Richard Reeves

By us, I mean mainstream institutions, mainstream conversations and families, because we didn't create enough space for this conversation.

And as a result, the conversation went elsewhere.

On the one hand, you do see these cultural and political signs of reaction, especially among men, arguably.

But at the same time, in real life, we're seeing the onward march on most fronts towards gender equality.

So, for example, my institute just published a paper on gender.

the amount of time that mums and dads spend doing childcare as opposed to paid work.

We've just seen the fastest reduction in that gap, convergence between mums and dads, that we've seen probably for half a century.

Now, again, I'm not suggesting...

that we don't need to do much more on all those fronts.

But there's this odd thing happening where online you have reactionaries, the manosphere, trad wives, no one wants kids, everyone hates each other, no one's having sex, take it whatever it is.

And then you go into the real world and you say, well, but wait, the women are working more and earning more and the men are doing more parenting and actually divorce rates gone down and...

It's sort of weird.

I think that away from the smoke and fury of the online culture war, American men and women are slowly but surely figuring this out.

And what we need to do is have their backs and try and help them figure it out rather than try and recruit them to a pointless zero-sum culture war.

Yeah, well, I think there's a couple of things.

One is that on the cultural level over the last half century, we have just massively changed the economic relation between men and women.

Most couples with kids, they both work now.

40% of women now earn more than the typical median man, whereas only like one in 10 in the 70s.

And just become an expectation now that both men and women will work not in the same way.

I'm not saying that we've solved the problems, but it's a very different world now.