i good morning. thank you all for joining us for this event on crisis of masculinity. why are boys falling.

this panel is intended to promote inquiry and further examination of an important and often overlooked topic. what has been happening to our boys and young men in america and the world for quite some time. each panelist will focus on disparate different aspects of this crisis. dr. piercey will discuss and other causes. dr. summers the education and education policies, and mr. olson economic shifts and men, the workforce. it is our hope that this panel will mark the beginning not the end of a conversation. panelists may disagree one another and even heritage policies, but we are going to forge ahead as this is a crisis in need of attention and

solutions. we are fortunate today to have a stellar of panelists to help guide us. first is dr. nancy pearcey. nancy is bestselling author and speaker, a former agnostic. she was hailed in the economist as america's preeminent evangelical protestant female intellectual. her work has appeared in the washington post, the washington times first things, human events, american thinker, daily caller, the federalist, and fox news. and she has appeared on c-span and fox and friends. she is currently a professor and scholar in residence at houston christian universe city. peirce's books have translated into 19 languages and include total truth, the soul of science saving, leonardo finding truth, love thy body, and most recently, the toxic war on

masculinity. we have available for purchase outside. christine summers is a senior fellow emeritus at the american enterprise institute, where she studies the polity of gender and feminism as well as free expression due process and the preservation of liberty in the academy. before joining aei, dr. summers was a philosophy professor at clark university. is best known for her defense, classical liberal feminism and critique of gender feminism. her books include freedom, feminism. its surprising history and why it matters today. one nation under therapy coauthored with sally satel who stole feminism and the war against boys which was named a new york times notable book of the year in 2001. and i will add that is an incredibly prescient, educational over 20 years later.

last we henry olsen henry is a senior fellow at the ethics and public policy center, where he studies and provides commentary on american politics. mr. olson is an opinion columnist for. the washington post and his daily pieces focus on politics, foreign affairs and american conservative thought mr. olson's work has been featured in many probably prominent publications, including the new york times, the washington journal, the wall journal, national review, the guardian and the weekly standard and. he is the author of the working class ronald reagan and the return of blue collar conservatism and the four faces of the republic party coauthored with dante scala. please join me in welcoming today's speakers.

to hear. thank you, brenda, for that introduction and. i'm going to use slides today because want to move through some facts quickly and that will help us to move faster faster. you go firstly. okay, i'm going to start first fact is this. where do you guys see it? you'll see it. okay. i don't see the slides. okay, great. look at this recent image from australian news tabloid. oh, do you think this boy, six or seven. what ideology you calls a seven year old boy a potential monster and says we must stop the menace of toxic masculinity. no wonder there's a boy. and i've asked to address the

problem of fatherlessness. and i want to start with the good news. there's going to be plenty of bad news today. but the good news is an anthropologist conducted the first ever cross cultural study of concepts of masculinity. and what he found is that all cultures share the expectation. a common code manhood that the good men performs what he calls the three p's protect provide and procreate. that is become a father, raise a family. so universally innately inherently men do know what it means to a good man. there's another sociologist. another. this one by a sociologist found that there are actually two contrary victory scripts that young men pick up today. this sociologist speaks all the world. and so he came up with a very experiment. he asked young men two questions.

first, what does it mean to be a good man if you at a funeral and in the eulogy, somebody says he was a good man. what does that mean? and the sociology said all around the globe, young men had no trouble. and so they answering that they would immediately start listing things like honor, duty integrity, sacrifice, do the right, be a provider, be a protector. and the sociologist would ask them, well, where did you learn that? they'd say, it's just in the air we breathe. or if they in a western country, they were likely to say, it's part of our judeo-christian heritage. then the sociologist would ask a follow up question. he would say, what does it mean? i tell you, man up, be a real man. and the young men would say, no, no, no, that's completely different. that means tough. be strong, never weakness. win at all costs, suck it up, be competitive, get rich, get. i'm using their language

language. and so the sociologist concluded that again, universally innately, inherently young, men do know what it means to be a good man. i would say we're made in god's image and therefore we do have an intuitive knowledge of what it means to be a good man. but they also feel culture a pressure to live up to the, quote unquote, real man and, which includes very different traits not all of them about, of course, in a crisis. we want people, men and who can stand tough. but if it gets decoupled, disconnected from a moral vision, then these traits can slide into being things like entitlement, dominance, misogyny, what we might call the andrew tate phenomenon. right. fast cars, fast money, fast women. so in response to the boy crisis, we are increasingly now young men reach out to the man who sphere via the collection of online groups that we call the manosphere and that all sort of

