Why Women Are 15% More Likely to Earn a Degree Than Men - Richard Reeves

Today, the chances of a woman getting college degree are 15 percentage points higher than a man. So the inequality has reversed. If we once had a world in which masculine ways of behaving were held up as better than feminine and girls were shamed for not living up to them, I think in many cases we've flipped that script. Now, never use the term toxic masculinity. Never shame boys and men for being boys and men, having these underlying traits, urges, preferences, and psychology. Instead, say, okay, you know, how do we take that operating system out into the world today and express it in a way that's as good as possible? Right. And what are the risks? What are the dangers, costs and benefits of these different attributes that we might have as boys and men?

All right, Richard, welcome to the Man Talk Show. How are you today?

I'm good, Connor. Thank you for having me on. Good, good.

Well, listen, it has been. I'm glad that I finally locked you in to speak with you because I have been looking forward to this conversation. As I told you before the show, a good friend of mine sent me the article in the New York Times that came out, I think, on the day that your book launched. And I was sitting in an airport and I immediately downloaded the audio for your book and started listening to it. And by the time that I got to my destination, I was like, oh, my gosh, I have to interview this guy on the show and really love the work and have found the conversation interesting for a number of reasons, which we'll get into. But I have to ask the question because my listeners that have been with me for several years are waiting for this one. So tell us a story about a defining moment in your life that has made you who you are today.

Yeah, well, it's a slightly sad story in a way. So I have to start.

On a sad note, but I haven't talked about this exactly this way before, but my youngest sister died when she was 26. So I was four years older than her. And I was very close to her, I think, partly cause my parents had actually had a. They'd lost a child in between the two of us. And so there's always something rather special about Beth because she was the one that kind of came after. And I was, you know, I used to. She'd go on the back of my bike and stuff like that, kind of unusually, I think, for a brother to be that close to her. So I was very close. And she died of cancer. I was with her at the end, and she died with such extraordinary grace and understanding like, there was no anger there. Obviously, there was huge sadness, but there wasn't anger there. And at one point she said to me, said, you know what, Rich? I've had a good life, shorter than I would have liked, but I don't look back and think I don't have any major regrets. I've lived pretty well. And I had this moment of thinking I couldn't answer that question the same way right now. And I left shortly thereafter. I left my career in journalism because I felt that it wasn't the best use of the skills that I had been given. I moved into more of a scholarly direction, more into think tanks and then into politics and tried to use, I think, some of some of the talents that I've been given are around ideas and communication, and clearly that can make you a very successful journalist, but there's a certain shallowness to journalism. In the end, I didn't. I didn't feel at a deep level that I was doing my best. My sister at the time was working in mental health care. She was incredibly proud of her work. And when we had the service for her, it was just absolutely full of people that she'd helped. Right. And I thought, well, you know, if I had a service, I'd have a lot of colleagues and old reporters and mates. It's not going to have friends. But how many people would be at the service who would be able to say, yeah, I'm here because she helped me, because he helped me. And I realized the number was pretty small. And my career trajectory, and in a quite important way, my life changed from that day on. Yeah, that's.

I really appreciate you sharing that. I mean, it's interesting how I. How death can inform in so many ways the way that we live, you know, and it's interesting, like, I'm turning 40 at the end of this year in November, and even just that notion of sort of moving through the midlife has started to make me question trajectories within my career and what I want to leave behind and, you know, questions of, do I go back and get a master's degree or do a PhD and. And sort of pursue things in a different way. And so it's interesting how those types of moments, obviously what I'm talking about is very, very different. I didn't lose anybody. But I appreciate you sharing that. And in some ways, I'm curious we won't linger here too, too long, but.

I'm curious how you as. Because how old were you when that happened?

I was 30.

30? Yeah. So I'm curious.

20, 29, I turned 30 shortly afterwards. Very, very. So she died in May and my 30th birthday was in July.

Oh my goodness. Well, I'm curious how you traverse that because I think that oftentimes we as men sometimes struggle to talk about the more grief oriented moments in our life. And I think, you know, one of the things that I've learned over the last decade of working with men is that modeling is incredibly important. I feel like I learn a tremendous amount from the men that I've had the privilege to speak with. And so how did you deal with that? When you look back on it, Were you able to sort of metabolize that experience? Did it just sort of naturally work itself on you? I would love for you to speak to that if you're open to it.

Yeah, sure. I thought quite a bit about this. And you know, grief is.

This companion for, for the rest of your life if you've suffered that kind of loss. And of course for my parents, having lost actually not one, but two daughters, kind of, even, even more so. And having had kids myself now that I had one son at the time and I have three boys. I mean just like any parent who's listening to this will know that the.

The thing that probably is the, the coldest feeling into your heart. Do you have kids?

I do. I have a two year old. He's turning two on Monday.

Right. And so like I've, and I've had moments with all of my kids of, of peril.

