TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 71

Grant: My guest today is Dr. Richard Reeves. Richard is senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and director of the Future of the Middle Class Initiative. His research focuses on the middle class, inequality and social mobility. He recently published a book called Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It.

Much of our discussion today will focus on topics emerging from that book, but we'll cover a range of topics. Richard, welcome to the podcast.

Richard: Thank you for having me on.

Grant: The thing that's important for people to understand is that men are facing two social pressures that are challenging their economic prospects.

So first: increasing return on college, and men are much less likely than women to go to college. That's one issue.

The second: jobs available for non-college educated Americans are much more likely to be occupations that are typically oriented towards women.

So, we'll try to cover both these areas and then a number of other things.

Men are being squeezed on both sides, both less likely go to college, and the jobs are available for people that don't go to college are much less oriented towards men, including nursing and other healthcare occupations.

When I mentioned to my friends and colleagues that roughly 60% of all college students are women, they're often very surprised; they don't realize this. Why is that? Why has the "men-in-college" crisis not risen to public consciousness like other high-profile outcomes and disparities?

Richard: Well, there's an institutional answer to that, which is it's nobody's job to draw that fact to anybody's attention. If it was the other way around, there would be organizations, institutions, agencies galore whose job it is to draw attention to gender inequalities when they run the other way. And I don't want to be heard as criticizing that work at all. It's important work, but there isn't somebody.

I'll give you a personal example. Actually, one of the things that led me towards the book was looking at these trends and seeing that they weren't getting attention. So, in 2020 there was a drop in college enrollment, but really only for men. There was a seven times bigger drop in college enrollment in 2020 for men than for women. And I found that in Table Two of Appendix Three of the National Center for Educational Statistics. And I literally walked around Brookings with this table to everybody I knew who worked on higher education saying, "Did you know this?" All of them said no.

Grant: So why was Covid most impactful on men? It seems like that's a Covid issue, right?

Richard: There's a general drop, and actually I originally wondered, it seems to be a bit of a mixture of supply and demand. So I think that it was easier for some men to just say, "Okay, fine. Never mind. I won't do that now, then." So, they were more like to delay.

But also, there was a supply side aspect to it, which was that more of the courses that men do at college require you to be physically present. So, there's a particularly big gap. There's a 15-percentage-point gap in community college enrollment for men. Part of that was because it's hard to do HVAC training or automotive engineering or whatever online, whereas more of the courses done by women were able to carry on online. So there was both a supply side and a demand side effect.

Now that's by way of explanation of what was going on. But the point is that no one was talking about it. Then the Wall Street Journal did pick it up and start doing some more work on it. But there is a national coalition on girls and women in education and very many similar organizations whose job it is to be really scouring these statistics and pointing out these inequalities when they run the other way.

And there just isn't the equivalent on the other side. And so that does create a bit of an asymmetry. So you can create quite a lot of surprise just by getting one graph like that or one stat like that, which is a pretty big stat. And you're right, that it's not talked about very much.

Grant: We also know that boys or men, once they're in college, are less likely to graduate.

So, something very interesting happened at the University of Pittsburgh. Our school of nursing was just named a top nursing school for men. It was not exactly clear to me what that meant. I think we're a great nursing school. I was not sure what we specifically do to make it more likely that our male students succeed.

So, in your sense, what would a top nursing school for men do to make sure that men were more successful in graduating from the school? And more generally, what would a top university for men look like? What would they do?

Richard: Who gives that award? I'm fascinated by that.

Grant: I was actually just trying to look it up. It's the American Association of Men in Nursing. It's the one that you mentioned in your book. If I'm getting that wrong, I apologize to the organization.

Richard: It's alright. Everyone can just fly across the keyboard and Google, fact check us in real time. That sounds right.

So, the first thing is to point out that you are right. The crude way to put this is there's a 10-percentage-point gap in college enrollment, but there's also a 10-percentage-point gap in on-time college completion, in other words, four years after enrolling in a four-year college.

And even as you go further out there's a gap in completion rates. So, men are much less likely to enroll, but, condition of unenrolling, much less likely to complete. In fact, being male is the single biggest risk factor for dropping out of college, controlling for everything else. Bigger than race, bigger than socioeconomic background.

And so, there's this huge dropout issue too. And then when it comes to what does it mean then to be a more male-friendly campus, what does it mean to help men stay on the campus? I think there is a number of things that we should be thinking about. But specifically in areas where men are underrepresented, like nursing, which you pointed to, I think is incredibly important to have more faculty who are male. Ninety-five percent of nursing faculty are female. And so, if you see a course that is taught, it's almost exclusively by women. It's just harder to persuade men as a course for them. That creates an environment in the classroom that's just going to be tougher for them if they're also in a minority. So, if you're in a minority anyway, and then there's almost no one who looks like you teaching the subject...

So, I would be all about significant affirmative action on the faculty side in terms of something like those areas where men are underrepresented. In other areas, now taking a step back and thinking more broadly, I think addressing issues of mental health generally on campus is obviously a big one, but specifically making sure that men are able to access those mental health services, which again is partly about making sure there are men offering those services. If you look at psychologists under 30 now, only 5% of them are male.

Richard: So, there's this huge shift. I mean, psychology used to be gender-equal in the eighties, but it's been hugely skewed now towards women. And I think if we want more young men especially to be turning to the services [that] are available to them, we shouldn't assume gender neutrality is the right-way approach when it comes to hiring the staff.

Grant: Right. Would you argue that a DEI office at a major universities should include men as one of their populations of interest? Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office.

