Richard Reeves on the Gender Gap

Persuasion

Richard Reeves is the founder and president of the American Institute of Boys and Men. He is the author of Dream Hoarders and, most recently, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It (which was recently included by Barack Obama on his summer reading list).
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Richard Reeves discuss whether young men propelled Donald Trump to victory in the 2024 election; how we can supply boys and men with new sources of meaning; and the enduring relevance of John Stuart Mill.

The transcript and conversation have been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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Yascha Mounk: So I'm really excited to talk about your broader research agenda regarding the status of boys and men in our society today. But the natural starting point, I think, is to talk about the election. There's been a lot of talk about the idea that the American election was somehow decided by young men moving to the right, that perhaps all of this is fueled by a kind of men's rights, via influences like Andrew Tate.

There may be something to that, but I think the actual story is a little bit more complicated. How do you think gender played into this election?

Richard Reeves: The first thing to say is that the surprise was not that we saw men, especially young men, moving to the right. That would have been pretty well predicted by the polls leading up to the election. The surprise actually was that young women also moved slightly to the right. The expected gender gap was going to be men, especially young men, moving right, and women, especially young women, moving left, probably motivated by abortion and other issues. And that would be this big gender gap.

Well, actually, there was a big gender gap, but that was just because women didn't move right quite as much as men did, which was not really the gender gap that the left certainly had in mind. But I think it's statistically clear that there was a move.

Mounk: I saw some slightly different exit polls and it looked like the gender gap had actually reduced since 2020. It sounds like you're thinking probably on the whole it has slightly grown.

Reeves: So I think the overall gender gap is probably pretty stable, maybe even narrowed a little bit from 2020 to 2024. And that's because you just saw this overall move. You saw pretty much every demographic group with a couple of exceptions moving towards the Republicans compared to 2020. So against that context, the gender gap was pretty stable and not that different to historic trends. It's when you look beneath the hood at different demographic groups that it gets more interesting. We did see a growing gender gap among young voters, voters under 30. We did see a bigger gender gap among Latino voters or Hispanic voters, with men moving even more quickly to the right than Hispanic women. But we didn't see it, for example, among white college educated voters, older voters, et cetera. And so depending on which demographic you looked at, there was a slightly different gender story. But I think it's certainly true, not to overstate that there was this kind of huge gender gap, but to underline the fact that that's because the expected move of women, and particularly of young women to the left, didn't transpire. In fact, if anything, it was a slight move to the right. But there was nonetheless a strong move to the right among certain groups of men, including young men and Hispanic men.

We'll see what happens with young men going forward, but when you see such a big move, when you see young men kind of breaking so hard to the right, that is unusual in that age demographic. And that's something that I know a lot of people on the left are very concerned about.

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Mounk: So I think there's three possible explanations for this. So the first one is to say that men used to have superior social status to women, they used to have all the privileges and advantages, and those are now being taken away from them and they're rebelling against that by moving to the right. It's kind of the equivalent of the explanation that really was quite dominant in political science about white people in 2016.

The second explanation is that it's not exactly that, that if you're a Latino man and—recently in your high school, perhaps in a college environment, there was a lot of emphasis on a particular left-identitarian vision that puts hierarchies of oppression at the center—and the assumption for a long time would be that you'd think, “Well, as a Latino, I'm oppressed, and so therefore I'm going to vote with a coalition of the oppressed.” But actually, perhaps in many contexts, you are also told that you're an oppressor on the basis of being a man. And so a lot of these people who have these conflicted identities ended up saying, “I'm more annoyed by the fact that I'm targeted as a man than I am identifying with the status of an oppressed Latino. And so I'm going to vote with the oppressors rather than the oppressed,” or something like that.

Perhaps the third interpretation is that gender is perhaps a kind of confounding factor here: What's really going on is that Democrats have become the party of the well-educated and, to some extent, the affluent; they won voters earning over $100,000 income a year and lost voters below that. They did much better among college-educated people, and you look at the current college population in the United States, and 60% of them are women, right? So it may just be that men didn't vote for Trump because they're men, and women didn't vote for Kamala Harris because they're women—it's that men voted for Trump when they weren't college-educated, when they weren't optimistic about the future, and women voted for Harris when they were college-educated, when they were optimistic about the future, and it's just that more women now fall into that category.