And they're just like. It is the cold dagger of fear of losing your own child and obviously losing a sibling is, is somewhat different but, but the grief is a companion and the grief is a gift. It's, it's a reminder, it's a connection back. And even talking about her now, as you can probably tell, I haven't talked about her for a while. You know, she's back in my mind and kind of I'm emotional again. So it's a way that she stays alive. Hits you. It hits you all kinds in weird ways and in odd ways. You create, you create stories around the person you've lost. So we have a story in our family that she always loved rainbows. So we have this, they have this story now that she sends rainbows. And it is remarkable how often a rainbow will appear at just the kind of right moment. I pick my parents up from the airport, there's a rainbow. I've having something happened. There's a rainbow. And so we now as a family just share Pictures of rainbows with each other. And so there's a sort of whole set of symbols and signals around her that are really kind of empowering and great as well as the loss. And I think the trick is to. To just be as joyful as you are sorrowful. There is this wonderful line from Khalil Gibran, which is that the deeper that sorrow carves into your soul, the more joy it can also contain. And there's really something in. My parents have really modeled that for me, talked about modeling. And so for a lot of. For a lot of parents, losing children is just. It destroys everything. It can destroy their marriage. It can destroy their sense of the future. It can just become all encompassing. Some parents become obsessed with whatever the disease was that, you know, kill. And that has not happened to my parents. They've grieved and, you know, they. We've all grieved together, and we always mark the right occasions. But they have a joyful, wonderful life. They're very happy, as, of course, Beth would want them to be. And so I think that the broader lesson here is. Is that there's this wonderful book called the Art of Dying, which I looked at kind of recently. I don't. Do you know that book?

Yeah, I can't remember the author, but yeah, yeah.

It's a. She's a doctor. It's a brilliant. It's a. It's a. Perhaps you can find it. But it's shown as a wonderful book, the Ars Moriaris, or whatever it is in Latin. And.

The strong message of that is that actually proximity to death and awareness of death is one of the things that helped. Is about a good life, a life well lived is one that's embraced and internalized the idea of death. And, of course, death is quite rare now for many people in modern societies. And so it does seem like this extraordinary, extraordinary event rather than the ordinary event it was until quite recently. And I think we've obviously gained a huge amount from the drop in mortality rates. I don't want to be misunderstood here, but one of the things I do think we've lost is that sense of what it means for our life to be aware of our death and to be okay with that. And. And I genuinely have come to believe that living well requires you to be facing embracing death squarely, without fear. And one practical consequence of it is that I. I live. I try to live each year as if it was my last one.

I hit on that because.

The little thought experiment I do at the end of each year. And again, this Will sound morbid to some people. But rather than New Year's resolutions and Heiser, the exercise I go through is to say, if I had known in advance that that was going to be my last year.

How differently would I have lived it?

And if the answer is very differently, I'm doing something wrong. If the answer is, well, I wouldn't be married to that person, I wouldn't be doing that job, I wouldn't be living there.

If there's some really big things that you just. If you'd known it was your last year, you wouldn't carried on doing, then you have some changes to make in your life now at the margins. Of course, if you knew you'd take more of it, you'd like. It's not that it wouldn't have any effect. And it's somewhere between this idea of, like, you have one day to live, right? A day to live, that's a whole different thing, right? You definitely clear your schedule and go and do stuff with your loved ones or whatever. If you have a day to live, right, that's just like. And I'm never going to die. My death is so far away from me, so distant from me, I don't have to think about me is too far the other way. So I think this idea of a year is quite a useful sort of framework. And so far, ever since Beth has died, I've been able to look back on each year and feel pretty good. Good. And say, look, it wouldn't have been exactly the same, but it would have been like 80 the same. It would have been the same in its major components. I'm doing the kind of work I feel I should be doing. I'm living with the. I'm living with the person who I feel I should be living with. I'm being the kind of father that. That I kind of want to. Want to be, by and large, within a certain margin of error. So I. I find that to be not. Not a morbid thought, but quite a pat. I find it quite a useful one. Got a good test.

I agree, 100%. I mean, it's interesting. This is not how I expected the beginning of our conversation to go.

It's definitely a first for me.

This is stuff I've never talked about publicly before.

Well, I'm glad to hear that. I'm glad to hear that in some ways, and I'm very appreciative of it because. And by the way, the book I think of, the one you're referring to, the Art of Dying, Peter Fenwick and Elizabeth Fenwick, if that's the one you're talking about.

Yeah, that is the one.

But, you know, it's interesting and I talked about this a little bit. Like right after my son was born, we lost our family dog and he passed at home with us. And we were there and I had my head on his chest listening to his heart, and my wife was sort of holding his paw and looking to his eyes. And it was just beautiful moment. But it was like five, six weeks after our son was born. And it was, I think about two months after my mom had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. And one of the things that I found to be really interesting is just as we were talking about this, and we'll segue away, I promise all the listeners maybe move away from this topic after. But one of the things that I found to be really interesting was I had this gentleman on my show years ago named Francis Weller, and he said that death reminds us to walk through life with grief in one hand and gratitude in the other.

Oh, wow.

And it was such a really profound moment where there was this really deep sort of sorrow and grief in my life of having lost our family dog and the sort of impending loss of my mom. But then there was just this incredible joy of having my son being born. And so it was a very strange time to sort of live with that kind of fullness. And I think in some ways it made me present to the fact that that's almost always there.

I think we as human beings sometimes try and live in a very one dimensional kind of way. We just want to be happy, we just want to feel joy, we just want to feel powerful and potent and all those things. But the. This stretching of our capacity to experience all of it is really one of the blessings that I think, you know, death can sometimes bring to us. And it can also make us question.

How we're walking through life, as you've so aptly put. And so I appreciate that perspective and I just really appreciate this conversation because I think, I think that for many of us as men, as fathers, as sons, you know, as partners, grief is one of those things. It's very challenging. And I think death is one of those things that's very challenging for, for us to be in relationship with, in a healthy way, you know, without fumbling down the hill of neuroticism and high anxieties and existential panic and shit like that.

So, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think maybe especially, maybe is true for, for men, especially in some ways, but. But because this kind of sense of trying to fix it and this sense of. The sense of helplessness that I think many men can feel in this circumstance. I certainly saw this in my family, too. I just. The level of acceptance that's required.

And sort of pivoting away from how can we save you, how can we save you, et cetera, to how can we be here for you as you make this transition? Right. And how can we reassure you that we're going to be. We're going to be okay without you? Right. Because that's the big anxiety. A lot of dying people, of course. And. But I, you know, I have just. I think that's like, there is a sort of railing against the reality of it that I think kind of some, some men have, you know, we can't, you know, we can fix a car, but we can't fix cancer. Actually. I can't fix. I can't fix a car either, actually. So I'm useless on both. I'm useless on both fronts. But. But, you know, let's talk about what should. Let's talk about technical high school for now. I'm sure that's what everybody wants.

Yeah, right, right.

Either your listeners are like, when are these guys gonna stop talking about death and start talking about, I don't know, college? And the others are like, no, no, no, stay away from technical.

Keep going, keep going.

Much better.

Well, I think we've given a good mix. I mean, I've always. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this. I've always had this perspective that we as men have a different perception of time than women in some ways, in the sense that we have this one sort of long arc. You know, women's lives, I think, have a sort of different temporal aspect to it because it broken up by menstruation cycles and being able to.

Carry a child, and then that period of time ends in a woman's life very clearly. Whereas for a man, we don't necessarily have these huge demarcations within our life. And so I think it can be. We can get lulled into this sense of, I have more time, I have more time, I have more time, I have more time. And then suddenly we wake up and we're, you know, whatever, 40, 50, 60 years old, and we feel like we've missed out on things. Or that impending sense of I don't have enough time is just.

Very front and center in our lives because we're very attuned to this sort of long trajectory that our life is taking. So I don't know if that makes any sense or if that has any relevancy or if that feels true for you individually. But I've noticed in working with so many men that there is this sort of different perspective of how we experience time and how we experience life sometimes.

Yeah, that's super interesting. And, and I agree with it. I think these sort of natural interruptions, the periodicity of, of, of women's lives, I think is very different to ours because they do, as you say, have these, these stages. I was thinking about there's a book by Louise Perry.

British feminist called the Case against the Sexual Revolution. And she talks about the three phases of women's lives. She's a maiden mother matriarch. And part of her argument is that under. In modern society that actually we're kind of a bit stuck to in the maiden phase and we don't give enough kind of status and attention to either mothers and certainly not a matriarchs. And I think there's some truth to that and that's kind of, if you like a, A downside. Whereas historically I think humans, human societies have done a pretty good job of finding kind of different, different roles for women, whereas for men, because we don't have as you. I liked your line of the ark. It's like that the line just doesn't obviously become dads and things happen, but not just in this kind of deep biological way. And I was actually. It's weird because I was talking to my, my wife about this just over the last few days. This has been a bit of an issue discussion for us, which is just this sense that women have even of just being life giving and actually the uterus and the womb and the kind of just sense of giving birth being huge and that. And then of course menopause comes and that, that's, that's a kind of. It's a change and all that doesn't go away, but it's a change. And so I wonder if this is kind of wild speculation now, but it feels to me that maybe one of the reasons that women might everything else equal be able to embrace death a little bit better is because they are the ones that give life and then they sort of start. So menopause in some ways is a kind of marker of like I've moved away from being a literal creator of life now. And so in that sense it's not obviously not a death, but it's an end. It's that, but it's, it's a, it's a. Which men don't get. Right. We don't get that sense of like a power. Our sort of life creating abilities are contingent on our age in the same way. So I do. I wonder about that. I've always thought about it in terms of the seasonality, the kind of rhythm of life that gives women that men don't have. But there may be something deeper to it as well.

Yeah, I mean, my friends that know me often joke about, like cautioning against talking about time with me for some reason because I always, I have this sort of interesting fascination with time and how we relate to it. But anyway, we can, we can move away from that and move towards technical high schools. Technical high schools and education everyone's been waiting for.

Yeah.

And you know, the, the goods. But I'm really glad that I got, you know, I've, I've. I just released a book on January 30th and so I've been doing dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews and I always appreciate being able to discuss something that is out of the norm. And so I'm, I'm very, very glad that I got to sort of take you off course.

Totally. I'm so far away from my script now, I don't even know what the script is anymore. What are we going to talk about again?

Well, so one of the reasons why I was excited about having you on the show is, you know, we live in this very polarized time. And what I find fascinating as, you know, somebody who runs an organization called Man Talks, is that there seems to be this notion that to talk about men, men's development, men's issues, the possible decline of boys and young men sort of creates this visceral reaction. Specifically, it seems to be on the political left. And then when you talk about these issues, what seems to happen on the more political right is almost a kind of blaming of women.

Or feminism. And one of the things that I've really appreciated about you is that you seem to walk this line that I'm very curious about, selfishly, how you've done this where you're not necessarily advocating for one flag or the other. So as you've stepped into this conversation and talked about the decline of young boys and young men, education systems, relationships, gender, all these different things. How have you tried to have this discussion, knowing this, the state of the culture right now?