the andrew tate model or let me give you another my own has been called in the new york new post called him the new andrew tate who says i help transform themselves into pimps. all of all of marriage throughout history, he says, has been basically prostitution. so that all men are johns. all women are. so where is the boy crisis coming from a key cause? is the number of young men are growing up without a father in the home. this is not a left right issue anymore. you know, people on all sides of the political all agree that fatherless boys are more likely to have trouble at school, to run away from home, be addicted to drugs or alcohol end up behind bars. boys raised by traditionally fathers generally do not commit crimes. fatherless boys, commit crimes. but the tragedy that today, 40%

of american children growing up, apart from their natural fathers, it is the highest rate of single parenthood in the world. is that something to be at the top of the top the heap for single parenthood. so the question then is, is causing this flight from. well, one obvious reason is the way fathers are marked ridiculed and in the media today portrayed as incompetent idiots. the homer simpson stereotype. yep. so then the question is where did these negative stereotypes come from? it turns you have to go far further back than most people realize. you have to go all the way back to the industrial revolution before most men worked with wives and children all day on the family farm. the family industry, the family business. the cultural expectation for men focused on their caretaking role. in fact, here's a surprising fact most of the literature of

the day on child rearing or parenting was addressed to fathers. if you go to a bookstore today, they mostly mothers, but fathers were just as engaged with children as mothers were. and of course, their sons teaching them the skills they needed for adult life. masculine virtue was described duty to god and man. so how did we lose. this concept of masculinity? the industrial revolution took work out of the. and of course men had to follow work out of the home and into factories and offices. and for the first time, men were no longer working with people with family members, people they loved and had a moral bond with. instead, they were working individuals in competition with other men. and that's where see the literature start to change. people began to protest that men were changing, that they were losing the caretaking ethos of the colonial era. they were becoming egocentric, self-interested aggressive, acquisitive, looking for number

one. this is some of the language that was used at the time. so was the first time that negative language began to be applied to the male character, and particularly to fathers. when fathers began working out of the home, they lost touch with the family. they were no longer as much in tune with their children's thoughts and feelings. and so already in the 19th century, we, the fathers, begin to be painted as irrelevant and incompetent. today, we're so used to fathers being of the home. we don't realize what a shock it was at the time and give you a few quotes. this is an article parents magazine from 1842 says paternal neglect has become one of the most abundant sources of domestic sorrow. francis willard, who was one of the most influential women of the 19th century, said, god is the father, but how many families there are, whether prototype of the divine is practically absent from sunday

to sunday. as a result, boys started losing touch with a close up model of what it meant to be a man. a sociologist writes for the first time in american history, young men experienced an identity, a history. boys grew up from their fathers and from the world of adult males, which cut boyhood adrift. robert bly. some of you have read his stuff. he's the founder of the contemporary men's movement, writes the love unit most damaged by the industrial revolution was the father son bond. he calls it industrial fatherlessness. and the most striking feature of child rearing manuals is the disappearance of the references to fathers. boys had a lot of unstructured since their fathers were no longer supervising them. and people began to complain that boys were becoming wild and

unruly. here's a the leading 19th century psychologist said never before has the american boy been quite so wild and so half orphaned. don't you love that word? their fathers out of the home. so they're essentially half orphaned and left to female guidance in school, hall, home and church. well, what happened when these half orphaned boys grew up? well, they took their wild ways them so that historians tell us. there was a huge increase in drinking, gambling crime, gangs, prostitution and i tried to get a discreet of prostitution, of home. i was really happy to find this. some sometimes a single quote, a single fact can crystallize things. so in 1830 and americans drank times as much as they do today. so there's a reason there was a great explosion of reform in the 19th century as well.