Richard: I do. And especially when it intersects with things like with race but also class. The thing that's very often not talked about in all of this is class. I mean, if you come from a really, really poor background – you might be a white guy, but if you are the only person from your neighborhood, then you face huge barriers: cultural barriers, skill barriers, et cetera.

So yeah, I would add that, but it's also incredibly important to look at how these different identities intersect. If you are a first-gen, white, working-class guy from Appalachia and you've gone to University of Pittsburgh, I would respectfully suggest that you're going to have at least as much difficulty on that campus as a privately educated – someone who went to Sidwell Friends in Washington, DC as a black woman. And that's not to suggest that she won't have some problems, but it is just to suggest that we shouldn't assume that he's not going to have problems.

Grant: Right. So, in what ways is the pre-university educational system geared against boys, both in terms of getting into college and then being successful once there?

Richard: Yeah, so the hard truth here is that most of the gaps that we see in terms of college enrollment and completion can be predicted by what's happened in K-12. So, whilst I do think higher education can do a lot better than it's currently doing on this front, we have to recognize the fact that there are these huge gaps earlier, especially in things like GPA, risk of exclusion, and so on.

And so, I think there are some key ways in which the K-12 education system is structured in a way that on average – let’s just take for granted unless we say it's not on average, everything we say here is on average – structured in ways that disfavor boys. And I would focus on two or three.

One is that boys develop somewhat later than girls. That's in all the culture war fights about neuroscience. There's no debate about the fact that boys mature a little bit later in terms of many of their key skills, especially in adolescence. So, they're just younger. A 16-year-old boy is younger than a 16-year-old girl, developmentally speaking, so he's at a disadvantage, everything else equal.

The teaching profession is one of these professions that's become steadily more female. And so, now only 24% of K-12 teachers now are men. Only one in 10 elementary school teachers are men. Most elementary schools have no males. And there's pretty good evidence that having a male teacher helps, especially in subjects where boys are struggling, like English, which actually, interestingly is a subject men are least likely to teach. So, men are less likely to teach and then least likely of all to teach English.

And the last thing I'd point to is the imbalance between abstract learning styles and applied learning styles. The sitting still in class, learning abstract concept stuff, paying attention, mostly intellectual stuff tends to favor girls a bit more than boys. Boys to tend to a bit better with their hands. And so, the underinvestment in vocational learning, technical high schools, and then later apprenticeships, everything else equal, really does put boys at a disadvantage to girls. There's been a real fear of tracking and shop class and so on in U.S. high schools, and I understand the history of that, but the present reality is that the underinvestment in those sorts of classes is really hurting the boys.

Grant: Do you think the growth that came in the wake of Covid and homeschooling could be a net good for boys, especially the growth in black homeschooling? I don't know if you've seen this, but the growth in homeschooling after Covid was most pronounced among black families.

Richard: Yeah, I saw that. What I don't know is how long that will last. It could stick, of course, but it was an interesting reaction against some of what was happening around school closures, because of course black families were much more likely to be in places where the schools stayed closed for a lot longer. And so, I see that partly as a reaction on the part of black parents. Just this, "You can't go on like this." [They] retreated in a sense. Whether that will stick or not, I don't know.

And I honestly don't know enough about the evidence on homeschooling – there’s obviously been such huge selection effects historically around that – as to know whether or not there's a difference in the gender outcomes.

It's an interesting empirical question, right? We see these big gender gaps in education, generally. I don't know if the gender gaps are narrower for kids who've been homeschooled. And of course, as I said, how to do a good study on that is a bit of a head scratcher, given the selection effect, but it's an interesting question.

Grant: We noticed during Covid the sitting in front of the computer watching class was terrible for my son. I think it was bad for everybody, but terrible for my son. My daughter responded a little bit, and they're different ages, but we homeschool kids now almost completely. And I've noticed in many ways it's actually good for my son, because in the middle of the day he's getting squirrelly, and we go outside, and we toss the football for an hour, and then we do a lot more. I'm just able to tailor it to him.

So it's just sort of something that popped into my mind as I was thinking about how my son...

Richard: Well, yeah. One of the pushbacks I get around some of my ideas in education policy, including starting boys later, et cetera, is that what people will say is, “Actually, if we could just tailor the education system a little bit more to individual needs, we wouldn't need these broad-brush, crude policy changes.”

And I agree with that. It's just very hard to do that in institutional settings, especially when they have scarce resources. So, to the extent that you can tailor at home, everything else equal, that should predict better outcomes for boys.

Grant: We know that there's a huge income return on college. We know that people that haven't gone to college, their wages have been at least flat, but probably have gone down in the last 50 years or so. And we know that women are much more likely to go to college. However, this pay gap mystery remains.

Why then is there this persistent pay gap between men and women if women seem to be faring better in a postindustrial economy?

Richard: Well, partly, of course, it is still a lag. We need some of these changes to play through the labor market. Women's educational advantage – it’s not new actually, it's been around for a decade or two now – still needs to play all the way through the labor market.

But what it means is that the story behind the gender pay gap can't be one of educational differences. You can't explain it through educational differences, obviously. But nor is it actually really a discrimination story. It's not, the employers are paying women less for doing the same jobs as men. It's really a parenting story.

So, the very top line summary of this is that the gender pay gap is a parenting pay gap. And almost the majority of it now can be explained with that. And then the remaining, let's say, two thirds of the pay gap can now be explained by the differences in the impact of having children on men's and women's labor market participation. Essentially, women's wages are basically tracking male wages now until about the age of 30. And then something happens to women about that point and you just see the lines and it's like a meteorite hit the earnings curve, whereas men's keeps going up. Because women take time out for labor. And so that's the main reason. And that doesn't mean it's not a problem, but it means if it's a problem, then it's a very different kind of problem.