Yeah, well, I think the first thing is it's much easier to, to appear non partisan if you are not a partisan. Right. There are people who are kind of actual partisans who are pretending to be non partisan, but they're actually. And it's pretty hard to pull it off. And I actually genuinely, I'm not, I'm not a partisan. I don't, I don't have a flag. I come from the uk, so that's one thing. So at even in the uk, I didn't have a particularly good flag. I worked for the Liberal Democrats when they were in government. I worked for Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and like two months into my time there, his chief of staff came and said, we've discovered you're not a member of the party. Would you like to join, given you're working for us in government? Because otherwise this could be really bad press. It's like, this is not a headline. We want, you know, senior advisor, not even member of party. So I joined quickly. Again, obviously this is, I'd never said that publicly before, so sorry everybody. It was a long time ago. I'm sure you'll forgive me, but I'm just not, I'm not a partisan person. And so on issues of Boys and men, I just, I, I'm just calling it as I see it. And I think that actually these arguments, there's merit on both sides. Anybody who can't see that there's merit in the opposing argument, it just isn't, isn't thinking properly, probably. So that made a bit easier. I think the second thing is that because I come from Brookings and I'm a scholar, that, that gave me some space to just get some attention for the facts. Just be very fact forward, let's lead with the facts. Let's just say here are the facts, right? And then we can argue about them, we can dispute, but like the facts themselves are not in dispute. And so then let's get into that, and that's, that's pretty powerful is to say this is not a, this is not an opinion based or an emotion based conversation. It's a whole. Here are some troubling facts, then we might get emotional about them later, but we start with the facts. And the third thing I would say is that just tone is incredibly important. I have really come to believe that tone of voice, whether in writing or in speaking, is incredibly important and not to be dismissed like, this is not. There is this sort of, you know, if I'm making the right argument and I'm correct, it doesn't matter how I say it. That strikes me as unbelievably naive and a little bit offensive because people are going to react to what you're saying and how you're saying it incredibly strongly in many Cases in an area like this, you use the word visceral, which is this visceral reaction which many people will have, particularly women and particularly those on the left to this conversation. And not only do I understand that, I sort of share it a little bit. I get it.

Right.

I feel it with you a bit. And so you have to embrace that, honor that feeling and say, look, I get it. You're probably rolling your eyes right now. You're like, where is this guy going with this? What's you know, et cetera. So just sit with that for a minute and pay attention to the areas where there are still lots of issues for women and girls. And finally, the intellectual, the intellectual heart of this is to just defy the zero sum framing. It's not zero. Zero sum thinking is poisoning so much of our politics and culture. It has to be A or B. You have to care about women. If you care about women and girls, you have to be blind to what's happened to boys and men or vice versa. It's like we're only allowed to use one eye, right? Right. At a time as I go. So. And if you use. Which are you gonna. You're look at the world through one eye or the other eye? And you're not allowed to use both.

And I think if you just say to people, look, I'm not going to do that. Right.

I'm not going to fall into that trap that just opens a space for the conversation. It doesn't mean everyone's going to agree with you or where you end up, but it at least creates a space.

Yeah, I mean.

I agree with everything you said. And I think what came to mind initially was just the Jordan Petersons of the world. This sort of. He's a fellow Canadian like myself. And, well, I've always found it fascinating how people have reacted to him where they sometimes miss out on what he's saying or will reject what he's saying because of the way that he's saying it. And I do think that there's an inherent merit in being able to communicate something from a grounded place. And I'm sure that your British accent doesn't hurt in America.

Right.

There's a certain level of seriousness that I think that has. But also the delivery method that you use is just sort of very straightforward, very calm, very grounded. And I think when it comes to these topics, man, is it ever easy to just get very emotional about it. So I'm going to share something that you wrote about recently on your substack. I think it was where you said that There are currently 1.6 million young women with a bachelor's degree. There are currently 1.6 million more.

Young women with a bachelor's degree than men. And to put this in perspective, that's just less than the population of West Virginia. So there's this sort of rising gender gap in education and specifically within college. And we hear these stats that there's less men graduating from college than ever before. I think it's something like 42% or 43% of college grads are men. I could be wrong on that. And the rest are women, boys are doing worse in school, et cetera. Can you break down a little bit of your assessment in terms of why you see this happening, what the data is showing? And then I'd like to talk about the implications after, because I think socially, relationally, there's some very big implications.

Yes, or there could be, and I'd love to talk about that. So the basic facts here are not in dispute, which is the. In pretty much every level of education, pretty much every subject, girls and women are ahead of boys and men in basically every advanced economy. So the details differ, but this is not something weird about the US system or the Canadian system or the UK system or the French system. It's. It's happening everywhere to slightly different degrees and at different levels. But the basic story of the last 30, 40 years is of a giant educational overtaking. So in the us, which is the data I know best, the chances of a man getting a college degree in 1972 was 13 percentage points higher than a woman. Today, the chances of a woman getting a college degree are 15 percentage points higher than a man. So the inequality has reversed. So. And 72 is an important year for you, for people in the US because it's when Title 9 was passed to promote women and girls in education, and it's coming up to its 50th anniversary. So 50 years after passing Title IX to help women and girls, we actually have slightly wider gender gap in higher education than we did then. It's just reversed. And no one saw that coming. Quite importantly, that was never predicted, never expected. I've talked to a lot of people, did the work in the 70s, and I've gone back to some of the literature and like, you cannot find anybody predicting the overtaking. It was all about catch up, quite rightly, right? No one thought, well, what if the lines keep going? Will we one day have to start talking about gender gaps the other way around? Like, it just didn't occur to anybody that was going to happen. And it, and it reflects what's happening in high school. So again in the US the ones that the students with the highest GPA, 2/3 of them are girls, the ones are the lowest, 2/3 of them are boys, et cetera. And being male, it's actually the single biggest risk factor for not being school ready at the age of five. And being male is the single biggest risk factor, obviously with the appropriate controls for other factors, the biggest risk factor for dropping out of college. So there's a kind of a risk, there's a sort of educational risk factor now that's just automatically attached to boys and men by anybody researching the field. And so as I say, that's true everywhere. Every OECD country, they're the advanced economies, there are more young women with a college degree. And actually the more gender equal countries, the Scandinavian countries, are the ones with the biggest gaps.

Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I think I've dug into this quite a bit and heard a lot of different conversation around it. And it's interesting to see and hear.

People'S responses to this data and their perspective in response to it. I've heard you talk about, let's just start from early age. Right. So I have a son that's two, and this is something that I've been thinking about as he's developmentally started to speak quite a bit later than a lot of, you know, especially young girls. We were sitting on a plane and there was a girl that was sitting behind us and she was like 17, 18 months old and she was fluent, you know, she was just chatting away. And here's my boy, he's almost two, and you know, he's not talking yet. Yet, or he's just starting to form that. And I've heard you talk about maybe one possibility of what could be contributing to this is that young boy's prefrontal cortex develops later. So can you just outline some of the contributing factors that people should be aware of in terms of why this gap might be happening within the education system? And maybe we'll just start at the beginning and work our way up to college.

Yeah, so I mean, boys on average, of course, all of these are average differences. And the distributions, the extent to which the distributions overlap varies depending on which one of these I'm talking about. But the general picture is that boys develop somewhat more slowly than girls. They develop language skills a bit later than girls, as I said, they're just, they're typically not as ready in terms of.

Spatial skills, verbal skills, at the age of, say 4 or 5, which is very often when they'll start school as girls.

And that's reasonably well established in the neuroscience. Right? It's not, this is not just behavioral. You can see it in the, you can see it in literally in the, in the MRI scans. And then as you move up through the school years and particularly into adolescence, early adolescence, a very big gap opens up in terms of the development of what you've called the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is sometimes called the CEO of the brain. It's the bit, the organizing bit of the brain. I sometimes refer to it as the turn in your chemistry homework bit of your brain because, right, turning into a chemistry homework is really hard. You have to take it home, you have to do it, you have to remember it, then you have to remember to do it, then you have to take it back in, you have to remember to turn it in. It's a very, very hard thing to do, especially if you're a boy. And so those kind of organizational skills or kind of non cognitive skills as they're sometimes referred to, are really associated with this prefrontal cortex. And that develops between a year and two years earlier in girls than in boys on average. And the main reason for that seems to be because it's triggered by puberty. So puberty has the second round effect of triggering the development of this bit of the brain. Girls hit puberty on average between a year or two earlier than boys. Is one of the reasons why I only discovered this fairly recently. Why in the Jewish tradition, bat mitzvahs are a year earlier than bar mitzvahs. Not in every tradition, not in every Jewish tradition, but that's quite common in Judaism, apparently. So that's interesting, right? Well, why would. That's a kind of. Well, duh. Of course, girls are ready before boys and they do hit puberty earlier. And the reason that matters for education, it matters for all kinds of reasons, is the education system in adolescence especially, really strongly rewards those organizational skills, the ability to control impulse, future orientation, back to your obsession with time. The prefrontal cortex is very strongly associated with having a future orientation and being able to see past today and tomorrow and see how your actions today will affect your future self. All of that comes at this prefrontal cortex. And so interestingly, while there's a very big gender gap in grades in high school, there isn't a very big gender gap in test scores, which are just more about cognitive ability. So it's very important. It's Framed the right way. It's not that girls are smarter than boys or vice versa. Doesn't appear to be much difference in terms of those just smarts, intellectual processing ability and cognitive skill. It's non cognitive. It's the chemistry homework, book bag planning, future orientation stuff where girls and young women are way ahead of boys and they remain ahead of them on that front through into the early 20s. So that has a huge impact during what turns out to be the critical. The critical years for educational trajectory are also the years when there's the biggest gender gap in neurological development. And there's no controversy about that, there's a controversy about how much they overlap, et cetera. But whereas there's a big debate about male and female brains and adults, there's no debate about this. Like I, when I wrote that section, one of my most progressive liberal feminist colleagues wrote in the, in, in the margins when she reviewed the book. I have a son and a daughter, so. Well, duh. And I think that like, if you want to make this very visceral, walk into any classroom of 12 or 13 year old boys and girls and ask them to open their book bags and see what happens. For the boys it's very often like a controlled explosion when they open their bags. And for the girls it's much more like to be quite organized little tabs and all the rest of it. Now these are stereotypes, but the stereotypes for a reason, because they're based in actual brain science. That means boys are at a slight disadvantage in the education system.

It's interesting, as you're describing this, I am looking around at my office and.

Knowing what my wife's office looks like.

Show us.