the temperance movement, the abolition movement, the so-called social purity movement, which worked against prostitution and sex trafficking and. these movements did a lot of good. but they also created antagonism between men and women. because these that they were addressing were traditionally male voices. but so one historian writes, almost all of the female associations were implicit condemned of males. there was little doubt as to the sex of the slave masters, cabin keepers and seducers. i know the historian writes, american society gave men the freedom to be aggressive, greedy, ambitious, competitive and self-interested. and then left women with a duty of curbing this behavior. and this is an image from the temperance look at the women kneeling, praying in the street, reinforcing that religion is for women. while the men in the saloon are standing with their arms crossed. the tension is palpable.

and one more expression of that tension the early feminists. so elizabeth cady stanton said the male element, a destructive force, stirring, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike, discord disorder, disease and death. what america needs, stanton concluded, is a new evangel of womanhood to exalt purity, virtue, morality and true religion. so do you see the tension between men and women? it's already in the 19th century and in the late 19th century, men began to revolt. they took the condemnations that women were lobbying against them and turned them into badges of pride. they basically said, if men are naturally rude and crude, well, then these are not negative trace and normative trace, just the natural male character. and this evaluation took place, especially after darwin,

published his theory of evolution. this is surprising because most of us of evolution as scientific, but it had a huge, huge impact on secular definitions of masculinity. social darwinism said that the men who came on top in the struggle for survival had to be men who were ruthless, brutal, savage, barbarian and sexually predatory to recover their authentic masculinity, they need to get in touch with the beast within. that was a favorite word. so in the past, christians had christianity had urged men to live up to the image of god in them. social darwinist urged men to live down to their presumed animal nature. and by the way, social darwinism has come back in our own under the label evolutionary psychology. this was a bestselling book, and the author, human males are by nature a, possessive, possessive, flesh obsessed, pigs, giving them advice. advice on marriage is like

offering vikings a free booklet on how to pillage. and this older book was just reissued. some of you may know george gilder men are nature violent, sexually predatory and irresponsible. the greatest yearning is to escape to a primal mode of predatory and immediate gratification. are you seeing the origins of andrew tate? are you seeing the ideas that now fuel the manosphere. quickly? a few a few points on solutions to just to make sure i'm not leaving you hanging. obviously the long term solution to any toxic behavior in men is reconnecting to their sons. a says we're not going to raise a better class of until we have the requests of fathers. there was a 35 year, 35 year longitudinal that looked at how parents are successful, passing on their religious, moral and spiritual values to their

children. and it came up with two surprising results. one is fathers more than mothers. my female students don't like this. they say that's not fair. but is a fact. fathers matter more than mothers. and the second thing they found is what is the close loving, warm bond? if the father, a moral exemplar, a leader in the a pillar of his church, but he's perceived cold and distant, his children won't follow him. they will they will not adopt his moral, spiritual values. another study focused more on how to raise masculine sons. this was this reported in this book here. and surprisingly, a fathers own masculinity was irrelevant. again, what mattered more a close relationship with his son and a quick suggestion on policy

recommendations. since we are in d.c.. a harvard harvard university just published a study finding that during the pandemic, 78% of fathers said that by working from they got closer to their children and they don't want to lose that. what i thought was cool is, you see, underneath that it was reported the new york times. so family friendly policies. i don't say family friendly because. most people think that means women father friendly policies is government should encourage corporations to take on. thank you very much. good morning. afternoon. and i'm so happy to be here and that the heritage is taking this

cause. i've been talking about it for many years. many of us had, and at least think tanks to take it seriously. if no one else does. thomas mortenson is a senior scholar at the pell institute. the study of opportunity in higher and that's a philanthropic group that, as its name implies it looks for ways to improve opportunity cities for disadvantaged groups. well in the 1980s early eighties mortenson looked with great satisfaction at the data because it had been the case especially before title nine. there were more men in college. the rate of college attendance was much higher for men than women. and he noticed that by 1982, women had caught up. and as a father of two daughters. he was very proud and pleased to see this. but kept watching the numbers

and with each passing year the female advantage in college grew. by the early nineties. he was alarmed. and on one occasion he looked at the of women's advancement according to of education projections. and he told colleagues only half in jest. the last male will graduate from college in 2068. now he was exaggerating, but the fact is not by much in the sense that our colleges are increasingly female dominated and. i just looked at the latest data from the department of education and rates college attendance are now higher for african-american girls. hispanic girls certainly white girls than for white and african-american boys are slightly white boys. hispanic boys in between the