Reeves: Yeah, I really like the way you've laid it out, Yascha. The third, you might think of that as the mechanical effect, which if there's an education split or an economic split, and more men are on one side of that split, less college-educated than women, then just mechanically, you're going to see more men voting for the Republicans. This is just a straightforward empirical question, which is controlling for education status. And once we've got stable data, you could always just do an empirical analysis, right? I think it would be a nice and simple thing for my institute to work on. I'll tell you right now that my pretty strong sense is that it will explain some of the gap, but not most of it and probably not even half of it. And then I think that brings us to which of the other two might be playing a part there and my sense of this is that it wasn't largely the first. Your first category is the backlash reaction: “I'm mad as hell about the fact that the patriarchy is disappearing. I used to have status just because I'm a man. I don't have it anymore. And so I'm reacting against that.” That would be a reactionary impulse. And I'm not saying there's none of that, but when I look at the attitudes, for example, of young men towards gender equality, they continue to get more liberal. Young men are even more supportive of gender equality today than they were eight years ago and certainly than 20 years ago. And so it's just too simple a story to tell. It wasn't a sexism election. I think that would be a mistake.

I think the second one gets closer to my view. I don't know this, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if we found that it was the younger of those men who moved most strongly to the right. And those are very young men. Some of those, they were 10 when Donald Trump came in. They were in middle school when “toxic masculinity” became part of the discourse. I think that we might see some of that kind of reaction, but it's not a reaction against the rise of women. It's a reaction against being constantly told that you don't have problems, you are the problem: mansplaining, patriarchy, toxic masculinity. So I do think they're not over the idea of gender equality, but they are over the idea of being told that they're at fault, that they're the problem, that their very identity is somehow problematic. They're kind of over it. And I really think that if the Democrats draw the false conclusion that sexism played a large part in people's voting behavior, then they'll spend a lot longer than four years in the political wilderness. Because it's also quite clear that people react pretty badly to being told that because they voted a particular way, that can only be because they've got these hateful misogynistic views. They'll blame the voter.

I don't think most of the people voting were voting on the basis of these questions. I think it was more of a more broad set of economic concerns. But I do think that overlaps with gender in the sense that a lot of men feel like they're struggling right now in the economy. They're struggling to get their footing in the labor market. They're struggling to bring home the kind of wage they want. They're just having a bit of a tough time of it. And that means that they are very open to economic arguments about being better off. But more broadly, I think this is more of a story of neglect than anything else. Young men are not actually seeking, by and large, a new masculinist identity politics, a men's rights movement, etc. Of course, there are some fringe figures doing that. But that's not what they're doing. I do think they are rejecting a form of identity politics that pathologizes them.

Mounk: And that's important because, as in the case of other kinds of identity groups, the analysis of why Democrats are losing is going to influence how you think they can address the problem. If you're thinking that the problem with white voters is that “when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression,” and they're just not willing to live in a society that isn't racist, well, then you're going to give up on them and focus on non-white voters. And I think in some ways that's what the Democratic Party has tried to do, with the result of driving a lot of non-white voters into the hands of Republicans, ironically.

If your analysis of the reasons for the gender gap is, “Well, these are all people who are addled from watching Andrew Tate and just don't want to accept female equality,” then you're going to be led to the conclusion that compromise is impossible, and that you're just going to have to build a coalition that is mostly centered around women, or the few men who aren't sexist in that kind of way. Whereas if you recognize that, as you're saying, men have actually continued to move towards embracing ideals of gender equality, and you can certainly reach for a vision that assumes that we want a society of gender equality and stands up for that, but without making them feel targeted in these kinds of ways, that would allow for a much more productive politics.

Reeves: Yes. You recognize there are some gendered inequalities now going in both directions and you address them. So we talked about some of these before, but things like the male suicide crisis, the struggles of boys in schools, the difficulty of finding alternatives to college—so more vocational learning, etc., more straightforward addressing of those problems, I think will downweight gender as an identity. I think, actually, that the neglect of some of the real problems that boys and men are having has combined with, at worst, a pathologization of them, and has actually created conditions in which we're probably seeing more of the men's rights kind of reaction stuff than we would have otherwise seen.

I think it's in some ways quite heartening that the overwhelming majority of men, including young men, are not falling for that. They're not falling for the zero-sum reactionary stuff. They do continue to want their sisters and their girlfriends to have equal rights. They are increasingly supportive of gender equality. It's just they want to be included, to use that terminology, and not in a patronising way, not in a “be a better ally” way. I think a big mistake the Democrats made towards the end of the campaign, especially, was they realised they weren't getting men, and so what they tried to do was try and guilt trip or shame or blame men into voting for them: “If you're a good ally, you vote for us. If you're not sexist, deep down, you vote for us.” And that I think was spectacularly unsuccessful because what it said to men is: “You should vote for us because you love the women in your life.” And that's a disastrous kind of message. It's not that the men don't love the women in their life, it's just that they also have their own issues. And that was something that I think that political messaging just didn't get across at all because the Democrats were pretty convinced they were going to win, effectively, as the women's party. And, privately, a couple of senior Democrats even said to me, “Well, we're pretty confident that for every young man we lose, we're going to pick up at least one young woman—and, by the way, she's going to turn out to vote and he probably won't.”