I can't, unfortunately, but it's, I mean, literally at my desk, you know, it's, there's like stuff that needs to be put up on the walls. There's pictures, there's, you know, boxes over here. I just set up the bookshelf and I haven't taken the boxes out yet. And my wife's office is just like pristine. You know, there's no clutter, there's nothing on the desk. And so, but you know, even I think about myself going through school and, and that was very much true. Right. This ability to organize was very challenging. The ability to sit still, very challenging. You know, I, I. Impulse control, sort of, yeah, impulse control. I sort of joke around that I was like one of the first guinea pigs for Ritalin, for ADHD at a very young age. And, and I think that, I think the stats show that, you know, boys are much more likely to be on ADHD medication and girls are much more likely to be on antidepressants.

Yes.

And so we can sort of see this divergence between how young boys and young girls are approaching. That kind of brings me to this question of. There seems to be a very sort of blatant undermining of this. The basic principles of the biological sex differences, like it's almost like to talk about differences between male and female elicits or sort of evokes this kind of attack or response sometimes. So what do you say to that? How do you traverse that? What would you say are some of the natural differences between men and women that we should take into consideration here? I think we're talking about some of them. And are there any caveats that you think that need to be deployed within this conversation that are often missing in the discourse?

Yeah, so we've mentioned one which is in the timing of brain development. And that's a nice, that's a good safe one to start with because I say there's no controversy about that. And like anybody that spent any time with 14 year old boys and girls says something to the effect of what my colleague says. Well, duh. And so that's kind of well known. By the way, the bad news for you, Conor, is that if you're 40, your prefrontal cortex is as good as it's going to get. So your office is not going to get any tidier.

I'm there. Yeah, that's it, it's done.

Sorry, it's by about 25, it's game over in terms of the development. And actually men do stay a little bit behind women, even on those, even on those skills. And yeah, it's interesting because back to where you started around, like where do you caught controversy and where. Not like where, what's the rhetorical strategy? And the chapter I was most strongly urged to take out of the book was the one where I discussed the differences in men and women's psychology and preferences that are grounded in biology.

And why, if at all, we should pay attention to them. There's two parts to your question. One is.

What are they? And then secondly, do they matter? And I think that's really important that you added that second one because they don't matter, then why would you spend much time talking about them?

And I think again, the problem with this is that the debate gets really polarized really quickly into. I like to think of the idea of kind of overlapping distributions. I think that's a useful concept. And somebody once said that most of the problems in society stem from people's inability to understand an overlapping distribution.

So if you hear there's a gender pay gap, it means that all men earn more than more women. That's obviously crazy.

So let's take height as an example of that. Right? Are men taller than women? Yeah, but I think about a third of women are taller than the average man. Big differences at the tail, so very unlikely. Like 1% of women are over 6 foot, 15% of men are, and then same at the bottom. Okay, so just take that as an idea. That's what a lot of the differences that we, that we might talk about look like. They look, you know, some of them look a bit more like that, others less. So. Right. So the question is how they overlap. Now, the two, the two other ways to look at this are. It's binary, right? So you're either in that camp or you're in this camp, or at the other extreme, we're basically the same, or any differences are just a result of socialization. Both of those positions are batshit crazy in my view. And just like nobody out there in the real world just gives them the time of day. Right? So it's only ideologues who would suggest that because on average women are more nurturing, only women should be allowed to be nurses. Right. Or that because on average, you know, men are more aggressive or higher risk that only, only men should be allowed to be fighter pilots. But also, most people would say, look, under conditions of absolute free choice, we're not going to get 50% of nurses are men and 50% of fighter pilots are women. We're not. Because the overall distributions of interest in and aptitude for those things differ between men and women. So the question is, okay, so where is it then? So what's the number? It becomes an empirical question. But if we can establish from the outset the fact that there are differences doesn't mean they apply to every individual. And the fact that there are differences doesn't make one of them better than the other. Right. And historically, the reason people are afraid to talk about differences is because they get weaponized against women.

Right.

It's like the feminine virtues or the feminine traits are devalued in our economy or in our society by comparison to the masculine ones. I think that's probably the best definition of patriarchy that I could think of. Right. It's a term that's massively misused. But I think a patriarchy is probably one where there is just like the value is placed on the traits Preferences, psychology, virtues, tendencies of men, masculine as opposed to feminine. And a matriarchy would be the other way around. So I'll give you three examples and I'll start because dangerous. I could keep talking about this, but let's take risk, aggression and sex drive. And those are the three I briefly touch on in the book. There are others, like men are a bit more into things, women a bit more into people, which matters for occupation. I do talk about that in the book as well. But some of the biggest differences are around the ones I've talked about, which is the potential for aggression significantly higher in men than in women. And that's large about testosterone. Relatedly, the extent to which men are driven by sex is much higher than for women. I have a recent substack on that for women and the appetite of men for risk to take risk is higher for men than for women. And so the question then is like, well, do those things matter? Well, some of them might matter in the education system, right? So if you've got more risk taking apt then do you build that in and men are more competitive as well? I think that's the other, the other one that's worth mentioning, a bit more drawn to competition.

So do you structure your education system in ways that favor one style of learning over another or one set of tendencies over another? And what you should try to do is not not do that. And arguably we went, maybe we were too male in the past, but if anything we're too quotes female now in the education system. And then things like violence and sex and so on, those are more around what are the kind of cultural norms. But I'll give you one very specific example of pornography, right? If we're going to educate our kids how to think about pornography, which we absolutely must, and what pornography is and what it means, etc, I think treating girls and boys the same.