And so, we've successfully born down on straightforward discrimination. It's not that there's none left, but that's only a small part of the story.

Now, women have actually overtaken men terms of education. And so the remaining two big things are women still working in occupations where the pay is not great – including in some where they need quite high levels of education. We've already talked about teaching, but teachers don't make great money, but they've got a lot of education and there are others, same with social work, same with some of the other areas we've discussed. And those are female dominated, so that explains some of it.

But it's mainly this: if you have kids, it affects you. And what's actually really nice about some of the latest social science that we've got increasingly good data on same-sex couples. And what's nice about that is it allows you to see when they have kids – and it's mostly women; men in same-sex couples don't tend to have kids as much – you can see that the impact on the earnings of the stay-at-home partner is just the same as it is for a woman in a straight relationship.

And so that's very good face-value evidence that this is really about the distribution of labor around caring for kids, and therefore a very different kind of challenge, a different kind of problem – if it's a problem at all. Some people would say, "Well, that proves it's not a problem, right? Women are choosing to stay at home with their kids, so they earn less; where's the problem?" And other people would say, "Well, why is that? Why is it so gendered?" But at least we're having a proper debate then.

Grant: Well then, I'll just ask you the question directly: is it a problem?

Richard: I think to the extent that it's the result of genuinely substantive choice. The fact that you pay a price in the labor market for caring for your children is as it should be. Let me say that really bluntly, because if you had a world where having children had no effect on your labor market outcomes, then I would suggest there is either something pretty wrong with the family or something very inefficient about the labor market.

I mean, it seems like something would have to be quite screwy there if taking proper amounts of time out of the labor market to care for your children or having to put higher priority on your kids than on some of your earnings didn't affect your earnings; then something's gone badly wrong with the labor market.

But I would say two things. One is I think that we could reform labor market institutions so that the tradeoff isn't as sharp. I do think the prices the parents pay is too high because we haven't reformed some of our labor market institutions enough. We're still a bit stuck on the buy one, get one free model of the worker when you had someone at home. So, I think there's a lot we can do to reduce the trade off, the price that's paid, not to eliminate it. I definitely suffered a labor market penalty from taking time out to look after my kids. And so I should have. In a sense, even the word "penalty" is probably the wrong word, right? I earned less.

But I also think we should examine why there's such big gender difference in that. And I think as far as very young children are concerned, the evidence is pretty strong. That's the result of real choice. I can't look at the evidence any other way, but I would like to see men being able to and willing to take more time out to care for their kids, especially as they get older.

Grant: Yeah. So, I'll return to this question actually a little bit about gender differences in biological gender differences and how that impacts this. But I'll return that question in a second.

So I want to talk a little bit about employment prospects of men as we move from an industrial economy to a service economy. I think that's one of the very central stories of what's going on, so would it be more accurate to rename your book "Of Working-Class Boys and Working-Class Men"?

Richard: It wouldn't be inaccurate. It would certainly underscore the fact that if you're looking to where are these problems that we've already addressed, where are they to be found? Much more so among working-class men. Almost every one of these trends is really working-class men or black boys and men. So, that's the other part. There's a racial dimension to this too, for sure.

But I also believe that some of the challenges – although they may not show up quite as clearly in some of big data numbers, like the labor market staff, the health trends, education – that there is nonetheless a broader challenge for men. Even those who are from backgrounds of privilege who do have high levels of education, economic power, they, and here I should probably say, we, are still nonetheless having to renegotiate what it means to be a man, what does it mean to be gender equal, but also have these different roles, et cetera.

And so, whilst I don't think that those challenges spill over into some of the deeper social and economic problems and pathologies that we've discussed, I nonetheless think some of the questions about masculinity and about what it means to a man are being asked at every level of society. It's just that men with more resources are able to come up with better answers and negotiate this new world without paying such a high price.

So, I think it's just more a question of men with power. I think I say in the book, “equality is easier for the affluent.” Men with power and resources are somewhat insulated from the downside shocks of the questions, but the broader cultural questions I think are more universal.

Grant: Interesting. So, do you see a future in which working-class black men and working-class white men might come together under class interests?

Richard: Yeah, I think we might even be starting to see that in some of what's happening in terms of political affiliations so on, too. But yeah, I think that so many of the issues that white working-class men are having now are very similar to those that black working-class men are having or have been having for much longer.

And particularly around things like family issues. The percentage of births outside marriage, being in a relatively weaker economic position than the mother of your child: that's not new for black men. But it's increasingly common now for white working-class and lower-income men. And so the radical shift in the economic power relationship between men and women is something where that's shared, but much more generally the shock from the economy.

And I was really struck by the fact that the Infrastructure Bill, for example, 70% of the jobs are going to go to men and actually disproportionately men of color, but working-class men, so white working-class men, Hispanic working-class men, black working-class men. And one of my frustrations was that no one in the administration was willing to say that. God forbid that they should say, "This is good for working-class men." But again, it was a good indication of the fact that the economic interests of black, actually Hispanic and white working-class men are really quite strongly aligned and many of the social and economic trends that they're dealing with are very similar. And I think we're starting to see perhaps some of those lines breaking.

I mean, it was very striking to me in the midterms – and here let's not get into politics – but in the midterms, we did see a big gender gap. And, in fact, Ron DeSantis's thumping win – which got a lot of attention because he picked up a lot of Hispanic votes – I was struck by the fact that his winning margin among men was four times bigger than among women. He had a 28-point margin among men as opposed to seven among women. And so, there's just a huge difference and that has to be that he was picking up the votes of black and Hispanic men as well as white men.

