender inequalities in one direction.

And when there are some big gender inequalities that go the other direction, and if it’s true, that truth will be out there. And it allows Tate and others to sort of point to the facts, and say, “Hold on, why are they not talking about that?” And so, what you get is this kind of competition of victims, essentially. And maybe you-

Hanna Rosin

Right.

Richard Reeves

… criticize the feminists for this as well, but it’s like, “No, no, we’re the real victims. Men are getting domestic abuse. Men are struggling [inaudible

]. Men are the ones discriminated against now.” And then you get the women’s groups saying, “No, no, no, women are the victims.” There’s a, there’s either a war on men or a war on women, take your pick. And of course, I don’t think either of those things are true. I just think that there are all different challenges for different people-

John Donvan

Yeah.

Richard Reeves

… in different parts of the situation. But, but Hanna, I wanna push you on this. You said “no gender-based programs.” So that, does it mean you’d abolish the gender policy council, or get rid of all the work for women in STEM?

Hanna Rosin

I think targeted programs, like as specific as you can get, that is better, rather than say, “all men, all women.” You just leave yourself open to hypocrisies, and people pointing out who’s upper-class, and who’s lower-class. Like, as-

John Donvan

Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin

… as targeted as you can get, that would be better. It would be more like… You know, I remember Berkeley once had an affirmative action program, which was incredibly targeted. Like, they actually looked at, evaluated at disadvantage in a, in a pretty minute, specific way. And then, other than that, I think I would lean towards programs that are gender-neutral, the way, say, Finland has all children start at seven, rather than just say boys and girls should start at different.

John Donvan

I, I, yeah, I, I, I think what, what your response to that question addresses, I know you’ve both acknowledged this, that it’s difficult to talk about all men-

Hanna Rosin

Mm-hmm.

John Donvan

… and all women, and we’re sort of stretching credulity by doing that. So it might be useful to try to get into some more specific examples, and I, I’d like to go to Hanna. Richard’s pointing out that in 1972, women represented only 42% of the, um, university student population, and now it’s up to 59%. Well, I came up through an era in which that was considered a problem, and steps were taken to address that. Now that the numbers have flipped, is there a case that something should be done to address the fact that men are lagging in, uh, opportunities in education?

Hanna Rosin

I think it depends what, and which men. Like, it, you know, should there be something done about, say, men from college-educated families who are not getting into colleges at the same rates as women from college-educated families? Probably not. Should there be something done about, you know, honing into what men are interested in, and maybe creating more programs in this or that college, or this or that state school, or making college more affordable, or making it seem like it’s worth men’s time? Sure. Like, it depends on how targeted and specific you get.

I also think we have to address the fact that the skills that make women get ahead in college are possibly hurting them when they get out of college, like the ability to sort of, you know, follow the rules, and sort of get through college is the same thing that, when they get out of college, they pay a high penalty for breaking. It’s just very hard to be still a rule-breaker if you’re a woman, and decide, like, I’m gonna gun it, and I’m just gonna focus entirely on my work. You know, I’m gonna drop out of college. Like, that, that prototype doesn’t really exist for women. So the very fact that they are good at college, it’s like getting the attendance award.

Like, the question is, so what if they are good at college? Like, does it translate into more power, better policies for women, a more equal world, or does it just translate into being good at college?

Richard Reeves

There is a sort of argument that, yeah, women are doing much, girls and women are doing much better in education, but they’re still not doing better in the labor market. And the way I think about that is, you’ve got two wrongs, essentially. You ha-, I think you have an education system now that’s structured in ways that favor women and girls, and a labor market that’s structured in ways that favor men. And there, we should fix both. I think Hanna is more of the view that kind of two wrongs kind of make a right, but the point about this being an empirical question, John, is, like, the single biggest risk factor for dropping out of college, controlling for everything else, controlling for income, Pell status, race, et cetera, is what? Being male, with all the other controls.

So when we assess colleges now for whether, how they’re doing, in terms of college dropout, we control for their gender composition. Because we know that.