Doesn'T make very much sense, right. That we're so different in terms of our wiring around sex that our relationship with pornography is inevitably different. So you want sex segregated pornhead classes for sure. Yeah. So that's kind of like a very specific example. But I think not just sort of wishing these differences away doesn't help anybody.

Yeah, I've given a few talks at all boys schools over the years and.

It'S interesting, I remember one of them there was sort of 600 boys and you know, they ranged from I think grade six to 12. And I remember at one point I told the dean of the school and the teachers had asked me to talk about pornography in some way. And so I had all of the teachers because it was a two story place, all the teachers were up top and all the parents that wanted to come and watch were up top. And so I had them all turn around and face away from the boys who are all in the very middle on the main floor with me. And I said, okay, none of the parents and none of the teachers are allowed to look if you're down here. And I click the slide and the slide went. And it's just a porn, you know, big massive letters. All the boys sort of erupted. I said, okay, raise your hand if you have watched porn, if you've, if you've seen it, if you've watched it recently. And I would say 98 to 99% of the hands went up in the room, you know, and there's 600 boys in there. And I think this, I think that I've seen different versions of this. But you know, the average young boy is starting to watch porn between like 9 and 12 or something like that.

Yeah.

Which is to, to me that type of inundation of sensory information is just massive. And I, I do think that it's sort of this strange social experiment that has been happening within our culture and society that we are just not talking about. So I appreciate talking about.

I think that the shock, the kind of amplifying effect of the Internet in terms of access to pornography but also other, you know, other kinds of, what would be the polite term is sex work for think only fans, webcams and so on. Just the way that the Internet, like all, all the trope is all technologies affect sex. You know, the first things the printing press was used for was to, you know, do new nude things. They just uncovered some 40,000 year old, you know, figurine which is like, of a naked woman. I think it was like the world's first porn question mark, etc. So you know, as soon as we could carve we were like whittling at.

Naked cave paintings and.

Yeah, yeah, all of that. Right. So it's like. But the Internet really is very different. It kind of in this force multiplier effect. And in fact one of the great difficulties. There are two huge difficulties of getting good evidence on the effect of porn. Number one is a research bias that almost everybody researching the effect of porn has a prior that it's bad. There's just a built in bias among the researchers and sensible people looking at the evidence know that. Right. You just have to know there's a huge selection effect for people researching it. But the second bigger problem is there's no control group.

If you're trying to look at what's the effect of looking at porn on young men today? There's no control because they're all looking at porn.

So then it becomes like, how much, to what extent? And so, but it is really, it's a real, it's a problem in the social science of this era is just like when something's ubiquitous, how do you, how do you know what effect it's having? So, so I looked at the evidence on porn and it's just really hard to get good evidence. So that's one of the reasons why. But I will say that I didn't know what you said to the boys actually, because I think your brain on porn is a very good book. And my reading of the evidence is that it's like a lot of these things is that there's, you know, there's the potential for addiction and overuse, etc, there's a real risk of displacing other activities. It's like it's less the direct harm of porn and more what you're not doing when you're watching porn. That's a whole kind of different thing. But overall, I didn't share the moral panic that many people have when I looked at the evidence. But I'd be interested, I'd be interested to know what's your take on it?

Well, I mean, having a lot of hours working with men over the years, what I've noticed is a couple of things like in my book, I'm going to send you a copy of my book and it'd be interesting to hear what you thought. But I have a section where I talk about porn because I certainly struggled with it at some point, point in my life and it was what I would classify as unhealthy and not sort of useful. But you know, I talked about some of the data and some of the research, porn being a super normal experience, the sort of above normal experience. And that oftentimes a lot of men are turning towards porn because they're trying to escape, feeling something, right? It's become this reset button for their nervous system. So I'm feeling angry, lonely, boredom, you know, frustrated. I'll just hit the porn button, get a dopamine hit and feel better. And, and so there's many ways to do that. So one of the things that I, that I usually talk about with boys and with men is there are many ways to hit the dopamine feel better button that don't include doing that that are also going to leave you feel more connected to your own sense of empowerment, confidence, competency, all of the things that you're likely wanting to build. Whether it's, you know, work, working out or writing or going for a walk or calling a friend, there's many different things that you can do. So that's one of the pieces that I've talked about and that seems to hit for a lot of guys where just starting to interfere with the cycle that's happening and starting to see, what am I feeling before I watch porn? Am I actually aroused and turned on and horny or. Or am I feeling something entirely different that I'm just not wanting to deal with? So I think getting men to kind of be aware of what are you actually experiencing beforehand is just one of the most impactful tools. Because then guys can say, like, oh, actually I'm just bored. I'm not even turned on. I just can't think of anything better to do. So let's actually do something productive. Let me do something that's going to leave me feeling meaningful or connected or what have you. Sort of.

That's really interesting. I completely agree with that. And I also agree that like any, any man who says he hasn't struggled with this is either A, a liar or B, has no Internet connection or really bad connection.

Just as a. Just to take as a general statement, maybe off in a cabin in like, somewhere like has. Has dial up. Maybe, maybe he's okay. But I. I think the more serious point is that you're right in the way you framed it. I think this kind of dopamine nation work, that's gone, I think. And interestingly, you see among some young men now that actually it's become like a point of pride to not.

Yeah, no, no, Fab, right?

