Richard Reeves

But the point is actually by being quite dispassionate about it and just saying, look, these are facts and hopefully reasonably even-handed, I think what it did was create a space for a conversation that was already there.

It just didn't quite know how to break into the open.

I just kept running across these data points that showed me on lots of fronts now, boys and men are the ones who are behind.

In education, for example, we see that by the end of high school, boys are a year behind girls in literacy.

There's a bigger gender gap on college campuses today than there was in the 1970s, but it's the other way around.

So men are a bit further behind women in college today than women were behind men when we passed Title IX.

We've seen a big rise in suicide rates among young men especially.

And what I came to realize was that there's this cultural moment we're going through.

I think a lot of young men and young women actually, but young men are really struggling to kind of come to terms with what does it mean to be a man today?

What does it mean to succeed today?

Who am I?

Which are, of course, age old questions.

But I found that even through listening to the conversations my sons were having, that this was just a question that they were asking in a way that previous generations of men didn't.

Well, I will say it was quite difficult to land the book in the right way and also to find a publisher.

There were a number of conversations with publishers who just felt that it was too controversial.

But my sense of this is that when there's something that's true,

And there's something that people are feeling in their own lives.

They're watching their son struggle at school maybe or their brother struggle with mental health problems or whatever it is.

But they're also – and let's imagine this as a woman – actually have struggled perhaps in the workplace and really committed to the idea of gender equality.

And there's this dissonance.