Hanna Rosin

But, Richard, don’t you think a structural problem [inaudible

]-

Richard Reeves

And so, why, doesn’t, and doesn’t that make a case for a gender b-, actually helping on colleges, if being male is the biggest risk factor?

Hanna Rosin

No, to me, it makes the case for the structural problem with college, that a lot of professions that were, did not require a college degree now require a college degree. And we’ve allowed that to balloon and happen. So you need six years to become a pharmacist, and you need however many years to become a, a cop, and rise up in the system. It’s like we’ve just allowed college to become a capitalist enterprise, and so, it is required that everybody go to college. And I think that’s the better structural problem to fix than it is to say, “Okay, let’s just lean into that, and make even more people pay even more money to go to college”-

Richard Reeves

[inaudible

]

Hanna Rosin

… “and take on even more debt that they then can’t pay, and have to work, you know, in a labor market which, in which it’s very difficult to”-

Richard Reeves

So I-

Hanna Rosin

… “to make it with debts.”

Richard Reeves

… I agree with a lot. I agree with a lot of what you’ve just said about the problem of the sort of what’s now called the paper ceiling. I don’t know if you’ve come across that term from Byron Auguste. I love that, which is, like, over-credentializing. Um, but I, but I think it’s a different problem. But let, let me put a sharp point on this, Hanna, because it’s very interesting that it’s maybe a bit too horseshoe theory. But there’s a lot of the men’s rights activist types who basically think we should get rid of all the things for women, right? They’re not calling to create things for men, generally. They’re just saying, “Get rid of all that stuff for women. It’s unfair.”

And my view is, no, no, no. Let’s keep the things that help, that are helping women and girls, because they have, still have different problems, but let’s add some interventions that help, you know, boys and men. We do have something like the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education, and we have the American Association of University Women. Would you abolish those? Because they’re gender-based.

Hanna Rosin

That’s true. They have a legacy which, I think it would be dangerous to abolish them. I think whenever you, you tiptoe into these broad topics of men or women, whether you’re abolishing or whether you’re founding, it just becomes a war. Like, it just feeds into a culture war in a certain way. So I wouldn’t take the dangerous step of abolishing them. I would just let them become kind of legends, and sort of ceremonial. And then, what I would actually do is look specifically at where women are lagging or falling behind. Are there specific subjects? Are there specific things? Are there specific holes in the labor market where we have created disadvantages for women, and a similar thing would be true for men?

John Donvan

I wanna move to a sort of, uh, 30,000-foot look at this for a moment, and share with you the fact that when I shared with a friend that we were doing this debate, her response was it sounded crazy to suggest that men are finished, because her response was, “Well, men are still running everything,” basically, talking about political office, talking about executives at companies. And, uh, Hanna made this point in her opening statement, Richard, that basically men are still the bosses. And I’d like you to take that on.

Richard Reeves

Sure. So this is the, what’s sometimes called the, the, the apex problem, because the, if you only look at the top of society, then it’s very clear that there’s a long way to go, in terms of getting greater gender representation. I mean, I already mentioned, like, only one in four members of Congress are women in the U.S. The U.S. is a real laggard in political representation. So the UK, where I’m from, it’s a third of our members of Parliament now are women, up from 5% in 1979. When Margaret Thatcher became prime minister, only 5% of MPs are women. Now it’s a third.

We have seen significant growth in the, the share of women in senior management. So I’d encourage everyone to check out the work of Lean In, uh, on this, where they track over time. A really, really big increase in share of women, uh, uh, uh, up into senior management and into boardrooms, but is there still a work to do there? Sure.

John Donvan

Does that make it hard to say that men are finished?

Richard Reeves

It makes it harder to say that, um, because if you’re only looking at the top 0.1%, or 0.0001% of society, then you do still see those gender gaps. But I think that’s a, a real problem of scale, and I think that the danger is that, if you talk about, only talk about those problems, and you ignore the problems that actually tens of millions of men are act- and actually having, then it feeds into what I, it’s a very, very unbalanced narrative.

