Boys and Men Need Political Help, Now
By Michael Gurian (father of two daughters)
Published March 19, 2021 at GurianInstitute.com
There is a secret in American life (and indeed, a secret existing throughout the Developed World) that few people want to talk about: there are few primary markers of physical, cognitive, educational, neurological, emotional, psychological, and employment health in which females in the aggregate are doing worse than males in the aggregate. More than a decade ago, a number of us in the gender field founded a non-partisan group, the Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men, to point out this secret to the Obama White House. To no avail. Then to the Trump White House; again without traction. A few weeks ago, the Biden White House created its new Gender Policy Council, but like similar previous agencies, it is designated and funded to help girls and women, not boys and men.
I am a father of two daughters (no sons), and I applaud every council, every organization, and everything we do for women and girls. I have written a number of books specifically on girls and women, and have been accepted publicly as a leader in female empowerment. That work will not end for me, ever. Our daughters carry our civilization in their hearts and on their backs, and they need all the support we can give them. Nothing I say in this blog or in any of my work calls for ending programs that help girls and women to instead support boys and men.
But part of the secret is that our sons carry the worlds on their back, and we simply must love them, culturally and socially, as much as we love our daughters. Not to focus on males, too, especially when males are suffering significantly and in the long-term, is an act of political, economic, and cultural betrayal that has consequences — consequences we are seeing already in the rates of violence in our country. This is violence we will never get under control if we do not make our shameful secret public and deal with it culture-wide. We would not rob girls and women at all by working on what is happening to boys and men. In fact, we would make female life better by taking better care of male life.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats are stepping up
I have been a political moderate/centrist all my adult life. Over the decades, I thought having a Democrat in office would finally help boys and men, then as the cultural winds shifted, I thought a Republican would do it. But after multiple Democrat and Republican administrations, I see politicians unafraid of the female secret but afraid of the male. From conversations with politicians over the last twenty years, I know: some do want to help boys and men, but from the political-cultural viewpoint, women and girls are the victims and the vanquished in our culture; men and boys are the villains and victors. That’s what gets just enough votes to keep the politician in office.
But the secret remains — boys and men need our help, not just for the sake of politics, but because male privation is constantly growing. The newest unemployment data from the Covid crisis brings home the secret in a very painful way. Not only are two-thirds of our Covid dead male, but more men than women are also now unemployed because of Covid shutdown. While you may have seen headlines presenting women as the biggest job losers during this crisis, and while they have lost millions of jobs, the aggregate numbers remain: boys and men are once again suffering great loss, and our leaders will not confront the secret.
I hope that you — no matter your party affiliation and even if you are a parent of daughters not sons, as I am — will write to the Biden White House and congratulate the President for his focus on girls and women through the new Gender Council. I hope, too, you will challenge him to use part of the American Rescue Act to fund a White House Council on Boys and Men. I hope, too, you will provide your senators and congresspersons with the statistics you’ll read in this week’s blog post, provided to us by Sean Kullman, the Executive Director of the Global Initiative for Boys and Men. His charts come right off the Department of Labor Statistics, so you can go to that government website and do your own citizen science. Bring your own collective energy to the conversation on behalf of both sexes and all genders.
White House Gender Policy Council
One way to do that is to dig deep into the letter written by the White House Gender Policy Council’s co-chairs. Give the co-chairs some feedback. As you read and respond to the letter, you could note to the co-chairs that in most categories listed in the letter, males are doing as badly or worse than females. Some examples appear in this part of the letter: “Women and girls — and particularly women and girls of color — are bearing the brunt of this pandemic in visible and invisible ways. Women make up an outsized share of our front line workers, face historic levels of unemployment, and are disproportionately shouldering the increased care giving responsibilities created by the pandemic. Women’s participation in the workforce has dropped to the lowest level in more than 30 years.”
Nothing said here is untrue except for the exclusionary bias in each statement that neglects the full truth. The paragraph should read: “Women and girls and boys and men — and particularly people of color — are bearing the brunt of this pandemic in visible and invisible ways. Women and men make up our front line workers, face historic levels of unemployment, and are shouldering the increased care giving responsibilities created by the pandemic. Women’s and men’s participation in the workforce has dropped to the lowest level in more than 30 years.” In this new paragraph would be room for nuance in which more women are now joining the already large group of men (approximately 9,000,000 men pre-Covid) on the rolls of permanently unemployed while more men are joining women in shouldering increased care-giving responsibilities during and post-Covid.
Another part of the letter refers to violence against girls, women, and LGBTQ+ populations and is a welcome focus, but strangely incomplete. Most victims of violence in America are male. Boys and men are six times more likely to be victims of violence than girls and women. The Bureau of Justice Statistics is just one federal source of full violence statistics. Again, focusing on violence is important, but the letter basically says to Americans that the majority of victims of violence do not count — we will not fund a council to help them.
It is difficult to find a major category of health, wellness, and success where boys are not doing worse than girls, as this new study about the education sector from the Brookings Institute indicates. See also The Boy Crisis by Warren Farrell and John Gray.
Lack of national empathy for boys and men
The paucity of national empathy for boys and men is a significant problem that harms both boys and girls, both women and men. It needs to get onto politicians’ radar in a way that does not pit girls against boys, women against men, or anyone against anyone else on the gender spectrum. We have enough acumen and resources to take care of ALL of our citizens, not just the ones we consider politically viable in the short term. If we do not wake up to our national secret, we will have to face the fact that we are choosing “for” one half of our country and “against” the other half, and that is not the right way to run a society. Those of us who, in the ’60s and ’70s, became feminists to fight for women’s equality were ashamed of the way our culture disregarded female needs. By not helping boys and men today, isn’t our civilization doing the same shameful thing it did in the past, but with the sexes switched?
Continued reading: Men Lost More Jobs from 2020 to 2021, But Men & Women Are Both Suffering During Pandemic Economy