It’s common knowledge that for most of human history, ours has been a male-dominated society. But that’s changing.
Richard V. Reeves, a social scientist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, says women are blowing past men in education and many other areas at a rate that wasn’t expected. He will give a talk about that at UNLV later today, and ahead of that, he joined State of Nevada host Joe Schoenmann along with Magdalena Martinez from UNLV's Lincy Institute.
Reeves is a father of three, and said he was inspired to focus his work on boys after seeing the world through their eyes. He calls the work “at least a little autobiographical.”
“Just in my day job at Brookings, doing work on educational inequality, economic inequality, family change, racial inequality, I just kept stumbling across, or rather kind of running into, data points where I saw boys and men really as the ones who in some cases and some dimensions, and particularly for some groups, were really the ones who are struggling in terms of upward mobility, in terms of educational outcomes, in terms of mental health, which is obviously a big issue now, much higher suicide rates for men, for example.”
It’s not a polarized debate of gender, he said, and he isn’t taking any political stance with his work – quite the opposite.
“There are a bunch of places where we shouldn't be really worried about boys and men, including education, and that should be a straightforward policy problem, rather than a massive cultural battle.”
In education, Reeves said girls and women have overtaken boys and men on almost every subject in education. In 1972, when Title IX passed, men were 13% more likely than women to get a four-year degree. Now, women are 15% more likely than men to get a degree.
“The point is that you can have this relative gap opening up and then the real question to ask is, ‘Do we care about that gap?’ And if so, why do we care about it? And if we do care about it, what should we do about it? We shouldn't just assume a gap is bad news,” he said. “Might be great news that women and girls are so far ahead in education, especially what happens in the labor market, but … that scale of gap should be enough for policymakers to just pause and have a look.”
He pointed at the fact that most elementary school teachers in the United States are women. He said he thinks having a male in the classroom helps boys learn, especially male teachers of color. Reeves also believes there needs to be a reinvestment in vocational schools and programs.
“The education system right now, it's a little bit more female-friendly on average than it is male-friendly. And I think we see the results of that,” he said. “I think we've just got to follow the data and say, look, if this is what the data is telling us, then it's not in anyone's interest, including women's interests, if boys and men continue to struggle in education, and therefore the labor market and therefore in family life.”
Martinez said the issue of men being left behind in education has been “something of grave concern” for at least two decades, “in particular, Black and brown boys.” She validated Reeves’ work, saying from a research and personal perspective, “it’s real.”
Reeves posed a solution one could find in private schools already: starting boys a year later in school: “A 15 year-old-boy, actually with a 14-year-old girl, developmentally, they're a little bit closer together.”
He continued, “Generally, people are like, absolutely more technical high schools. Absolutely. The question then is, okay, how were we going to get the money? How do we do that? How do we operationalize that? How do we turn that into policy? And that's, I think, where it gets difficult because the things you'd have to do, might become politically unpopular. So for example, should we have scholarships for men who want to go and become English teachers in K-12 education? I would say yes. Just as we have scholarships for women into STEM subjects. But immediately then policymakers [say], ‘Wait, what? Scholarships just for men?’ And I'm like, ‘Yes, or something like that, because we need that now.’”
Martinez said there’s a perception that shifting policy or priority to men would take away from women, but that not necessarily the case.
“What are the priorities of our society?” she said. “How do we align these resources to our values and to the future we want to have? And I think that the most important question is, how do we manifest our values into policy and to practices?”
She said you already see this happening at UNLV, Nevada State College and College of Southern Nevada, “where there are specific programs to try to bring more males on campus and to help provide them those navigational skills that we talked about earlier.” She said we live in a region where most students are first-generation students and low-income.
“We understand that as a public organization, that we need to provide some of that information to families and students. So we're already doing it, but not at the scale that we need to,” she said.
Guests: Richard V. Reeves, senior fellow in economic studies, Brookings Institution, author, "Of Boys and Men"; Magdalena Martinez, Ph.D., Associate Professor; Director of Education Programs, UNLV's Lincy Institute
