Are Men Finished and Should We Help Them?

[Music] 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 clay O'Connor to talk a little bit more about this Evolution hi Claire hi John I know Claire 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 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 in families and 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 want to 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 so that's a big part of being open to debate 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 who are listening to these debates and by definition you have come to hear more than one side and that's why we love having you and a really interesting thing we follow stats on this is that 32 percent of our audience changes their mind from one side to the other after one of our debates which tells us what Claire 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 use debate to arrive at our democratic values and we want to restore those with open to debate sometimes even our Debaters can change their minds and that has happened and that is going to shape the debate we're about to do now our inaugural opened to debate debate so back in 2011 we debated the motion men are finished yes it was the title of an article in a book written by journalist Hannah Rosen 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 Hannah 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 thank you John 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 thank you for having me John and arguing no that men are not finished and and we shouldn't help them journalist and host of the Atlantic's Flagship podcast Radio Atlantic Hannah Rosen Hannah Rosen welcome back to open to debate thank you excited to be here we want to 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 well 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 US 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'm going to 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 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 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 and need help and I've been influenced along this journey by extremely good books that have both quantitative and qualitatively really summarize this very well including the book The End Of Man by Hannah Rosen which had a big influence on me and it's very interesting to me to see karahana's Journey away from that because I think in that book and the accompanying essay 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 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 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 eight percent in that year alone this is all data collected by the CDC Fiona Shand an Australian researcher looked at the words that men used 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 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 channeling a bit kind of Hannah Rose and Mark one if you like but in 1972 women accounted for about 42 percent of college degrees this is nces data and at the time so 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 a both bachelor's and Masters level so in others we have a big agenda 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 we have to really explain why it isn't also a problem now if the gender equality is going the other way around in the labor market at many men especially working class men and men of color have seen very difficult economic circumstances so most men today in the U.S in 2019 rather earn 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 a 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 have 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 thank you Richard and now Hannah you're up you are answering no to the question men are finished and we should help them so tell us why so this this is Hana 2.0 talking 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 on a 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 on to 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 a certain working-class man lost and floundering for sure are certain black men specifically getting crushed no doubt but as the resolution says are men like Capital men finished I just can't sign on to 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 want to talk about a study by Claudia golden and Larry Katz who looked at American business school graduates and at the point of graduation the salaries and Prospects of these very very 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 could be very powerful and they shift all their energy to caretaking now if men were finished I argued 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 receipt 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 want to 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 we 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 um anyway I 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 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 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 Day Care 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 thanks Hunter Rosen so let's get into the conversation and I want to go back to you Hannah 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 no it's 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 I mean I think things have gotten better for for some people especially 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 Etc and I think it's just true that white white college-educated women have actually continued to see very significant social and economic advances two things I'd respond to one is that uh Hannah's view about does it matter and she quotes the golden cats paper which is an excellent paper and one of the things that's 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 learning 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 of 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 going to be a really deep disagreement between us about the so-called manosphere or the reactionaries Hannah's already mentioned Andrew Tate and others and the sort of sense that you are you know them telling men you all believe good take a moment for people who don't know Andrew taters or Jordan Peterson what they're out there saying so most people probably do her Jordan Peterson as Canadian psychologist whose Book 12 rules for life I think the last time I looked it sold about five million copies so just become a global phenomenon speaking 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 Tick Tock had 12 billion Tick-Tock views and he posts short form video content which at its worst is just straightforward misogyny 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 so I I think Hana is saying that their messaging is problematic and you're saying their messaging is problematic yeah but what I'm what I'm going to go on to say is that we are creating the market for them so Hannah's view is the books like mine or hers that point 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 poor 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 want to 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 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 so Hannah would I think I hear Richard saying is that the U of 10 years ago and the Richard of today should be hitting on this message that men and boys actually are significantly disadvantaged you um absolutely and also vis-a-vis women well maybe we should address if they are significantly disadvantaged I mean I have so many thoughts what you just said about Golden 