Yeah, November, exactly. Just to kind of like. And that's really encouraging because that shows there's a kind of understanding of it. But the way you just framed it makes me think about the work on alcohol or anything else, which is what we're asked. The question you're asking is like, what am I trying to change about my state of mind with this? Like, what is it? Where am I trying to get to? Albeit briefly, like, and in that sense, it's better thought of as a form of substance abuse. If you think of porn as a substance, then that's substance abuse in the same way that you might use alcohol or any other kind of drug or whatever. Like, and it's weird, you don't normally think of it that way, but it seems to, you know, you tend to think of it more like a gambling addiction or something, but it feels to me almost more like psychologically, almost like substance abuse. Yeah.

And I think for a lot of. And unfortunately, we're running out of time, which is.

We haven't done technical high schools.

I know, I know I have to block you off for like an hour and a half next time and, you know, come sit in your office at the Brooking Institute and with. With my cameras and mics. But I'm curious maybe how we'll wrap this up is how. Because I can hear people. I get messages all the time from single moms, from fathers. And the big question is, how do I talk to my kids about pornography? And I know that this is maybe not so much about data or research, and it's more about a sort of direct insight, but I'm curious if you have any recommendations of how do we have these conversations? When should we have these conversations? What does that look like? Is it. Is this something, you know, personally, that you've. You got three boys. I would imagine that you've had to tackle this at some point. You know, Internet history is being revealed.

No, no. In my household, there's never been any of these issues. Connor, just make that very clear.

All the men in our household are saints.

Straight and narrow. Straight and narrow.

So, yeah, of course. And actually, I think it's an opportunity to make a more general point as well. I think this is a good, specific example, a more general point about how we talk to our boys and men generally about some of the struggles that they're having, which are distinctly male and which are related to aspects of the male lived experience, to put it that way. And pornography is one example, which is. Okay, so what's happening with pornography is that there's just this huge technology shock meeting, this psychology, right? Men are wired in a different way around. Around sex, which makes boys and men uniquely vulnerable to the dangers of addiction, abuse, over reliance on whatever you want to call it, of pornography, no question. But the underlying. The, the. The. The thing that's calling us to it, right, Is. Is not a bad thing, right? Our desire for sex, our strong sex drive, et cetera, is not a bad thing. So it's incredibly important. And I've really tried this with my own. So with some of my own sons is like, not to shame the underlying driver, but then to say, look, let's talk about, like, what are you going to do with that drive? Right? And how is this. And to what extent is this a good Or a bad way to do it. Let's talk about that, right? What's good about porn? What's bad about porn, et cetera, rather than how dare you? This is disgusting. Never again. And by the way, why do you keep masturbating all the time anyway? To which the answer is, I'm a boy.

I'm male. I love this. Actually, there's a great line from this trans man. And people trans agree data points to this when they talk openly about it. And he said, when I was a woman, I could masturbate. Now that I'm a man, I have to masturbate. Yeah. And it was great. All the guys like, yep, welcome to the party. And so there's nothing wrong with that. In the same way that if they're more physical, right. They're struggling to sit still as. As you did. As I did. Which is why I was in remedial English, by the way, to start with at school. That's also not bad. If they are. Have a. They want to take more risks, they want to run more risks, do more. Also not bad. Just try and find ways to do that in a way, the positive way, etc. And so never use the term toxic masculinity. Never shame boys and men for being boys and men. Having these underlying traits, urges, preferences, and psychology. Instead, say, okay, you know, how do we take that operating system out into the world today and express it in a way that's as good as possible, right? And what are the risks? What are the dangers, costs, and benefits of these different attributes that we might have as boys and men and not fall into the trap, which I think sometimes we do fall into, of treating boys like defective girls.

And saying at some level, either explicit or implicitly, why can't you be more like your sister? And the answer is, well, because I'm a boy and she's a girl. But I'm afraid sometimes that we. We've. If we once had a world in which masculine ways of behaving were held up as better than feminine and girls were shamed for not living up to them, I think in many cases we've flipped that script now and there's a real sense, especially among moms, I would say this is a kind of message, particularly to moms, which is it's quite easy to look at the things about boys and men and find them weird and. Or disgusting. Because, you know, if you're a woman, you just like. It's just like. Like the sex drive thing. It's just really hard for women to understand what it's like to be a man when it comes to that, and vice versa. Right. That's part of the beauty of the difference. So don't resort to shame. Be open and. And don't. Don't treat masculinity as some secular version of an original sin that has to be somehow exercised.

So well said. So well said. And I had some not so savory examples come to mind, but we'll leave those for our next conversation.

All right, let's do this again.

But listen, this has been wonderful. I mean, I think I've interviewed six or seven hundred people now over the last several years, and this is one of those conversations that will sit with me, and there's so many things that I didn't get to, but I'll follow up, and I would love to have round two at some point later this year or next and whenever you're available. And I just. I really value your voice, and I really value the work that you're doing. And I think having a boy, you know, the work that you're doing really does genuinely give me a sense of not just hope for my son and the future generation, but a sense of ease and calmness. You know, that there are people that are talking about this. And out of that conversation, some kind of substantial change will happen, whether that's in our social dialogues within our education systems.

And I think that that's deeply, deeply important. So thank you for all that you do, and thank you for how you present these things and your work and your research. And we'll have all the links in the show notes and for everybody listening, share, you know, man it forward, share this conversation with somebody that you know will enjoy it and go and get the book of Boys and Men.

We'll have.

And your book and my books. Get both books right. We'll have them in tandem. So, Richard, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you.

It's great, great conversation.