Grant: Right, and we'll return to these political questions in just a little bit. But one thing that struck me as I interviewed – I don't know if you know Gabe Winant, but he's a historian at University of Chicago, very interested in this transition from manufacturing to service industry. And he made an argument that I think is pretty compelling – and you're making something similar here – that the demographic and epidemiological trends that Case and Deaton were identifying, he argues is just a lag of the white working-class catching up with what had been happening in the black community, say in the 1980s. So he equated the opioid epidemic with the crack epidemic, and I thought that was pretty compelling.

Richard: Yeah, that is interesting. I think there are a lot of these issues. I know more about the family policy side of it, where the simplistic data point here is that rates of single parenthood among white families are at the level today that they were among black families when Moynihan wrote his famous report on the black family.

And so, to the extent that he was looking at what was happening to the black family then, it's true of white families now, too. And in fact, rates of single parenthood have basically leveled out particularly among black families. And so, all the growth in recent decades has been among white families. So, I agree.

And I think that particularly around issues around fatherhood, family, labor market, position, et cetera, there are many aspects of black masculinity that predict some of what's happening to whites. One, exception being incarceration; that's a big exception, of course.

I remember talking to a black friend of mine and talking about the whole issue of toxic masculinity. He's like, "Well, we may not have used that exact term," he said, "but black men have been accused of toxic masculinity for as long as anybody can remember." "Super predator," "wolf pack," et cetera, whatever term you want to use, that actually masculinity was pathologized among black men basically forever. Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about this historically and so on, but, and it's one of the reasons why I have a whole chapter on black men, because I think that there's something quite unique about the way in which masculinity has historically been, I would say, pathologized among black men. And maybe we're seeing some of that start to be affecting other men too.

Grant: Yeah. So, would it be better for men in a post-industrial economy to get more men to college or culturally deemphasize the bachelor's degree in the labor market?

Richard: Well, I want to do both. I know that's a really weak classic academic answer. "Well, it's a false choice. Let's do both." But I do think we can do more to help. I hope some of the reforms we've talked about would get more men to and through college, but I also agree that alternative routes to decent paying jobs are hugely important.

And I actually think there's a big gender dimension here because I think it’s especially important for men. And so, I don't actually think that we are going to get back to 50/50 in the standard college route. I actually think that would be unrealistic, frankly. I think girls and women have a structural advantage that's not going to get wiped away without massive affirmative action for men, which you're not going to see.

So, I don't want to keep seeing the lines going the way they're going. I do think there are men who could benefit from college who are not going. But I also see the investing in apprenticeships, community colleges, vocational training is hugely important to improving the prospects of a lot of learners, but especially men and especially working-class men of all races. And it's a source of great frustration to me that the Apprenticeship Bill, which would spend one and a half billion dollars to create a million new apprenticeships is stuck in the Senate, and has been for over a year, and probably will stay there, partly because of these incredibly arcane policy disagreements between Democrats and Republicans, but also frankly because the Democrats aren't as enthusiastic about apprenticeships in some ways because 90% of apprentices are men. So that seems a real problem with apprenticeships. I don't see that as a bug. I see it as a feature. And so. I think more investment, apprenticeships, technical high schools, more alternative route for sure. We should absolutely be deemphasizing the "college for all" message.

The only reason I get reluctant about that is whenever I hear people saying that college isn't for everybody, I always ask them, "what about your kids?" Because there's a bit of a tendency to say “College isn't for other people's kids, but it's always for my kids.” And until we get past that, I'm always going to worry a little bit that we are benching people and we're just saying, "Oh, well, you know, college isn't for them." And I don't want that to happen to working-class boys at an unfair level.

Grant: Although, I will tell you, within this little community that I run in, folks that have gone to college are actually beginning to de-emphasize college for their boys. In fact, I have three friends off the top of my head who all went to college, have master's degrees and all their boys are working for contractors now.

I don't see it as a movement, but I wonder if people who are in the know are starting to say, "I don't know why I'm paying for this."

Richard: Well, I mean, that could be true for girls as well, of course. “Why am I paying it for my girls?” And it's a really difficult balance, this. I don't quite know what the right balance point here is, but, on the one hand, I think it's great if people find alternative pathways and don't have to get stuck on the four-year track. But I'm also really worried that we'll get to a tipping point where we just start to say, “Well, college isn't really good for boys.”

I'm worried about this tension in my own work, honestly. But it's like, “yeah, it's not really for boys." And the more female-dominated college gets, and the more the female advantage opens up in high school and beyond, the danger I think, is that the very idea of academic excellence starts to be seen as feminine. And it's not, and then you've got an identity problem. And so, I don't want it to become an identity problem, which might be happening a little bit. I don't want us to give up on the idea that universities and colleges can serve boys and men better, and just say, “Well, we're not just going to put them there,” because then I don't think the future will be great.

Grant: You do argue in your book that we should get more men into the HEAL professions. The HEAL is “Health, Education, Administration and Literacy.”

So, what would your response be to the following statement? (And I'm going to carry this into a couple more questions.): “Biologically, men are more oriented toward things, women, more oriented toward people.” I know that's a controversial statement.

Richard: No, I don't think it is.

Grant: Okay.

Richard: I think it’s just a true statement. It only becomes controversial in a world where we deny that there are any differences at all between men and women, which is a world that only crazy people live in. The question is, what is the difference in the distributions on those dimensions?

We said earlier, everything's on average, right? One of the differences between men and women on average is that women tend to be a bit more interested in people and men a bit more interested in things. And so that's going to affect occupational choice. And, interestingly, in the most gender-egalitarian countries, in Scandinavia, there are actually fewer women pursuing STEM careers than in other countries. And I think the only sensible interpretation of that is that you can get to a point where people are choosing what suits them best.