Hanna Rosin

I mean, this is one thing I’ve wondered about my book since writing it. Isn’t it much more powerful as a class argument than it is as a gender argument? Like, even if you take your suicide statistics, it is true that, in suicide, men do take their own lives, whereas women more often attempt to take their own lives. So those statistics look different, but the statistics around young women’s desperation, tracking about the exact same dates, sort of around 2019, are pretty bleak also, particularly young women. I just think, like, it’s a class divide problem, and that’s the clean way out of, you know, a book like The End of Men, which I wrote, which is to sub-divide further and more intelligently.

Richard Reeves

I agree with you, but I would say that what that requires us to do is to be able to adopt multiple lenses, to use the term of art around intersectionality. So to take, you know, deaths of despair more generally, including suicide, it’s actually white working-class men (laughs).

Hanna Rosin

Mm-hmm.

Richard Reeves

But if you wanna look at education, it’s black boys and men. If you wanna look at issues around sexual harassment and assault, it’s women, quite cross-class, but especially working-class women facing more harassment in the workplace, et cetera. And so, if you’re saying that here’s a problem, then the question becomes, okay, so who is most affected by that problem? And what you’ll find is that it’s never going to be all women, right, or all men, or all whites, or all black, or all working-class people, or all upper-middle class. It’s always going to be some kind of combination of those, and that’s very important as a policymaker. Because then, what you’re gonna look and say, “Look, what’s really happening here?”

And to put a sharp point on it, for example, like, there are some cities in the U.S. where a huge proportion of the gap in high school graduation between boys and girls is explained by Hispanic boys, right?

Hanna Rosin

Mm-hmm.

Richard Reeves

So there’s some cities where there’s just this very low high school graduation rate for Hispanic boys, actually not so bad for black boys, and actually great for both white boys and white girls (laughs), right? But it’s like a… So what that means as a policymaker is, you should be thinking, “What the hell are we gonna do about helping our Hispanic boys?” In another city, it might be something else. And so, I hear you saying we should put the gender lens down altogether, and only have a class lens or a race lens. And I think that’s wrong. I think we need to keep them all.

Hanna Rosin

So if you take your chapter on red-shirting, which is very interesting policy idea… Should we red-shirt the boys? Which you have written about, and the example you-

John Donvan

Can you ex-, can you explain what that term means for folks?

Hanna Rosin

Yes, sure. Red-shirting means starting boys in school one year later, because it takes into account overwhelming evidence about the neurological development of young boys happening at a slightly slower rate at those ages than it does for girls. And so, boys begin their schooling time with a disadvantage. They’re already one leg behind. So the example you give in your book is an example of a neighbor or somebody you know from Beauvoir whose parents, which is a very fancy private school in D.C., and I’m thinking, okay. If that boy doesn’t go into school that year, he’s gonna have lots of great options. He’ll be at a great preschool. He’ll have his parents at home, which is functionally like, you know, being in a, being educated in school. Like, there are a lot of advantages a kid like that has.

30:40

But if you think about poverty, and what a poor boy who’s asked to stay a year more at home, I have no doubt that that’s a terrible idea, and that actually, the structural fix is not that. The fix is something else completely entirely, which is more expert teachers, and, you know, a better focus on daycare, and the kinds of things that say an education system we all admire, like Finland does, which is everybody starts a little bit later. It just, it, it just never works as a broad gender policy statement.

John Donvan

Did experiences during the pandemic bring stronger evidence to your yes or no position? And, Richard, why don’t you go first?

Richard Reeves

Yeah, I was expecting the shift to remote learning especially to hit boys much harder than girls. Here, I’m gonna, I think, concede quite a big point to Hanna, because actually, the gender gap wasn’t that big in learning loss. There was one, depending on how you measured it. The class gap was huge. And so, it was much more of a kind of the affluent kids and affluent families found a way to go through it. So in some senses, that surprised me. I thought boys would’ve kind of fallen, um, further behind. That said, in higher education, there was a seven times bigger drop in college enrollment for boys in 2020 than for girls.