Mounk: So how do we substantively fix this problem? When you're talking about the politics of it, sort of stopping to lecture them about male privilege certainly seems like the right idea—when somebody is on the ground, you should probably stop kicking them. But that’s not going to fix the structural problem that we're talking about. And obviously some of these changes, I assume, are rooted in these much more long-standing transformations of the economy. Because of globalization and automation, because of the shift towards the service sector and other kinds of things, manufacturing work is more sparse and commands comparatively lower wages than it did 30 or 40 years ago. Now, perhaps we can introduce vocational schools that upskill the American labor force. And perhaps there's geopolitical and geostrategic reasons for why we should do some amount of nearshoring in sensitive industries, and that might increase some of that. But none of that is going to bring back the world of the 1970s, in which you graduate high school, you're a reliable worker, you work hard in a manufacturing job, and you're probably, by comparison to other people in that society, earning a really significant income.

So what's the vision here? Is it that we need to somehow find a way to create the kinds of jobs that the fathers and the grandfathers of those men have traditionally done? Is it that we need to find better ways of integrating men into the sectors of the economy that are growing? Is it that we need to find meaning for them outside of work to a more considerable extent? Perhaps we also need to find different structures of meaning for men so that their status is not just dependent on their income or on having that kind of work contribution. What's the kind of scalable solution here?

Reeves: Can I say yes to all of the above? That was a great list. I think we should do pretty much all of those things. What we can't do is conjure back up a vanished economy. And we certainly don't want to conjure back up a world where men's status and position was dependent on women's dependence on them. We don't want to recreate the economic inequalities that the women's movement quite rightly has been unraveling and has made huge progress on. The shift in the economic relations between men and women over the last 40 years is astonishing: In 1979, 13% of women earned more than the median man. so 13% of women would have been in the top half of the male wage distribution. Today, it's 40% of women that earn more than the median man. Now, the important thing about that is it's not equality. The male and female wage distributions do not look exactly the same. There's still a gap, but 40% is a different world to 13%. And it's the world that we've been fighting for.

Mounk: And one of the interesting sub-facts here is that if you look at demographics which make a little bit more money than white people in general, you observe, for example, the average Asian woman in the United States now making more than the average white man.

Reeves: That's right. And also that white women actually earn a lot more than black men now, which was not true in 1979. In 1979, white women were lagging a long way behind black men. Now, they've overtaken black men. And so that's where, if you want to use intersectionality, that's where you would apply it. And you'd actually look at these different identities and, I think to some extent, celebrate the fact that it's harder to know in advance what the patterns of inequality are going to be. But actually, it’s an open empirical question. That's a sign of progress.

But to come back to your original question about solutions, I'll say something about policy that I'm not sure I believe, but I'm going to try out, which is I think in this area that actually policy is an important signal. As a general proposition, I don't think public policy is very often that good a signaling device, but if I'm right, and a lot of this is the sense of a lack of sensitivity to the problems of men, then I think just having some policies that show that we're going to do this thing not despite the fact that it's going to help men, but because it will help men, because we've noticed that men are struggling, would help. Examples of that could be to make the education system more boy-friendly. You've mentioned vocational training, but one of the things I'm very interested in is more male teachers. And I've noticed recently that everybody from Josh Hawley on the right to the American Psychological Association on the left agree that the declining share of male teachers is a bad thing. These are good role models. Male teachers tend to be coaches. They don’t tell you how to be male, they can just show you. And I think that's a better thing. And the American Psychological Association has just noticed these huge gender gaps in education and saying, “Maybe a few male teachers is not a bad idea.” And so I think you could say that would be a really good policy to pursue in and of itself, but it would also be a signal that you've noticed that men aren't doing great, that boys aren't doing great. And, by the way, we need more teachers. So why not try to get men? And then I'll add a couple of others just for illustration: more apprenticeships, move away from the massive subsidies to elite colleges, for example, and use some of those savings to put into trade schools and, in particular, apprenticeships. And you don't do that despite the fact they seem to be very male-oriented—you do them because they're male-oriented. They just seem to be better educational pathways on average for men, which is great.

Picking up your point about the growth areas of the economy, it is quite true we've shifted to more of a service sector economy. We have a growing need for jobs in the service sector, including in health and education and mental health. And actually those professions are becoming more gendered over time, more women in them.