But, so, what that means is that if you take STEM as the opposite of HEAL, will we get 50% women and men in certain STEM professions like engineering, computer science, given that average difference?

Answer: No. Similarly, early years education, nursing, et cetera: will we get 50% men into those professions? No. But could we do better than 3%, which is the current share of men in early years education? And what is the pattern here? I can't remember who said this, but somebody said, “Many of our problems stem from the inability of people to think about overlapping distribution.”

Grant: Oh, right.

Richard: And that's what we're talking about here. We're talking about overlapping distribution. And so, my middle son is an educator and he's very high on the people-oriented dimension. My youngest son is more classically masculine, so he's very thing-oriented, et cetera. And the other one's probably somewhere in the middle. I don’t know. They're male, but they are more people-oriented. So, should they get equal access to those professions? You bet.

How I'd interpret it is by saying that we should therefore be humble about the fact we're not going to get to 50%. But I'm also very struck by the fact that people will use that biological difference, “Oh, well, men are more into things than into people,” and they'll assume a binary rather than overlapping distribution.

I've heard people like Jordan Peterson, for example say, “Only 5% of engineers are women, but women aren't into engineering. They're more into people. Women are more into people than things.” That was 5%. It's actually 15% now, nearly 20%.

I’m sure Jordan people said the same thing about women in politics. When Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister, 5% of British MPs were women. Now a third of MPs are woman. We've just got to be very careful not to overweight the biological differences, but we've also got to be careful not to imagine that they don't exist and think everything has to be 50/50 before we're an equal society. And that's the middle ground that I'm trying to hit here.

Grant: We'll talk about nursing schools since that's where I'm professionally located. We were at 9%, I forget, maybe, 10 years ago. We're at 11% now, and we are pretty excited about that. If I were talking to my dean, what should I tell her is the proper goal in terms of the distribution of men and women? I know you just said 50/50 is not reasonable, but what do you think we should be aiming at?

Richard: 30%.

Grant: Okay. Why that?

Richard: So, I'm drawing a little bit on some work by the psychologists Rong Su and James Rounds, who actually took the people-things difference in personality between men and women and then mapped that onto the occupational structure. And what they did was something really neat. They said, “Okay. Let's imagine a world where these differences were playing out perfectly in these occupations,” and then they assessed the occupations for how people-y or thing-y they were. (I’m sure they use better language than that.) And one of the areas they looked at was health sciences, and that included a whole range of things, not just nursing, but it's close. They said in a world where people were choosing freely, and a world who has overlapping distributions, it's something like 25 to 30% of those professions would be male. And by the way, about the same number of engineers would be female.

Grant: Interesting.

Richard: So, it's not fifty. But it's not five. And there may be some professions where you're just going to get really skewed on different dimensions.

So take – well, I'll come back to deep sea fishing in just a second. But, so I would take that study and I'd say, “Look, if nursing's a bit more of a people-oriented thing…” First of all, it could be sold as more thing-oriented. There's a lot about the way it's marketed, but assume that we're actually selling it correctly. We've done all the faculty stuff, et cetera. What's a reasonable number to think would reflect actual choice where there's no other barriers? I would say 25, 30%.

The other area is deep sea fishing, which is incredibly dangerous. Some colleagues said to me the other day, and I mentioned that deep sea fishing is still 99% male or something. One of the women said, “Yeah, you can have that one.”

Grant: Exactly.

Richard: It actually turns out there just aren't very many women that want to go out on an incredibly dangerous voyage out into artic waters and risk their lives to get some fish. And that's probably a dimension where the overlap is pretty small and where the incentives are much lower.

Grant: So then, what could our nursing school reasonably do? And you've mentioned this a little bit. You mentioned more men as professors, but that's a long term solution. I mean, you’ve got to get people through PhDs, you’ve got to convince them to do the PhDs…

What in the short term? Is there anything that you could see that's reasonable for a nursing school to do in order to get more men?

Richard: I do think working on that pipeline issue is incredibly important. So, although you say it's a long term solution that's a reason to start now rather than wait, precisely because of that. And in the meantime, as I say, to proactively seek out and give preferential treatment to male applicants for faculty and professions in just the same way.

There's a two-to-one preference for women in STEM faculty hiring, everything else equal. It's a strong affirmative action, not official, but unofficial. Obviously, we can't break any laws here, and I just want to go on the record and say I'm not suggesting that the University of Pittsburgh Nursing School breaks any laws.

But also, just finding support groups. And maybe you do some of this already, I'd be interested to know, and funding those networks, those support groups, outreach into other programs, outreach into high schools, male nurses going into high schools. Fund those programs; that's relatively inexpensive.

What's the great feminist slogan? “You have to see it to be it.” Apply that to how we're thinking about nursing and even something men think about or boys think about.

And I would lastly say, and look, here's where you'd need money, but if there was a way to offer scholarships to men who want to do nursing, and they would be often in it.

The problem is, we know that right now it suggests we can do it under Title IX because there's lots of it happening on the other side of the equation, although Stanford's just being investigated for that by the Department for Education. So, we'll see how that plays out. But if there could, let's say there was a funder. Let's say there's someone who was interested in this and could be persuaded to put some money into it. Then actually having some male-only scholarships for your nursing school, that's a very powerful incentive. Sometimes throwing money at the problem is the right answer.

Grant: I also thought your book had some really interesting questions about masculinity itself, and you alluded to this a little bit in previous answers, but I want to delve into this question of masculinity and a post-industrial economy. Did the service industry revolution prove that men need women way more than women need men?