And so, I worry that the derailment of educational plans, uh, it was bigger for boys and men, and that we haven’t yet seen that play out. And then, the last thing I would say is that, the way the pandemic was treated strengthened my case, precisely because there are so many organizations whose job it is to draw attention to the problems of women and girls. There were many, many, many reports and studies of what the pandemic would mean for women’s employment, for domestic violence, for women’s stress levels, mental health, et cetera. We talked about a she session, which turned out not to be the case, but nonetheless, there was a lot of attention paid to those.

Whereas the fact that men were dying at much higher rates… More than 100,000 more men than women died of COVID. Uh, uh, in middle age, twice as many men died of COVID. The fact that men were just much more vulnerable to the disease really was quite hard to get any attention to at all, because there were no institutions whose job it was to draw attention to that. So there was an asymmetry in the way the impact of the pandemic was being described, and I think that actually strengthened the argument that, if you have a huge institutional architecture that is, quite rightly in my view, drawing attention to the problems of women and girls, and nothing on the other side, that creates the vacuum into which Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson march.

Because men were dying in much higher numbers, and it was quite difficult to get anybody to talk about that fact, except on the men’s rights subreddits, where it was getting a lot of attention.

John Donvan

Hanna?

Hanna Rosin

It did have a huge impact on my thinking. The thing that Richard breezed by, which was the she session as we called it… So what happened was that, around the month of September, 900,000 women dropped out of the workforce, which basically kicked back women’s labor force participation, like, overnight, you know, 30 years. I found the fact that that could happen genuinely terrifying, also enraging. Like, I had a very profound emotional reaction to that, because I thought, really? Like, September, just because kids are going back to school? Like, is there any reason why it has to be the women who drop out of the workforce in that month?

Like, okay, you wanna argue about breastfeeding, or, or young children, but there is no advantage that women particularly have in helping a child through a Zoom call than a man has. It just reinforced to me this idea that, no matter how many women go to college, an dhow much progress we make, unless you get past that phase and actually have women legislating, or try and sort of move these structures or these cultural views, you’re just n- not gonna get anywhere. I know. I hate to think of it as a zero-sum game, but that huge number in that particular month did have a huge psychological effect on my thinking around these issues.

Richard Reeves

I’m gonna refer here to the work of feminist labor market economists deliberately (laughs), like Stephanie Aaronson and Betsey Stevenson, both of whom have written for Brookings on this, in showing that actually, that the employment, it was, it was temporary. The, women’s employment has actually come back at least as strongly, in some demographics a bit more strongly than men’s. So it ended up coming out as a bit of a wash, in terms of the gendered impact, but there is no credible labor market economist now that would say it was a she session.

There was a fear that it was going to be, but it turned out not to be.

Hanna Rosin

Well, we can say it was a temporary-

Richard Reeves

Okay.

Hanna Rosin

… it was more the slap in the face, that you can drop that quickly that fast at any moment. It’s sort of how a lot of people felt about the Supreme Court decision-

Richard Reeves

Yeah, the speed of it.

Hanna Rosin

… that despite all of these institutions to help women, and all of these groups, and all of this advancement, you can just, like, boom, drop out in a minute. It’s just a very unsettling kind of feeling. It makes the whole thing feel extremely ephemeral, and I also would say, this is hard to talk about. It’s not studied, but we do kind of depend and have in the background this idea that women are infinitely resilient. They can drop down. They can come back up. They can adjust to labor market changes, and we, we don’t have that about men.

We’ve asked the first generation of men for resilience. It’s been about a generation and a half that the way that they think of men and manliness has suddenly shifted, because the labor market shifted so quickly. I just don’t know what is okay to expect, like, and how much… I’m being very honest here, like how much sympathy I can call up for this just kind of little bit of resilience that we’re asking for. Like, I remember reporting in these towns when there were jobs, but they just weren’t jobs that conformed to a man’s sense of what a man was.

And now, we have to suddenly rush in and provide a lot of institutional support to help somebody make that little psychological leap, which women make constantly all the time, that we’re not asking of men. I, I just don’t know how to think about this.

John Donvan

Are, are you sort of suggesting that men need to get a grip?

Hanna Rosin

No. I, that is what I’m suggesting, and I’m… You said it, not me. I would never say it. I just don’t know how to think about this question.

