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Data on how boys and men are falling behind has been piling up for decades. Young men are less likely than women to enter and complete college. They’re committing suicide and dying of drug overdoses at much higher rates. And median earnings for men without a college degree have dropped by 14 percent since 1979.
On the whole, philanthropy has paid little attention to these gender disparities. But Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution scholar of poverty and family policy, is raising alarms among funders and nonprofits about the crises of boys and men from his new perch as founder and president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a think tank opened last year. “It’s quite difficult to retain a focus just on boys and men,” he says. “It goes against our prevailing view about gender equality.”
But the attention of megadonors like Melinda French Gates suggests that philanthropic investment in these efforts is widening, no doubt thanks to Reeves’s 2022 book Of Boys and Men. In June, as part of her commitment to give more than $1 billion to support women’s rights, French Gates tapped Reeves to help distribute $20 million to groups focused on men and boys.
Reeves spoke with the Chronicle about the gender divide in philanthropy, why we need nonprofit institutions focused on the concerns of men and boys, and where he’d like to see donors investing to help close widening gender disparities.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Less than 2 percent of philanthropic giving in the United States directly benefits women and girls. And according to estimates from Candid, even less is designated to support men and boys. What should we make of this?
There’s a belief that a lot of general spending is going to implicitly help boys and men more than girls and women. If you’re funding economic mobility, work-force development, mental health care, for instance, it’s believed that’s going to tilt more towards boys and men, so you need this sort of corrective spending for girls and women. This is part of a more general argument in public policy, but I think it really applies in philanthropy, too.
But I don’t think that general philanthropy is skewed male. When you talk to people in the YMCA, Boys & Girls Clubs, etc., quite often they’re saying that they’re struggling to actually reach and serve a lot of boys even though they’re trying to. You get this sense that without a bit of a focus on boys and men, if anything, the default might go a little bit the other way.
Much of the data about men falling behind has been evident for years, but most philanthropy hasn’t responded. What gives?
Part of the problem here is that it goes a little bit against the grain that we’re going to have to invest extra resources in boys and men. It’s seen by some people as difficult, problematic, sensitive, challenging — whatever word you want to use. It goes against our prevailing view about gender equality.
In the mid-2010s the Obama White House’s My Brother’s Keeper’s initiative, which focused on Black men and boys, helped spark at least $300 million in foundation pledges. It doesn’t seem like those efforts have been sustained. What happened?
Clearly there was a bit of a surge, specifically around boys of color, and Black boys in particular. But in some ways, that was the exception. Even at the time, there was some resistance to the idea of having that focus specifically on boys and men, particularly from women’s groups.
At worst, the idea of a male struggle is an eye roll moment, a tiny violins moment.
Richard Reeves, American Institute for Boys and Men
Over time, a lot of those initiatives have evolved to being more about helping young people of color. The gender-specific nature of those efforts has definitely been diluted.
Why did you start the American Institute for Boys and Men? Why do we need a new institution to tackle these issues?
The pandemic was really the lightbulb moment for me. The number of reports and studies and press releases calling attention to the potential dangers specifically to women and girls that were posed by the pandemic was huge, and quite right, too. But there was lots of stuff happening to boys and men as well, and that wasn’t getting attention. College enrollment rates dropped seven times more for men than for women. Men were dying in much, much bigger numbers.
It was a big realization to me that this is an institutional issue. The point is not that there’s anything wrong with what women’s groups were doing, but there was silence on the other side. The absence of other institutions and voices drawing attention to the issues of boys and men creates an asymmetry.
What kind of reaction have you gotten as you’ve launched and sought funding for your organization?
For a lot of foundations, it’s not breaking news that there are a lot of issues facing boys and men. They’re seeing it in their own data quite often. It’s more like, what’s the permission space around both talking about this and then investing in it? This work doesn’t fit into existing funding streams in a neat way.
At worst, the idea of a male struggle is like an oxymoron. It’s an eye roll moment; it’s a tiny violins moment. But I do think that permission space has really opened up over the past few years, and a huge part of our mission is to continue to expand that.
