Of Boys and Men Quotes

“But my argument is not that we should be doing less to attract women into STEM; it is that we should be doing as much to encourage men into HEAL.”
― Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“We face labor shortages in two of the largest and most important sectors of our economy—health care and education. But we are trying to solve them with only half the workforce.”
― Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“Specifically, I argue the following: (1) the male role has long been culturally defined as that of a provider, and based on the economic dependence of mothers on men; (2) this traditional role has been dismantled by the securing of economic independence by women; (3) culture and policy are stuck on an obsolete model of fatherhood, lagging way behind economic reality; and (4) this is resulting in a 'dad deficit,' with men increasingly unable to fulfill the traditional breadwinner role but yet to step up into a new one.”
― Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“For men who are in work, pay levels are typically lower than in the past. The median real hourly wage for men peaked sometime in the 1970s and has been falling since. While women’s wages have risen across the board over the last four decades, wages for men on most rungs of the earnings ladder have stagnated. Only men at the top have seen strong earnings growth. Men who entered the workforce in 1983 will earn about 10% less, in real terms, across their working life than those who started out in 1967. For women, by contrast, life-time earnings have risen by 33% over the same period (these numbers are at the median).23 In the dry words of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The long-term trend in men’s earnings has been quite different than that for women.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“Is your child a dandelion or an orchid? An odd question, I know, but psychologists use these terms to distinguish between children who are pretty resilient, mostly able to cope with adversity and stress (dandelions), and those who are more sensitive to their conditions (orchids).57 If things are just right, orchids will really bloom. If not, they will suffer.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“The second reason to get more men into HEAL jobs is to help meet the growing demand for labor in occupations like nursing and teaching. Almost half of all registered nurses are now over the age of 50. This means many are likely to retire over the next 15 years, especially if they are under greater stress at work.”
― Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“Child support payments should be set with greater sensitivity to a father’s ability to pay, and considering their nonmonetary contributions, including the direct provision of care for their children. Oregon, for example, has a “parenting time credit” that reduces child support payments made by a noncustodial parent if they spend more time caring for their children.”
― Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“Fourth, average sex differences do not justify the institutionalization of gender inequality. There is a fear that biology can be used to provide an intellectual foundation for sexism. This is well founded, given our history. In the wrong hands, evidence for natural differences can indeed be used to justify oppression.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“The real debate is not about whether biology matters, but how much it does, and when it does.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“Biology does represent the foundation of our personalities and behavioral tendencies,” writes Louann Brizendine in her book, The Female Brain. “If in the name of free will—and political correctness—we try to deny the influence of biology on the brain, we begin fighting our own nature. If we acknowledge that our biology is influenced by other factors … we can prevent it from creating a fixed reality by which we are ruled.”4”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“These cultural variations matter a lot for how, and how far, natural tendencies are expressed in behavior. Culture and biology do not develop separately from each other. They coevolve. Neither biology nor culture can provide the whole story. But understanding the role of biology is necessary for keeping it in its place.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“Second, these sex differences can be magnified or muted by culture. Some cultures valorize violence, while others do not. I’m pretty sure that I would be more physically aggressive if I had been born in Sparta a couple of thousand years ago. There’s just not that much use for it at the Brookings Institution.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“The typical male has a greater willingness to take risks, for example, than the typical female (especially in adolescence). But some women are more risk-taking than some men. Most studies find the biggest differences are at the tails of these distributions, rather than for the majority of people. A large majority of the most aggressive people are male, but the differences in aggressiveness in the general population are much smaller.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“One thing that did seem to influence men’s decision whether to study abroad was “peer interactions,” but in a negative direction.36 Men appear to motivate each other to stay put, rather than hit the road.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“Young women are seizing opportunities with much greater zeal than young men. Take studying abroad as another example. In recent decades, this has become much more popular (at least until the pandemic) with increasing numbers of undergraduates now grabbing their passports and phrase books and heading overseas, most often to Europe.32 And why not? Going to another country for a few months is a great opportunity.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“First, motivation: “The women are so driven. They know they have to provide for their family.” Second, independence: “They [the women] don’t really need a relationship, they can do it on their own.” Third, persistence: “When stuff gets hard, the guys tend to run away, the girls don’t.” Fourth, planning: “Women tend to live in the future, men tend to live in the present.” Put these together—motivation, independence, persistence, and planning—and it is no wonder, to Tyreese at least, that women are doing better in school.