John Donvan

Mm-hmm.

Hanna Rosin

There’s just a part of me that feels like, you know, j- just like expecting your daughter to clean up the dishes after dinner, and just kind of, like, letting your son sit. There’s just a feeling like that which makes me resist jumping into these programs.

Richard Reeves

Yeah. Yeah. I, that’s interesting. I, uh, if you talk to young women in particular, their sense of frustration they have, it is, “Get a grip. Get your act together.” And of course, young women now have gotten their act together in a completely different way, perhaps, to previous generations, and maybe too much so, in that sense. One of the interesting arguments I’ve had with people is, they’ve said, “That could be a temporary phenomenon, because as women have just had to do this,” it’s like the immigrant mindset thing. It’s like, you’re gonna have to work hard. You’re gonna have to do better. You’re gonna have to be ready to do everything. Go, go, go. Um, but that might fade, right, that that’s a kind of temporary thing, that there isn’t anything intrinsically more motivated about women than men.

I actually wonder, and here, I’m treading in some dangerous territory, too. But I actually think that the male role, and perhaps masculinity more generally, does have to be somewhat more socially constructed. I think that’s why societies have had rites of passage. You know, they’ve worked very hard to turn boys into men, and in particular, into pro-social men, and it doesn’t happen as automatically. And, uh, the evolutionary psych people would say it’s because of our relation to reproduction, that we don’t have such clear life stages or whatever.

But I have come to believe, and here maybe I do sound quite conservative, that that’s true, and that, actually, you know, boys don’t become men automatically. And that, that the masculinity and the male role is more socially constructed than the female role, um, and that we’re falling down in that task. And if we don’t want the Tates or Petersons or whatever it is, them setting out the model of masculinity, we need better alternatives than just, “Get over yourself. Get a grip.” I understand the instinct, by the way.

Hanna Rosin

Yeah, and I also don’t think it has to be conservative. I think that’s the grand American mistake, is that saying men need to be pro-social somehow is the same as saying men need to get married, or men need to be men and women need to be women. Like, there are lots of other countries and lots of other cultures that have figured out in a different way you can attach a man’s-

Richard Reeves

Like fatherhood, yeah.

Hanna Rosin

… responsibility for children without telling him to get married, or telling the women to get married. There’s sort of 1000 different ways that you can accomplish that without being a conservative.

Richard Reeves

But I think this point about, like, zero-sum, I think we should be honest about this. Zero-sum things are zero-sum. So if we are going to have more women chief executives, and more women in Congress, we need fewer men. That’s, there’s no point, like, avoiding that, but there are many other areas that aren’t. So investing in vocational high schools, for example, which does seem to disproportionately help boys, it’s not gonna be bad for girls, or at a… That will take money. Should we do that? Yes, absolutely. Should we do it specifically because it’s good for boys? Yes, um, in the same way that we might do other things because they’re specifically good for girls.

And on college campuses, should we have, you know, men’s resource centers as well as women’s resource centers? I would say yes. The alt-right would say no, and they’re trying to knock down all the women’s centers using Title IX. So interestingly, Title IX is now, now used, being used very effectively against women’s, uh, initiatives.

Hanna Rosin

And what happens at a men’s resource center?

Richard Reeves

They’re discussing issues specifically related to being a man. Uh, so, for one thing is, that it’s a good way in to get mental healthcare, and maybe some skills, some coaching around study skills, where, you know, male students typically are way behind, uh, women. And it turns out, and here I’m being a little bit anecdotal. This is just based on my conversations with the people who are involved in the tiny number of men’s resource centers, is that actually, what they find is that men are really struggling with their study skills, but they actually find it hard to admit that in more mixed environments. Because they’re already feeling like they’re just doing much worse.

John Donvan

Richard, um, you’ve talked about a number of potential initiatives, um, and you’ve both talked about the danger that these could stoke, uh, gender culture wars, but how do you move forward with some of your suggestions without stoking a gender culture war?