I’m really pleased by how many leading voices in the women’s movement are saying, “Of course we should pay attention to boys and men” and then do something about it. I see it all as part of a general movement to build a gender sensitivity into philanthropic giving in both directions.
You were one of 12 leaders recently awarded $20 million from Melinda French Gates to redistribute to other charities. How did that come about? How do you plan to use that money?
I had some contact with senior people at Pivotal Ventures — Gates’s limited-liability company — but not with Melinda herself and never with a hint that this was coming. It was out of the blue. Given that I’m explicitly focused on boys and men, it was perhaps an even bigger surprise to open that email for me than for other recipients who are working in areas on behalf of women and girls. That is obviously where the bulk of Melinda French Gates’s money has gone and continues to go.
As she says, it’s very hard to create a world where women are going to flourish if the men start floundering. She’s vaulted over the kind of zero-sum framing by continuing to make massive investments on behalf of women and girls but also saying there’s some stuff we need to do for boys and men as well as part of the gender equality push.
My investments are in boys and men, 100 percent, but I think there are ways to help them that will be very obviously good for women and girls. My donor-advised fund is going to be called Rise Together because that captures the spirit of what I think about this. We’re still going through the mechanics of setting it all up, but I’m going to be looking for ways to support boys and men, especially those from less-advantaged backgrounds.
The French Gates money is a really important signal. When you get a philanthropist of that stature sort of signaling that this is an area that she’s noticed could do with some investment, that just helps others to go, “Oh interesting.”
A huge amount of money has been spent to get more women into STEM careers. You propose that the U.S. needs an investment of at least $1 billion from government and philanthropy to encourage more men to pursue careers in health, education, administration, and literacy — what you refer to as HEAL jobs. Why is it a problem that we see fewer men becoming social workers and teachers? And how can philanthropy help?
We’ve been breaking down these gender stereotypes in one direction only. Men represent far less than half of the work force in mental health professions. Having men in our classrooms and in our therapy rooms and in our hospitals as nurses is just as important as having women in our labs and in our spacecraft and in our engineering offices. Representation matters, and it has to matter as much as those professions. The cratering share of men in those professions is bad for everybody.
I compare the American Association for Men in Nursing to the Society of Women Engineers, and it’s like comparing a mom and pop corner store to Walmart. They’re just tiny, they have no money, they just have no resources and nothing for scholarships.
There are a lot of programs that do a really good job in high and middle schools of exposing girls to STEM professions, and there are basically none on the other side. That would be a really, really good thing to support. There’s some great scholarship programs for encouraging girls and women into STEM subjects. How about more scholarships to get men into K-12 teaching? Why not fund them alongside the work that you’re doing to get women into STEM?
Mental health is another area where you believe we need initiatives that are sensitive to gender differences. Men are four times more likely than women to die by suicide but 10 percentage points less likely than women to access mental health care. And 15 percent of young men today say they don’t have a close friend — a five-fold increase since 1990.
We know little about the young man who attempted to assassinate President Donald Trump in July. But he has been described as someone who didn’t really have friends, which seems to fit the common profile of young men who commit these acts of violence. Does this friendship deficit and mental health crisis among boys and young men have a role in the violence we’re seeing today?
I have very mixed feelings about this connection. The much bigger problem than men acting out is men checking out. The number of men who take other people’s lives is dwarfed by the number of men who take their own lives.
We’re now losing more years of male life to suicide than anything else. Since 2010, almost all the rise in suicide has been among young men. We’re losing 40,000 men a year to suicide. It troubles me sometimes that the tragic actions of the very, very tiny, infinitesimally small minority of men who do act out gets attention, and the daily loss of life and meaning for millions of young men does not.
I’m really worried that the way this can get construed is that every young man who is struggling to find his place in the world is a potential shooter. That is just emphatically not true and is a very troubling way to frame it.
On the other hand, it is certainly true that many of these young men are lost. They’re struggling to find a place in the world where they feel valued, where they feel needed, where they feel seen. Tragically, some of them will act in a way that will make sure that they are seen, even almost always after their death. I don’t want to in any way sort of suggest that that’s indicative of a kind of general issue, but if it helps us draw our attention to the real issues that so many young men are facing, then that’s good.
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