And in just the same way that we didn't just say we need more women in STEM and do nothing about it, we actually have had huge programs, policies, investments, philanthropy to try and increase the share of women in STEM. We now need similar efforts to increase the share of men in those growth parts of the economy. And so I don't think there's any contradiction between continuing to do work to, say, get more women into engineering and now having similar work to get more men into areas like education, for example, or mental health, because that's where the jobs are coming from, and also to decode the idea that these are “women's jobs.” There is this idea a bit on the left that to try and do something to make these jobs seem more male-friendly is to sort of give in to patriarchal notions, to give in to men's fragility or their sense of themselves. I just think that's naive. I think in just the same way that we had to work quite hard to persuade women that engineering and economics could be quite female-friendly, we need to do the same to make guys feel comfortable going into nursing or teaching or mental health. And I don't see any problem with that, honestly. And so I've criticized the Biden administration for having an initiative to get a million more women into construction, not because I think that's a bad idea, but because there's no equivalent initiative to get men into teaching or into healthcare.

Now, we can't put all our eggs in the basket of economic power for men anymore. And I'm going to risk sounding maybe incredibly conservative when I say this, but I think that men need to know that the tribe needs them, and the way in which the tribe will need them is going to vary hugely over time and place. But to feel unneeded is quite literally fatal, and certainly disorienting. And we've just got to find ways, a bit through public policy but much more generally, to supply men with a broader range of sources of meaning than the labor market can now provide them, which doesn't mean giving up on the labor market. That's a really difficult conversation to have right now, but it's the one we have to enter into.

Mounk: That's very interesting. But let me ask you a broader question.

So on the positive side, the space to talk about these issues is much bigger and broader than it was a number of years ago. Let's say that you continue to be effective with your institute and other like-minded people are able to put together some of the programs you're hoping for, there's more vocational programs, perhaps there's some special programs to try and persuade men to go into teaching. Perhaps we find some better ways for men to find meaning outside of their work. At the same time, some of the basic underlying trends look like they're going to continue. Of course, it's always a mistake to assume that trends continue in a linear way. It may be that we're about to hit an inflection point in any case, that, all things considered, there's going to be fewer rather than more manufacturing jobs per capita in the United States 20 or 30 years from now. I assume that the importance of the kind of formal education that women now seem to have an advantage in is going to increase rather than decrease. How do you think things are going to shake out in 25 years?

Reeves: Well, that's a really challenging and great question. And I tend to be optimistic about these things. I think that's one of the things that makes me a liberal. That's one of our great blessings, and our great curse, to be optimistic. But I think optimism is in some ways something we need a bit more of in our society generally, because it's a self-fulfilling feeling, right? You can't create a better society unless you feel like society can be made better.

If you assume, as I would too, that the economy is going to continue in the direction which means that jobs that are just automatically more male-friendly are going to be in shorter and shorter supply, we have to culturally adapt to that and find ways for men to go into other kinds of jobs without having to cease to be men—which is, think, an important thing. We can't feminize men just because the labor market's changing. We actually need to help men adapt to those roles in a way that makes them feel like they're an appropriate role for men. I just think that's important that we do that, but also to broaden out these places and sources of meaning for men in society. And so I think if in 25 years we haven't deepened and expanded and supported the role of fathers, for example, that will be very bad news, because that's one of the ways in which men can continue to feel that they are needed and have meaning, with a different kind of institutional fatherhood. And we're already seeing that men are doing a lot more fathering than they did even 25 years ago. But I think 25 years from now they'll do even more. And these other chances for them to play a role in their community, which you alluded to a moment ago, around coaching, volunteering, et cetera—maybe this is a provocative point, but I've really come to believe that actually we need some quite specific roles for men in social institutions. I think that male associative activity is more institutionalized on the average than female is, that the average women are just a bit better at association and therefore don't need as much institutional scaffolding to make that association take place.

It's very interesting to me that, at least in the short run, when once you take away the need for something to be done by men, it very quickly ends up being done by women. It's the difference between saying “we need someone” and “we need you.” And at least having some sort of gendered aspect to that turns out potentially be quite important.

Now, I'm aware how all this sounds. It sounds like if you're listening to this, perhaps if you're more, if you're a progressive and you're rolling your eyes right now and saying, “Well, seriously, we have to create special roles for men in order for them to actually do anything?”Maybe they should just do them anyway. Why do we have to carve out male specific roles? Are men really not going to get off the sofa unless we give them specific tasks?” I understand that frustration, but at least for now, when I look at what's happening, I actually do think we need to find ways to make a specific offer to men. Maybe take coaching as an example. Whatever it is, we need to signal to them right now that, in this period of great transition, we actually need you.

In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Richard discuss the life and philosophy of John Stuart Mill, and the post-liberals who critique him. This discussion is reserved for paying members...

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