Richard Reeves

Yeah, well, I, I think by starting with the facts, starting empirically. For example, just to, to not speak abstractly about it, if you believe that one of the causes of, uh, boys’ underperformance in education is the drop in the share of male teachers, uh, in K12 education, which has been quite precipitous, and if you believe the evidence, as I do, that actually particularly in subjects like English, where boys are struggling, actually having a male teacher seems to help them quite a bit. And it particularly helps boys from lower-income backgrounds to have male teachers. Then what about policies to recruit more men into teaching, just as we have incentives to get women into STEM?

Let’s do that, and then see if it works. Let’s continue to evaluate it, see what the impact of having more men in, in classrooms is. And as we’ve mentioned Finland, I can mention the fact that, for a while, Finland had a 40% quota for m-, for male primary school teachers, and their results improved. And then they got rid of the quota, because they passed a sex discrimination law, uh, and so, that went away. But it was very interesting kind of period where they actually had deliberate public policy to get more men into the classroom. So see if it works, but that’s the kind of policy that I would, I would say most people would probably be likely to support, frankly.

John Donvan

Mm-hmm. Hanna, do you have any response to that?

Hanna Rosin

Yeah, it’s interesting to me watching how data and policymaking intersect. It’s sort of where do you put the lens? Like, you’re looking for the root of the problem. So if you sort of know that more male teachers will help boys, then, you know, you try and encourage more men to become teachers. But the actual root of the problem is that teaching became a female profession because it was underpaid and undervalued, and so, so you paid everybody a lot less to be a teacher, and you made teaching a much less valued expertise. And so, men fled the profession.

So it’s a little bit like, you know, again, I, I’m speaking in zero-sum terms, but it does seem like the more equitable thing would be to, to make teaching (laughs) a very attractive profession. Then men will come be teachers, and it helps everyone without creating a culture war, or without triggering what happened in Finland, which is that people bristle.

John Donvan

I’m just wondering what message each of you thinks boys are getting today about their masculinity, and are they helpful or harmful? And Richard, I’ll let you go first on that.

Richard Reeves

I think they’re getting a vast range of messages, uh, across that whole spectrum, some of which are, are more hurtful than others. But I, I think the problem here is that it’s sometimes feel the choice is either between toxic masculinity… The problem with masculinity is masculinity, and there, it takes on some of the feel of a puritan theology of original sin. It’s just this thing in you that, if we could get rid of it… Maybe it’s like the appendix. It’s just, like, an obsolete evolutionary hangover, which is mostly harmless, but if it gets inflamed, we can take it out under general anesthetic. But either way, bad thing. The world would be better off without it. I think that’s a horrible framing, hate the term toxic masculinity, think it pushes boys and men away from a productive conversation.

Or on the other hand, you get the kind of reactionary right, which is man up. Take your shirt off. Work out more. Beg-, real men, blah, blah, blah, right, and not much in-between. And, and I think that’s a h-, uh, a very, very unhelpful framing. And in a world where we have much greater gender equality, and most boys and men want gender equality, most parents want gender equality even if they are conservative, but they also know that the world their dad was in, where his masculinity was kind of defined for him, and… “N- n- my dad never thought about his masculinity. He just, you know, got a job n- n- raised us,” it’s, isn’t a helpful in a world where these things are in flux.

And so, I don’t think there’s that much positive messaging out there at all, and back to my earlier point, I think that creates a dangerous vacuum.

John Donvan

Hanna?

Hanna Rosin

This is where I feel somewhat hopeful, because what I lean into is the increasing ubiquity of gender fluidity, and a sense that what gender is and how strongly we hang onto it, and cleave to it, there is a very prominent alternate view out there, which is that people slide along the gender scale. They slide along the sexual scale, and that people also understand that’s very threatening to a lot of people. And I’m talking about, why are we having this huge debate about trans rights, when it’s not an enormous percentage of the population? It’s because it gets at these things that we’re talking about here, which is, can you break this really, really strongly held order of sort of what masculinity is, and what femininity is, and just, like, loosen it up a little bit?

I think that’s the hope for them, is to be less afraid of tapping into things that were con- considered traditionally feminine, traditionally masculine, and all of that just relaxing a little bit, whether it mean in, you know, roles in raising a family, roles in how you talk, roles in how you dress, or whatever it is. I think that is very positive, though dangerous to many people, but positive to me.