girls across all ethnic lines and race what you find is that in classrooms, because you have to say if more girls are going to go to college, that's because of something that's happened earlier on, which is high school, junior high school, elementary school. and we find at every level the girls come to kindergarten more prepared at. they are far readers. they get most of the honors. we look at the lists of valedictorians, even aspirations. there was a time when psychologists would measure vocational experts would measure the aspirations of young men and women. and young men had higher aspirations. there's been a reverse. and the girls are more ambitious now. when? when mortenson, the pell institute, when he announced to the world that there had been this this that, you know, that

the that the the boys were on the wrong side of the educational gender gap. he assumed that there'd a lot of publicity. and what he found because often his would release studies and that generate publicity articles. but nothing happened. no. nobody wrote about this. i heard about it. i was working on my book, who stole feminism, and i was on a radio show and. i was in that book. i was defending equal feminism, but i took exception what i called gender feminism, kind of radical view of the world that viewed women's oppression in, particularly in the united states, as systemic and that men were patriarchal overlords. and it was a constant struggle for and that we lived in a state of siege. and i just found it to be ridiculous exaggeration and i had noticed little bit i knew a bit about how boys doing in school, but i was on a program,

it was on npr and people were calling in and an an eighth grade teacher called in a male teacher and he said, it's. it's certainly not the case that in my school the girls are oppressed. you know the boys are the overlords. they're failing at everything. they're not not even they don't even seem to want to join the sports teams, he said. check this out and it mentioned mortenson and then i mortenson's findings and have followed him ever since and in fact this led me in 2000 2001 to come out with my book the war on boys and. that book got a lot of publicity, and i was in after that, the precarious state of boys became pretty well-known. there were magazine covers and and so forth. what didn't happen was any initial and there were no initiatives. there were no there was no, you

know title nine for boys or to boys. it's never happened. and the schools of education were continuing. i talked to people at that time and did as much research as i could find out what was going there. and what you found was that they were focused on girls and the struggles that girls were having. finally, in 2011, i was very grateful because the harvard graduate school education published major study on that acknowledged the plight of young men in school was called pathways to prosperity. and what they out was that in an economy where manufacturing was still dominant, those with less were not going to make it unlikely to make into the middle class. they called education beyond high school. the passport to the american dream. and more women were getting it than than men. more young women. young men.

fast forward recent years people like larry summers, the former president of harvard, has looked at the data and concluded that by mid-century than a third of men between the ages 25 and 54 will be out of work. now, the under education, the failure to educate, educate young men creates all sorts of problems for them, for women who will make their futures with them. and it it's dangerous for. the future of our economy. now other have this problem and they're forming commissions and doing all sorts of studies and such. what's happening here? it's still, after all these years radio silence nothing except in the think tanks. the think tanks are doing it right now. brookings, richard reeves written a very good book on the precarious state of boys. a lot of the same information i

had that mortenson had way back the eighties. and now he's setting up a center for the study of men and boys. what? i don't have much time. but just to say what the forces against us. why is one prepared to listen? one thing i think the schools of education are a big problem. they are carried away with an agenda that does not include, you know, specialties in how to save boys. there's an article by lyle asher, a scholar in the chronicle of higher education in 2008, called how schools of education became a menace. and they so carried away with with what? well, i once heard on a french radio show, that blue pc, kazaa are two more. more politically correct than that you die more politically correct than our schools of education. and boys are not politically correct. schools education are not

addressing the problem they are not teaching teachers how to be engaged the male mind. our schools do a much better job educate girls than boys, but that is not seen a problem worthy of addressing. i'm not even sure they recognize the category of boy. so women's groups on the other hand who we all a great deal of credit for strengthening women in education. there were major initiatives, special programs and scholarship ops to to close the the college attendance gap and close the math and science gap. but if you bring up the idea that maybe we should have such programs for girls and for boys and young men they call it backlash and they will they see it as part of a sort of obnoxious men's rights movement.