Richard: Wow. I don’t know if it was just the service economy revolution, but I think that that was part of a broader, astonishing economic change in recent decades to secure much greater economic independence for women. So, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Mead…

The point is independence. That means money. And breaking the chains of dependency between women and men economically was the central goal of the postwar women's movement. And it has been very significantly achieved. That has changed the economic terms of trade between men and women in a way that is incredibly profound. And we're still only in the first moments of dealing with that in terms of what it means for men and masculinity.

So, I think those changes really have exposed the fragility in some ways of the male role in relation to the women's role. And at the moment, given that women have retained primary responsibility for child-rearing but have expanded into breadwinning, I think that has actually created situation where it's perfectly reasonable to make the claim you just made, which is: “Yeah, it turns out that the women don't need the men.” Once they can earn or have welfare or whatever, they can be economically independent and still have kids; then the question of why they need the men is a real one. Whereas we know, that least as things stand, men without strong attachments or strong anchors just are really, really struggling.

And, and I do think it speaks to a deeper – maybe I don't say it quite this bluntly in the book – but a deeper truth, which is that masculinity is always more fragile. It's always more socially constructed. It's always a bigger cultural task to construct masculinity than femininity. And that we are, I would say, rather spectacularly falling down on the job around that right now.

And part of the problem is that we haven't redefined masculinity or in some ways, I think, even taken seriously the fact that we do have to construct masculinity. There does need to be a script for masculinity. So, we’ve torn up the old one, but we haven't given men a new one.

Grant: Right. That's the thing about revolutions, right? Is they're pretty good tearing things down, and not great at building things.

So, actually, your response raised two really interesting questions that I had written down. The first is, would you consider the situation of a single mom in 2022 working minimum wage as a healthcare aid to be preferable to the state-at-home mom and wife of a steelworker in 1955?

Richard: Well, I would have too much humility to imagine that I was the best person to judge that. I would presume that the best person to judge that is the woman in that situation. And what I would like to see is a world where that is a substantive choice that's made by both partners, but in this case, the way you framed it, especially the woman.

And if it's a substantive choice and there's exit power, et cetera, then I think that we can then confidently pay people the compliment of assuming that they know their own minds and to know their own wellbeing. That's the liberal in me coming out. And I think that what was correct about the feminist challenge to the situation where women had so little economic power in relation to men was that it wasn't a choice. Or at least, you didn't know if it was a choice. And so actually the securing of economic independence is actually important to then being able to look at what the patterns are.

You've used example of the steel worker, but when I see Harvard MBA women taking time out to look after their kids, I don't panic and assume that the patriarchy has got its claws into them again. I assume that they're making that choice from a position of power. And I think the ideal world is one where we can be pretty sure that both women and men are making these choices about family shape and family formation from a position of choice and power rather than necessity.

Grant: I was revisiting some work by Wendell Berry as I was reading your work. I don't know if you've read Wendell much. “Feminism, the Body and the Machine” is a really fascinating article where he essentially says, “What we've accomplished is we've freed women from the master husband, but then we've put them in wage slavery.” So, to your point, is the single mom working minimum wage as a healthcare aid, is that what she chose? Is that what she wants? And it's an important question.

Richard: Yeah. And then again, you’re into questions of political economy then as well. And I think it's very interesting to see such a strong alignment between some social conservatives and a number of people on the, on the left around things like child tax credits, around giving money to people so that they can choose to stay at home with their kids if they want to, rather than just subsidizing childcare so they have to go out to work. And I support many of those policies on those grounds of choice. I think the goal should be to give people the maximum autonomy.

Grant: To your point, that actually seems like one policy solution that can get some bipartisan support is giving money to people with children. Although, those things, who knows – but it seems at least it's promising as a bipartisan solution.

Richard: I agree, and we got very close, although the U.S. historically hasn't done much of this. We weren't too far away from being able to make the child tax credit permanent; there's a couple of votes in the Senate. And so, I don't think that'll come back up again for a little while. But I think there's more appetite for this child-centered family support than perhaps we'd previously thought.

Grant: You talked about masculinity. What is the success sequence now that it's not: graduate from high school, get the union card, get married, have five kids? What’s the new success sequence for the post-industrial man? I know this is a big question, but maybe just sketch it out a little bit.

Richard: Interesting. I'm amused by your definition of the success sequence because it's like there as many success sequences as there are people using it, but I like yours. Five kids was definitely not in the original Sawhill-Haskins success sequence.

Grant: I'm situated here in Pittsburgh, and I'm thinking of the 1950s industrial man; that's the archetype that I'm thinking of. But to your point, there's all sorts of success sequences, but what does the success sequence for postindustrial man – what does that masculinity look like?

Richard: I think this message about being able to stand on your own two feet to some extent is as important for men as it is for women. And this sounds like an odd thing to say, but I think we're doing a much better job of getting the message about stand on your own two feet, get some economic independence, get some skills – we’re doing a much better job of sending that message to young women now, girls and young women, than we are to young men, because we've presumed that they'll have that, which is not true for all the reasons that you identified earlier. Actually, in the postindustrial economy, a lot of men are economically floundering.

So, actually making sure that you can take care of yourself, stand on your own two feet. That's usually important. I think this idea of skills is usually is hugely important. I like the phrase from JF Roxburgh, the headmaster of Stove School, who said “The goal is to turn out young men who will be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.”

Grant: Oh, that’s great.