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“MIT’s Josh Angrist, a Nobel Prize winner in economics, studied this last program and has spent a lot of time in this field. He tells me he “has no theory” about the gender gap. (This is a more formal way of saying “I don’t know.”)”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“Among women, the Fort Worth initiative “tripled associate degree completion.”7 This is a huge finding. But as with free college in Kalamazoo, it had no impact on college completion for male students. Why? Again, the evaluators can only speculate. James Sullivan, one of the scholars who is examining the program, says, “We don’t know.”8 That phrase again. His research team does note that the case managers assigned to work with students, called “navigators” (great name by the way), were all women. When a program relies heavily on a close one-to-one relationship, matching the gender of the provider and recipient may be important. This is consistent with research showing that when the racial or gender identities of teachers and learners or mentors and mentees match, results are often better.9”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“Last but not least, boys suffer more from family instability, especially from the exit of biological fathers.65 Boys raised by single parents, especially single mothers, have worse outcomes than girls (including their own sisters) at school and lower rates of college enrollment, in part because of bigger differences in behavioral problems in the classroom.66 “Boys do especially poorly in broken families,” write Marianne Bertrand and Jessica Pan.67 Boys also benefit much more than girls from successful placement into a foster family, rather than remaining in a group home, according to an analysis by Stanford’s Cameron Taylor.68”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“Class warriors downplay gender concerns, focused only on the oligarchy. Gender warriors downplay class concerns, focused only on the patriarchy. But inequalities of class and gender have to be considered together, especially when they pull in different directions. “Policymaking is not a zero-sum game in which you have to choose between caring about female disadvantage or the socio-economic gap or male underachievement,” write Nick Hillman and Nicholas Robinson. “All three matter.”5 Focusing too narrowly on the remaining barriers facing women can distract attention from the much deeper class divides that have opened up in our society. We might lean in, but fail to look down.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“One of the reasons Black men are less likely to be in the workplace is simply that they are so much more likely to be in jail. And even when they are released, their chances of finding work are massively reduced. This is not just because they have a criminal record—it is because employers are more likely to view Black men as criminals anyway.40 One striking study showed that a Black man without a criminal record is less likely to be hired than a similarly qualified white man with a criminal record. This is why reforms to “Ban the Box” (i.e., remove the requirement to declare a criminal record when applying for a job) do not seem to improve the chances of Black men being hired.41 As Devah Pager writes, “Effectively, the job market in America regards Black men who have never been criminals as though they were.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“But what can be won can also be lost.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“Wifeless men, by contrast, are often a mess. Compared to married men, their health is worse, their employment rates are lower, and their social networks are weaker. Drug-related deaths among never-married men more than doubled in a decade from 2010. Divorce, now twice as likely to be initiated by wives as husbands, is psychologically harder on men than women. One of the great revelations of feminism may turn out to be that men need women more than women need men. Wives were economically dependent on their husbands, but men were emotionally dependent on their wives. For all their jokes about the ball and chain, many men seem to know this. In a 2016 poll, more men than women ranked being married, either now or in the future, as “very important to me” (58 v. 47%). Men do not want to be ships without sails.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“women who have achieved the greatest degree of economic independence, with high levels of education and earning potential, are the ones who are now most likely to get married and stay married. I don’t think Gloria Steinem or anyone else thought that this was how things would unfold. Even she eventually got married, at the age of 66, explaining, “We are at an age when marriage can be chosen and not expected.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it "has gone too far." It is that it has not gone far enough.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“As Anne-Marie Slaughter, head of the New America Foundation, warns, progress will be slow if we continue to define the "care problem" as "women's problem.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“all else equal, an all-female four-year school would have a graduation rate 14 percentage points higher than an all-male school.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“True equality between groups that are different in any way can be attained only by providing for the differences". That´s Margaret Mead again, in 1974. Mead´s idea of true equality might now be labeled equity.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It

“The social institution of fatherhood urgently needs an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children. Along with the obvious challenges there is a big opportunity here too, for an expansion in men’s roles.”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

“How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times by Roy Peter Clark, an excellent guide to sharp communication in a world of blogs and tweets (and yes, I am aware that the book you’re holding is rather long). The other is Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong about the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling, who”
― Richard V. Reeves, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It