and this very bad and even even president obama came out with a program to help i african-american young men and to strengthen them academically other ways. and there was a huge push back saying that this was harmful to african-american girls and this was they see it as a zero sum game and i guess what i will leave you with is that it's not as if men and women or girls and boys are two separate tribes or two separate, you know. they're like on opposite sides, competing for a single trophy. we're in this. and if men are in trouble, so are women. if girls are in trouble. so we're boys. we are in this together. now i can sympathize as i know those some feminist colleagues of mine, they'll say, well, there's been, you know, centuries of patriarchy and the boys and men are a little bit behind. and so what, you know, just women a chance to saw.

and isn't it time they enjoy having all the advantages and? i understand that impulse. i think it's misguided. i became a feminist in the 1970s because i did not appreciate chauvinism. i still don't. but the proper corrective to chauvinism is not to reverse it, and practice it against males. the the proper corrective is basic fairness. and fairness today requires that we address the serious educational deficits of boys and young, the rise of women, long overdue, does not require the fall of men. thank you. this is what men do. thank you for coming.

i am dealing with might be called the downstream of the boy crisis which is some point boys become men and they may be men. they may simply be males. but one thing you expect adults to do is work. and what we're finding is, unlike women whose, labor force participation rate has hit new all time highs. men are dropping out of the labor force. so let start with the dreary statistic that you may have heard, but if you have, it bears repeating. if you haven't, it might be news to and shock you, which is that throughout the time when the is keeping these statistics about 96 to 97% of men in their prime working age, 25 to 54 were engaged with the labor force. and as recently as 1967, that figure stood at 96 and a half percent. so there are very few men of prime age who are not engaged in at least looking for work that

is down to 89.3% as of the last month. so roughly 7% of the prime aged male is no longer even trying find work. that's adds up to seven or 8 million men who are not trying to find work and hence are habitually underemployed or unemployed. they don't spend their time engaging themselves. some of these people are out of the force because they are delayed. the people go back to school are 25 or 28. when i was in law 35 years ago at 26, i was one of the older students in class. i would expect now i would be the medium in a law school as taking 2 to 4 years off has become the norm. but nonetheless, what we see is that only about one sixth or one seventh of the people who are not working, are engaged in

education. the rest are engaged in something else. nor is it the rise of the stay at home dad that there are people who are taking care of parents or grandparent or being the person like carly fiorina's husband, who gave up his job to take care of children as she became ceo of hp. but they too are only less than 10% of the people. the overwhelming number of people who are not working either give no particular reason say they are retired or the massive large numbers say they are ill or disabled. and that's the key to beginning to understand what's really going on with the male crisis, because not really a male crisis. it's a man without college degree that there are studies that. take a look at labor force participation rates in the prime age across generations. and what you find is that there's no increase. if you have a college degree between whether you are a member of the silent generation or if member of generation x, most men

who have a college degree are engaged, the labor force, the rate at rates not seen in the broader prime age participation rate since 1970s. what's gone and goes up each generation is the number of people who don't have a college degree who drop out. the labor force that goes up 4 to 6% in each generation. and it also goes with age so that now have 6% of people who are 55 or older out of the labor force. if you have a college degree, if you are 55 years old or 54 years old and you are have less than a college and you're a man, 20% are out of the labor. and this gets to the question about, disability what's increasingly happened is if you don't have college degree and you get older, you go on disability, which is a government program and that points to something also that we need to take a look at is why is

it rational for somebody a college degree to take the low but paycheck that a government program offers rather than progressive. so i want to get into that by showing that this decline has not been linear. in fact, there are periods where it doesn't decline at all. the first decline started 1967 to 74, when male prime age labor force dropped from 96 and a half to 94 and a half. that was a version of a certain age where remember that there were two large recessions that happened during that period. then it stays roughly stable for six years. the carter years, the reagan years, the beginning of the bush years, men are not dropping out of the workforce. it then drops by about two points during the early 1990s, a period that rapid demobilization of the military, along with a recession. it then stays during the clinton years and then takes two more drops from 92 to 91%. during the recession of 2001.