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 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 going to change that like that's just a world view 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 naive to think that oh if we have some policy programs then Andrew Tate will suddenly become a reasonable person and all his followers 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 so and they 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 no so to be clear about my position on this I don't think that the policy 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 Hannah 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 whether gender policy Council that only can 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 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 behind men are the ones discriminated against now and then you get the women's group saying 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 in different parts of the situation but but Hannah I want to push you on this you said no gender-based program so that doesn't mean you abolish the gender policy Council or get rid of all the work for women in stem 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 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 and 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 ways say Finland has all children start at seven rather than just like yeah start at different times I think what what your response to that question addresses and then you've both acknowledged this that it's difficult to talk about all men 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 Hana Richards pointing out that in 1972 women represented only 42 percent of the University student population and now it's up to 59 well I came up to 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 opportunities in education I think it depends what in 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 in to 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 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 going to 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 there is this sort of argument that yeah women are doing much girls and women doing much better 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 have 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 Hannah 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 pale status race Etc 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 doesn't that make a case for agenda but it's actually helping men on colleges it being males the biggest risk that 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 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 to 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 so I to make it with debt I agree with the law 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 August I love that which is like over credentializing but I but I think it's a different problem but let me put a sharp point on this Hannah because it's very interesting that this may be 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 let's keep the things that help that are helping women and girls because they have to 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 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 I want to move to a sort of a 30 000 foot look at this for a moment and share with you the fact that when I shared with 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 that come companies and ahana made this point in her opening statement Richard that basically men are still the bosses and I'd like you to take that on sure so this is the what's sometimes called 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 US the US is a real laggard in political representation because of the UK where I'm from it's a third of our members of parliament now are women up from five percent in 1979 when Margaret Thatcher became prime minister only five percent of MPS are women now as a third we have seen significant growth in the share of women in Senior Management so I'd encourage everyone to check out the work of lean in on this where they track over time a really really big increase in share of women up into Senior Management and into boardrooms but is there still a work to do there sure does that make it hard to say that men are finished it makes it harder to say that um because if you're only looking at the top 0.1 percent or 0 point zero zero zero one percent of society then you do still see those gender gaps but I think that's 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 actually actually having then it feeds into it's a very very unbalanced narrative 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 subdivide further and more intelligently I agree with you but I would say that what that requires us to do is to be able to adopt multiple lenses so to use the term of art around intersectionality so to take you know deaths of Despair more generally including suicide is actually white working class man but if you want to look at education it's black boys and men if you want to 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 Etc and so if you're saying look 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 policy maker because then what you're going to 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 US where a huge proportion of the Gap in high school graduation between boys and girls is explained by Hispanic boys right so there's some cities where there's just this very low high school graduation where Hispanic boys actually not so bad for black boys and actually great for both white boys and white girls right but it's okay so what that means is a policy maker is you should be thinking what the hell are we going to 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 all together and only have a class lens or a race lens and I think that's wrong I think we need to keep them all 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 in the example can you explain what that term means 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 DC and I'm thinking okay if that boy doesn't go into school that year he's going to 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 but if you think about poverty and what a poor boy who's asked to stay a year more at a 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 just never works as a broad gender policy statement did experiences during the pandemic bring stronger evidence to your yes or no position and Richard why don't you go first 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 Hana 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 have kind of Fallen 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 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 reports and studies of what the pandemic would mean for women's employment for domestic violence following stress levels mental health Etc we've 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 a hundred thousand more men have than women died of covert in middle age twice as many men died of covert 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 Hannah it did have a huge impact on my thinking the thing that Richard breezed by which was the sheer 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 want to argue about breastfeeding 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 and how 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 not going to 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 I'm going to refer here to the work of feminist labor market economists deliberately