Richard: Isn't that great? I've been asked to update that and I can't improve on it because you know what it’s talking about? You've got to learn how to conduct yourself properly around women and in society. And that going from the raging, hormonal mess you are at fourteen to the hopefully somewhat-completed version of yourself ten, fifteen years later. The task of parents and society is to get you to that point where the boy is still inside you, but he's not in charge anymore.

And there are still differences in the way you're going to articulate yourself in the world from women, but they're going to be done in a way that is cognizant of the fact that we're in an equal world and that women need to be treated with respect.

But yeah, the ship starts sinking. Someone has to put themselves on the line. You'd want your boys to be able to do that as well.

And the last thing I want to talk about is fatherhood. When we talk about the men who are really struggling, like the ones who commit suicide or attempt suicide, the last two words they're likely to use about themselves are “useless and worthless.” Those are the two words that suicidal men are most likely to use about themselves before committing suicide or attempting suicide.

But anybody who has kids, anybody who's a father, has worth and has use. And so, I think being intentional about becoming a father, and who with, and then being a responsible and an engaged father is central not only for the kids' life chances, but also for the sense of purpose and structure in men's lives.

And given that so that we've seen so many other changes, I think that seeing fatherhood as this incredibly important – I would argue in some ways a social institution, there's an argument, “is it an institution or not?” – But fatherhood, and preparing for fatherhood, and what kind of dad are you going to be is, I think, an incredibly important question that we need to be asking.

And preparing yourself to be the best kind of dad you can be, I think, is an important part of this modern success sequence journey. So I think if it was previously high school, union card, marriage, kids, et cetera, I think it’s now much more about skills, self-knowledge, autonomy, and then fatherhood and preparation for fatherhood.

Grant: That brings up another question. We think about the twin phenomena of declining birth rates and the struggling postindustrial male. How do they interact with each other? What comes first?

Richard: The honest answer is I don't know. But I don't think anybody knows, and it's probably a bit too early to tell. I haven't joined in the same level of panic as others about what's happening to the birth rate. We'll see; ask me again in five, ten years. But I have seen a lot of people almost freaking out. I think it's better, it's a bit early to freak out. Not least because we can solve most of it by having more immigration if it's an economic problem.

I think the reason that a lot of people are so concerned about the birth rate is less because of the demographics, what it means to the economics, all the social sciencey stuff they say. I think actually it's because they think it's a symptom of a much deeper malaise. Which is, “What's happening in our families?” It's such a visceral thing. It's kids, having kids, the next generation, life is good, et cetera. And so, I think it really speaks to this, “What's going on?”

So, as a leading indicator of some underlying problems, I think I am more troubled by it in that sense. If what's happening is that fewer people are able to have kids, able to create the circumstances they want to be in to have kids. That's the problem for me, less than, is it 1.8, 1.37? I honestly think that's not really what people are worried about.

And I think it's true. You look at men with less than a college degree or even high school degree: much lower rates of marriage, but also much lower rates of becoming a father. And I really am troubled by that for some of the reasons I hinted that earlier around how important fatherhood is for anchoring them.

Grant: Yeah. And there's no act that speaks to hope quite as much as being willing to have children and pass something on to them. You have kids because you think there's something worth passing on.

Richard: Yeah, you do. And because you want to create life with the person that you love in ideal circumstances. So yeah, I agree. I think it's potentially symptomatic of a whole set of broad – and one of them may well be that we haven't yet come out of this very difficult period where we've rewritten the contract between men and women. And I don't yet think we've landed in a place that anyone's quite happy with in terms of what that means for family, parenting, marriage, sex, life, the universe and everything. I think we're in a bit of a mess right now. And I would say that it's a mess as a result of these huge revolutionary changes we've seen.

But the solution to my mind is not to say, “Oh, yep, we should never have done any of that feminism stuff. Yep, yep. If women could just stop going to college, that would be great. If women could just get back in their home, that would be great.” That's not the answer. The answer is to just say, “Big changes make a mess. Let's clean up – let’s actually take the mess.”

Grant: Right.

So, do we need to accept a certain degree of “toxic masculinity?” to also ensure that we will have someone to pull us out of a burning building when we need it?

Richard: Hmm. Well, if the virtues that lead someone to be willing to run into a burning building are toxic, then God help us all. But I think that's part of the problem, which is the failure on the part of those who use that term, which I would also use in the air quotes. I actually think the term itself is toxic. Is the failure to unapologetically define the aspects of masculinity that are not. Like physical courage.

And I quote partly channeling Carole Hooven, there's these civilian hero medals. They're from the Carnegie Hero Awards. They're a hundred years old, and they go to people who've run into burning buildings to save strangers, and all other things. And 95% of the recipients are male. And it's not for want of trying to look for women. Occasionally they're women, but by and large – and they're 15-year-old males, they're 17-year-old males, they're 20.

The willingness of men to lay down their lives is a huge difference. That's a distribution that doesn't overlap very much. And that should be seen and applauded as hugely positive. And it probably means that those are professions where that's more likely you're not going to get to 50/50, for the reasons we identified earlier. And we should be absolutely celebrating those aspects of masculinity.

Grant: So, to what extent – and I'm pulling you into a very fraught conversation – but to what extent has the current focus with issues related to transgenderism undermine efforts to make conditions better for working-class men?

Richard: Yeah, you are right. These can be quite perilous waters, and again, I think because the way that it's framed. If it's framed in such a way that you either have to believe that everyone's on the spectrum, that to support the rights of the very small minority of people who are trans or non-binary – and we are talking about very small numbers – that somehow that means you have to abandon the idea that there are males and females, that there are masculine and feminine traits. And again, I refuse the false choice.