and then the massive drop during the great recession from 91% to 88%. yes. male labor force. prime participation has risen from where it was eight years ago, from 88% to about 89.3%. note the it always takes place during periods of economic dislocation. so i'd like to point to a few things that we should take a look at to better understand what to do. the first, obviously is deindustrialization, that it to be in the 1950s or sixties that if you didn't get a high school or if you only got a high school degree or you didn't get a high school degree, you could get a job that decently paying if not middle class paying. those jobs don't seem to exist anymore. that instead the decent wage, low skilled you have the low wage, low skill you have the rise in the of disability insurance. it becomes simply more rational

for you get on to roles that have been loosened and the eligibility for which has been moved away from what you and i would consider disabled to what they call functionally, which is to say you can get disability insurance if you had a stroke and you can't work, you're quadriplegic. the classic sorts of things that we would anyone would say this person is disabled, they can't work. what the government program now does is say if you're older and you have less education, you're working in a less demand industry, you're functionally disabled and you get awarded disability insurance at a lower of physical impairment. why wouldn't somebody who's been working in backbreaking work who has who's a college or school dropout take the low? but wage, especially since doesn't get adjusted for or not your partner or wife is working. it's an individual based determination. it's not a household based determination. then you have a question that i

don't think has been looked at and needs to be examined as part of this. and that is the question of conscription and the military. when we had these record high percentage rates, if you were not ever in college, you're highly likely to be. we had two and a half to 3 million people in the u.s. military, the 1950s and the 1960s. almost all of them conscript, 98% of them male, according to the statistics. what does that do? it gives you order. it gives you structure. it gives you a credential. and it may give you a skill. 18 to 21 year olds could be drafted and out even in the lack of formal education with something that was of value to employers that no longer exist. we don't have conscription. you have to have a high school degree and pass cognitive test even in the list only 80% of the military today is male and it's half the size it was.

it's 1.35 million versus two and a half to 3 million. and a population that's 50% larger. the option society provided, albeit indirectly for these men 50 years ago simply doesn't exist today. which places more pressure on the formal education that have never been constructed to figure out what to do with. people in the bottom third of the cognitive scale whose value historically has been physical labor rather than mental analysis. so what should we do? well, obviously need to do a lot of things on the social front. we need to encourage families, need to encourage fatherhood. we need encourage marriage and so forth. but can we do on the policy level? a few things i'd like to talk about. first, seriously, take look at high school education for people in the low for men, boys in the lower third of the people who are unlikely to even enroll in

college and if they are highly likely to dropout to create a structure skill based acquisition program that gives them a credential and real skills that they can take with them into the labor. second, we need to deal with spatial mismatch. if you take a look at county level, participate in rates, they are not even places that are job deserts like, the mississippi desert delta or rural kentucky have. overall labor, male labor force protection rates of 50 or 60%. you take a look at economically vibrant areas. you'll see 85, 90 or above. now, some of those rates obviously are still, but there are millions or hundreds of thousands and maybe over a million men of prime age working who are stuck in job deserts, who do not move. and every government program they in to grips with or come into contact does not encourage them to move. we will pay anyone going to

college to leave their homes, to study in college, and we will give them nothing if they want to go take a job in the rio grande valley working in a manufacturing plant. perhaps that should change. the other thing i think we need take a look at is disability insurance is that people are subject to temptation. i don't want to condemn anyone who has worked in a difficult job, who faces slim job and doesn't want to leave their job desert. i do blame a system that says if you have obstacles, you should just give up the disability system, encourage people with certain degrees of education and job prospects to give up. and once they're on the roll for a year or more, they're highly unlikely. get off. if they're on the road for two years, they get medicare. you can be a 56 year old man getting, 1100 dollars a month from social security disability and medicare until. you reach your full retirement age and doesn't matter what your

partner or, your spouse is earning. this is bad for the man. this is bad for society. and it must change. so there are some things that we can do. independ them of the larger social problems i think can ameliorate this problem. and i think as a policy institute, the heritage foundation and similar policy institute should take a look at those. in addition, the more difficult, ultimately more rewarding social issues if you really want to address the downstream of the boy crisis, and that's the male unemployment crisis. well, you all very much. that was wonderful. going to go ahead and turn to from the audience because i'm sure there will be a lot. i just asked you do ask a question rather than making a statement. and if you have a particular panelist, you would like a response from indicate that otherwise we'll leave it to their discretion.

yes, sir. the back. i thank you all for your time. quick question on mostly pertaining dr. olson's speech, which again, really appreciate. so there's response, especially from gen z, about the response to working their whole life. it's generally seen as as a negative perspective when you have to work your whole life instead of pursuing the the wants that go away from work. so can we respond maybe in a policy, maybe in a psychologic aspect in terms of changing how this has shaped young minds to back away from you know, creating a hard earned life from hard work and creating success from their dedication and time. how can we start to change this? i think, you know, would either of you like to take that and that's as much in your bailiwick as it is in my.