like Stephanie Aaronson and Betsy Stevenson both of whom have written for Brookings on this and 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 was going to be well we can say it was a temporary 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 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 it 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 just don't know how to think about this are you sort of suggesting the men need to get a grip no I that is what I'm suggesting and I'm using said it not me I would never say it I just don't know how to think about this question there's just a part of me that feels like you know just like expecting your daughter to clean up the dishes after dinner and just kind of like letting your son there's just a feeling like that which makes me resist jumping into these programs yeah yeah it's interesting I if you talk to young women in particular this 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 the 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 that could be a temporary phenomenon because as women have just had to do this it's like the Immigrant mindset thing is that 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 and but that might fade right that's a kind of temporary thing there isn't anything intrinsically more motivated about women than men I actually Wonder 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 rights 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 yeah and 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 and maybe I do sound quite conservative that that's true and that actually you know boys don't become men automatically and that the masculinity in the male role is more socially constructed than the female role 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 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 are figured out in a different way you can attach a man's responsibility for children without telling him to get married or telling the women to get married there's sort of a thousand different ways that you can accomplish that without being a conservative 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 going to be bad for girls or whatever that will take money should we do that yes absolutely should we do it specifically because it's good for boys yes 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 Nine is now now used being used very effectively against women's initiatives and what happens at a men's Resource Center they're discussing issues specifically related to being a man so for one thing is it's a good way into getting Mental Health Care maybe some skills some coaching around study skills where you know male students typically are way behind 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 Richard um you've talked about a number of potential initiatives um and you've both talked about the danger that these could Stoke gender culture wars but how do you move forward with some of your suggestions without stoking a gender culture War yeah well I think by starting with facts starting empirically for example just to not speak abstractly about it if you believe that one of the causes of boys underperformance in education is the drop in the share of male teachers uh in K-12 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 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 from for male Primary School teachers and their results improved and then they got rid of the quota because they passed a sex discrimination law 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 mm-hmm yeah it's interesting to me watching how data and policy making 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 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 the people bristle I'm just wondering what message each of you thinks boys are getting today about their masculinity and are they helpful or harmful and original to go for first on that I think they're getting a vast range of messages across that whole Spectrum some of which are are more hurtful than others but I I think the problem here is that it sometimes feel the choices 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 it's a horrible framing hate the term toxic masculinity you 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 became real men blah blah blah right and not much in between and and I think that's a 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 my dad never thought about his masculinity he just you know got a job and raised us is isn't 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 Hannah 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 on to 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 sexuality 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 is 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 considered traditionally feminine traditionally masculine and all of that just relaxing a little bit whether it means you know roles in raising a family roles in how you talk roles and how you dress or whatever it is I think that is very positive though dangerous to many people but positive to me 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 Hannah 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 I want to talk about a time in my child's Elementary School when the principal who is a very 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 that because that language naturally puts us in a sort of fight state 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 on to 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 times 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 on to a blank statement men are finished men need help you end up essentially signing on to something that just feels false to people and is likely to be more incendiary than helpful thank you Hannah and Richard you have the final say here your rebuttal pleas as to why men are finished and we should help them 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 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 or 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 all boys and men as a group all together 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 thank you Richard and that concludes our closing round which means it wraps our debate as well and I just want to say Richard and Anna 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 Hannah thank you so much thank you that was great [Music] and thank you for tuning in to this episode of open to debate you know as a non-profit our work to combat extreme polarization through civil and respectful debate is generously funded by listeners Like You by the rosencrans foundation and by friends of open to debate open to debate is also made possible by a generous Grant from the Laura and Gary Lotter Venture philanthropy fund Robert Rosencrantz is our chairman Claire Connor is CEO Leah mathau is our chief content officer Julia melfi and Marlette Sandoval are our producers Gabrielle yannicelli is our social media and digital platforms coordinator Andrew Lipson is head of production Max Fulton is our production coordinator Damon Whittemore is our radio producer Raven Baker is events and operations manager and I'm your host John Don Ben and we will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Open to Debate

Views: 2,259

Keywords: Intelligence Squared, IQ2, IQ2US, Intelligence Squared U.S., debate, live debate, I2, nyc, politics, conservative, liberal

Id: FlT5clM4WfA

Length: 50min 10sec (3010 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 14 2023