And actually, the way I think about this is the vast majority of men and women identify themselves as such, in line with their natal birth, et cetera. They say I'm mostly or largely masculine, feminine. And so, if there is a spectrum, most people are clustered towards the ends of that spectrum, right? Most of us are. And then there's very few people who might transition (Of course, that word's very important. It implies movement.) or who might be into a tiny percent intersex, and it seems to me that we're perfectly able to, or should be able to, respect the rights and freedoms of those few people in the middle of the spectrum without in some way imagining that most people aren't at the end of the spectrum.

In other words, I think we can have exceptions to rules. And that both the exceptions and the rules can be okay, but we certainly shouldn't allow that the focus on a small number of folks in the middle of the spectrum to mean we have to ignore everybody at the end of the spectrum. I don’t have to ignore the 95% of men who are – at least 95% men are cis heterosexual, at least – I don't have to ignore that 95% of men. It's probably more than that. But say, let's be conservative and say it's 90. I don't have to ignore the overwhelming majority of men in order to respect the rights of the tiny minority of men or women.

Grant: So, last question. To what extent did this male struggle that you describe explain or contribute to the January 6th event at the Capital? There were a lot of men there.

Richard: A lot of men there, and that would be true for lots of activities in society. That was a particular moment, but that would be true… I mean, 90, 95% of violent crimes are committed by men. That's worldwide. The precise numbers will vary, but in every known human society today, yesterday, et cetera, men commit the vast majority of violent crimes. They also commit most physical acts of destruction, et cetera. The men just act out much, much more than women, if you look at violent revolutions, who's on the barricades, et cetera. So, for good or ill, it's going to be men doing that stuff. So, I'm not at all surprised. And I think you could probably look at other incidents throughout human history and find that the same would be.

Does it speak in any way to these broader questions that we're talking around about masculinity? My answer to that would be a pretty hard no, and I would resist the line being drawn between them because the danger with drawing the line is in that it suggests that the peculiar actions of a handful of men on a particular day are related to the deep struggles that many men, millions of men are having every day.

To somehow equate them, I think runs the risk of somehow pathologizing the everyday struggles of millions of men and saying, “Oh, well they’re like the January 6th ones.” And also, it suggests that the reason why we should care about the incredibly high rates of suicide or opioid addiction or unemployment or social pathology, these struggles of men – if we don't deal with that, then they'll rampage the capital. It’s a terrible reason do it. We have positive reasons for doing all those things for men.

So, I worry about that. I'd say the same about mass shooting, by the way. People will say, “Oh, well, we've got to look after these men; otherwise, they'll become mass shooters.” I’m like, “No, they won't!” Actually, violence has dramatically decreased in the last few decades. So, roughly speaking, a man today is about half as likely to be violent as he was just 30 years ago. That's an incredible change. Phenomenal social achievement. The world is so much less violent for my 20-year-old sons than it was for me in my twenties. And then, that's true going back.

So, men are very, very, very much less violent today than they were. And the danger with the headline grabbing like January 6th or a mass shooting, whatever, is that it belies that the truth for the vast majority of men is that they're much less violent than they used to be, but also much more likely to take their own lives. So, whilst homicide rates have almost halved, suicide rates have significantly gone up. And so, I just really worry about the way in which those kinds of events can be interpreted as in some way a direct-line cause from the problems that other men are having, because most men are not acting out, they're checking out. They're dying of an opioid overdose in their basement. They're not on the steps of the capital, and they don't get headlines for dying of an opioid overdose in their basement.

Grant: I'm interested in the way you took that question. The other thing that I was trying to connect also was the rise generally in populism across the world, among men and the Trump phenomenon.

Richard: Ah, okay. So, you framed it specifically about January 6th, so you probably got an air full of what you weren't asking for, but I do think generally the evidence that populist movements are attracting more men is true.

An overall view is that if real problems aren't taken seriously by responsible people, then irresponsible people may well end up exploiting them. But I think more specifically – and you look at this in the gender gaps and in attitudes towards gender among people who are supporting populist parties; Brexit wouldn't have happened if it hadn't been for young men being more pro-Brexit than young women – I think that if there are real and deep problems being faced by boys and men in our society, especially, as you've highlighted correctly, by working-class boys and men, and they are not being addressed and are not being seen to be addressed by mainstream institutions, or even discussed by mainstream institutions, then those real problems can very easily metastasize into grievances, and grievances can be exploited by skillful populist politicians like Donald Trump. And I think that's essential. And Donald Trump's almost cartoonish adolescent masculinity.

I'm not suggesting everything Trump did was wrong, and I'm certainly not suggesting that this is true. I'm not going to do the deplorable thing at all around people who voted for Trump, but I think there was something about the way he acted as a man that was a little bit adolescent. It was a little bit of like a middle finger. It wasn't mature masculinity, but it was masculinity. And I think the mere fact that he was performing some masculinity was incredibly liberating for a lot of people.

And so I think the solution to that is not to say, “Oh, well that's toxic and we need to go back and we live in a patriarchy.” Instead, it should be to say, “Okay, there's something here. Let's address those problems. But let's also model a mature form of masculinity and take those problems seriously.”

If these men and young men especially feel like their problems are being paid proper attention to, I think they're much less likely to end up in some of the more difficult places that they found themselves and therefore take a lot of the fuel out of the flames of populism.

Grant: Well, Richard, I could talk to you all day. This was such a fun conversation. We're out of time, unfortunately. So, I just want thank you for coming on. And hopefully our paths will cross again. We have many, many mutual interests. I think that it’s high probability that our pass will cross someday.

Richard: I certainly hope so, and I'd love the conversation. Thanks for having me on.

Grant: Awesome. Thank you so much.