yeah. i think part of it has be social and part of it has to be education, you know, which is that you need to have there's an assumption in many of our educational that success is going on to college and not going on to college is not. and i think for this demographic of men, that's never going to work in any to recognize reality and meet reality where it is, and that means providing a honored sense of achieved and advancement within the public education system. my next question. yes, sir. in the front. i was just asking, trying, see if i'm a user researcher, somebody can tell me if there is any must key that comes out of all at once. all multitude of thousands of issues of ideas today in america

and in the world. does anyone of you have any suggestion about what one must? the key that can solve all that at once? i have one suggestion which most everyone who's addressed the problems boys has come to one change that would make all the difference, which is we need a kind of marshall plan for mail. there a huge problem that's that the gap is a chasm female literacy male and it's cross-cultural. every society is dealing with it, but it's just a big challenge to get boys to read, to want them to be part of the world of the written word. and if you can do that and there are ways to do it and we should be studying the member broken record. i mean, if we had schools education that that focused on male pedagogy, there would be

every would have a reading list of books irresistible to boys and even the whole war over phonics versus whole language people didn't talk about the gender aspects but there's no question that well, for everybody. phonics is better. but for boys, it's almost a necessity. so they're just we're doing everything wrong in terms of literacy. i think once you do that, you open up the world of reading and that, of course, has implications for how you do in all of your other classes, even even math and science classes require literacy. so i would think that would be sort of uncontroversial. i think we could do, although just try it. there will be you will be called a backlash if you want to say you're addressing the problems of boys. but that's that would be one thing. nancy, do you want to respond to that as well? oh, i love it. i love that idea. and my main concern, too, is the

backlash. you label your label the backlash. but it's did somebody mention richard reece? you and. so i think it's cool that up recently if you this was a left right issue then it shouldn't be i it should be that cares about boys it's time to have compassion on men and boys. they are falling behind. and i think it's great that richard reeves being you know clearly men are more on the left. it's now okay for him to say this it's it's become okay for a liberal person to say we need to care about boys and men. and just the fact that he wrote a book and, it is well-received. it's very recent book, i think is a very good mark because, yes, i remember the controversy over dr. summers book when she first wrote the war on boys and now that there's been a sea change, people are finally starting to say it's okay to acknowledge that men and boys

are falling behind. and that's a good sign. so i am hopeful. of course, the reason is boys are falling behind so badly that you can't be ignored anymore. so that's sad. but at least it's no longer something that's just considered an issue. the right. reactionary conservatives. you know, it's becoming an issue that people, you know, are allowed to acknowledge on both sides of the aisle. yes. in the front. okay. thanks. regarding fatherless boys have the study showed i difference between a divorce or a never married couple versus a father who died? oh, yeah. question because yes, it's far worse. divorce is far worse than a father who died because a father who died retain a positive memory. right. the family still honors him. they remember what a good man he

was. and they put his picture up and they teach their to the you know, the mother teaches her children honor, respect him still. and it's a very different emotional tone than if fathers if they've divorced there's a lot of animosity. there's no good there's always some animus and some tension and some anger. and so it is not at all for boys pick up, you know, negative responses to their to father and it's. that's a good point. yes. people have found that a widow who's lost your father to death the children do much better divorce. yes yes. oh oh sorry. oh, i think sorry. katherine mcculloch from catholic university, thank you for your remarks. all and interesting. i have two questions which you can take in turn. one is if if any of you wants to comment on the school system

being predominantly coed and, you know, the loss of male schools and and an all girls schools as as maybe being part of the formative difficulty. and the other question relates to the statistics on the labor participation and i understand them as cross sectional. and, you know, there's a lot of population changes compositional over time. so i wondered if we have access to longitudinal individual level data that can help us draw conclusions about the past of men with different types of backgrounds college education, family structure surviving, those periods of, economic dislocation, better than others. if you're aware i could take the first. maybe you'll take the second. yeah. there's certainly evidence that boys thrive in single sex classrooms. so it's a little mixed about how much better they are than what worries me more is the even in coed schools, absence of male