John Donvan

All right. Well, let’s move into our closing round, in which each of you gets to make a summary statement of a couple of minutes, and, um, Hanna, since Richard went first for our opening statement, you have the floor. Tell us again why you’re arguing that men are not finished, and we shouldn’t help them.

Hanna Rosin

I wanna talk about a time in my child’s elementary school when the principal, who was a very, uh, high-achieving principal, she decided that she wanted to close the achievement gap. Now, she didn’t say much about what the achievement gap was. She didn’t say, “Oh, you know what? The Latino boys in our school are doing much worse than the white boys,” or, “The black boys are doing better than the Latino boys,” or anything like, because that language naturally puts us in a sort of fight state. It, it puts us in a culture war state. So she avoided that language up front. She just said, “Hey, we want everyone to be able to achieve equally,” which is something we can all sign onto.

So how did she achieve that? She started to do very targeted testing, and she noticed that, in third grade and in sixth grade, there was a particular cohort of Latino boys who were doing worse in a couple of different subjects. And then she internally hired a lot of resources to bolster that, and within three years, she had pretty much closed the achievement gap, and could brag about that publicly.

So I think what I am advocating for here is that we can do very targeted help, and it looks different. Sometimes, we’re emphasizing class. Sometimes, we’re emphasizing a gender difference. We’re doing it in certain places, for some classes and not other classes. It’s not putting gender off the table, because I think if you sign onto a blank statement, “Men are finished. Men need help,” you end up essentially signing onto something that just feels false to people, and is likely to be more incendiary than helpful.

John Donvan

Thank you, Hanna. And Richard, you have the final say here. Your rebuttal, please, as to why men are finished, and we should help them.

Richard Reeves

On a whole range of objective measures, education, family, employment, many boys and men are really struggling. On a whole series of other objective measures, many girls and women are objectively struggling. And I agree that we then have to look at that additionally through the lens of class and race. We’re not talking about all boys and men, any more than we were talking about all women and girls. But I think we’re at a point now, given the recent trends, where we face a choice. We either have to say we’re not going to look through the gender lens at all, because we think other lenses of class and race are more, are more useful as a group, or I think we have to look at both.

The worst of all worlds is the one we’re in right now, which is where we say the objective evidence that women and girls are struggling justifies institutions and policies that are gender-based, that are very clearly targeted for women and girls, and have nothing on the other side of the equation. So we are right now in the worst of all worlds. We’ve either got to abandon the idea of gender-based policies, and caring about women and girls as a group altogether, or boys and men as a group altogether, or we have to level the playing field. We have to balance the scales. If we don’t do that, and there are real problems facing boys and men, and they only see us addressing the problems of women and girls, that creates a reaction, and the reaction will be potentially much worse than any of the policy solutions that I’m suggesting here.

John Donvan

Thank you, Richard, and that concludes our closing round, which means it wraps our debate as well. And I just wanna say, uh, Richard and Hanna, um, thank you so much for approaching this debate, each of you with an open mind, and for bringing really thoughtful disagreement to the table, in short, for being, as we say now, open to debate. Richard and Hanna, thank you so much.

Richard Reeves

Thank you.

Hanna Rosin

That was great.

John Donvan

And thank you for tuning in to this episode of Open to Debate. You know, as a nonprofit, our work to combat extreme polarization through civil and respectful debate is generously funded by listeners like you, by the Rosencrantz Foundation, and by Friends of Open to Debate. Open to Debate is also made possible a generous grant from the Laura and Gary Lauder Venture Philanthropy Fund. Robert Rosencrantz is our chairman. Clea Connor is CEO. Leah Matthau is our chief content officer. Julia Melfy and Marlette Sandoval are our producers. Gabrielle Ianacelli is our social media and digital platforms coordinator. Andrew Lipsen is head of production. Max Fulton is our production coordinator. Damon Whittimore is our radio producer. Raven Baker is events and operations manager, and I’m your host, John Donvan. And we will see you next time.