teachers just a disappearing species. there are almost no men. men now, certainly in k through k 12. you have very few male teachers and you know when we it and it didn't used to be the case it was there were many male teachers in fact you go far back and they were all male teachers but now what you find is there's no effort in schools of education to recruit more males. they are some 70, 80% female now in the enrollments and there's no outreach. now we see in schools of engineering you had so many more males. so the massive to get more girls to focus and study engineering where are the to get young men into early childhood education even just education in general. they aren't there and we know that a lot of boys boys just can

thrive in a classroom that is sort of sympathetic to certain levels of rambunctious ness. and they enjoy the male teachers and they don't them and point is increasingly, schools have been feminized and the classrooms, the readings and it's a lot a lot of it catered to the interests and strengths of girls and i would like to see more single sex schools or even with single sex classrooms. we had them for a while but the aclu in and sued and called it gender apartheid and so was stopped. so it's there are obstacles but i think we need huge campaign to get more guys into teaching. on the second question, there may be studies. i'm not aware of them and i that's one of the great questions is why it that some

people deal with dislocate and collapse and why is it that others deal with dislocation and if not adapt? i think that would be a place that would bear merit. lot of studying. okay, we have time for one more question. at delano squires, heritage foundation. this question is mainly to christina summers. i wonder, do you react to the findings nancy pearcey that men have traditionally seen the protection and provision of women and for women as part of their role as men? one do you see that as chauvinist. and then to do you feel that the promotion of traditional marriage and family as a as a response to this crisis is something that sort of traditionally liberal feminists can get behind? well, first thing i'll say is the we've heard a lot about

toxic masculine unity and what these critics forget is that there's also positive, which is the opposite. so it's toxic male or sometimes they call it pathological masculinity, pathologic ugly masculine male shows. his manhood by preying on weaker, destroying bullying, intimidating, positive masculinity, just the opposite. you show your manhood and your masculinity by being protective of weaker people, by not destroying. and i still believe now that the boys know how to do it. but still, i think the majority of men and in this country do events positive masculinity. there's a lot of with the young men and but i do think it is there's a certain protectiveness towards women who are typically weaker physically weaker and a we are a more egalitarian in

society. so there's going to be that can be a difference gender roles where you're not entering the marriage as the you know he's the the sort of in charge of the family don't know too many people have marriages like now you see one another's equal but i, i look at statistics and what i find is that there is still a majority of women. you ask them, what is your ideal life arrangement? and they want to work. women want have jobs, careers, but when they have children, they would to work part time at something like 60% of women prefer would prefer to work part time. you have a small percentage that want to work full time, even they have children. they're high. career is good for them. they're not the majority. then there's a smaller percentage that don't want to work at all and would just like to be a stay at moms. but that's what women want. and now you're not going to

close the wage gap. if you do that, there will still be because women will be retreating from the workforce. and so that's most of the feminist submission. only cares about that. not really. what are women's preferences? so the last i'll say is that i wish there were it were the case. the left would take more seriously the importance of stable families for children and especially for boys. it's been shown that in any, you know, traumatic situation family drama, if you have a divorce or if you have violence, if you have extreme poverty, it has a disparate impact on the boys and they are more seriously damaged educationally, socially. there's a fragility at the girls are for reasons that aren't fully understood seem to be able to cope better. and so for all of these reasons,

you think there would be a movement to. towards urging people to marry and to have, you know, against a single parent families as a norm. of course, that will happen. but to have that as a norm, it's simply not viable socially. and yet i once brought that up at a at an event at stanford. we were discussing the wage gap and. somehow i brought up the advantages of having a stable families and an and what price women pay, trying to raise children by themselves, a partner without a husband. and people were just horrified that i was suggesting that that could be anything with which any bad effects of having raising children without a father. well, it just turns out us this is a tragedy for everyone, but especially for the boys.

so i don't consider it a aspiration. and in fact, if you look at liberal upper class liberals, that's they live. they're the stable marriages in the world. and them for their children. but when they come to writing the sociology for everyone else. they're celebrating, you know, alternative arrangements arrangements. well, unfortunately, we do have to end there we've only scratched the surface, but thank you all for coming for this robust conversation and. thank our panelists very much for their remarks.