My message to #Heforshe was that we need #Sheforhe too

Unless men feel like their challenges are being acknowledged and addressed, they'll see feminism as irrelevant or even hostile

One of the great things about my job is that I get to speak about boys and men to a very ideologically diverse range of audiences. I find this to be very helpful in terms of keeping my own ideas under productive pressure, since all sides have plenty to offer to this debate.

So I was delighted to have the chance to take part in the recent #Heforshe summit, organized by UN Women as a parallel event to the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly.

For the final panel of the day, I joined Christine Emba (she of the the landmark Washington Post essay on men and masculinity); Michelle Terry, CEO of Movember, the non-profit focused on male health; Joshua Hughes, a student at Howard University; and moderator Rachel Lowenstein of Mindshare.

The panel title was “Disrupting the Narrative on Boys and Men”, and it was a rich and useful conversation. But perhaps the most important thing about the panel was simply the fact that it took place: a clear sign that organizations focused on women and girls are increasingly opening up to the conversation about the challenges of boys and men.

The whole summit is online here (our session starts at timestamp 01.14). The #Heforshe team have also put together a nice two-minute summary:

Of course, we didn’t agree about everything. But there was enthusiastic endorsement for the need to move beyond the zero-sum framing that plagues so many discussions of gender. As Christine said: “Men and women have to rise together”.

My own contribution was to make the case for a specific, institutional focus on the challenges facing so many boys and men. I was there, after all, as President for the Institute for Boys and Men. Here’s a lightly edited version of what I said:

As a lifelong, ardent feminist I have decided to create an Institute focused on the problems of boys and men. That probably needs a bit of explanation. It is based on a few assumptions:

First, in a number of countries in the world, there are a number of gender gaps that go against the traditional narrative of gender equality, including in areas like suicide, education and wage stagnation. We are seeing some real problems especially, in the U.S, for Black boys and men and those from working class. So, real problems.

Second, if there are real problems in a society faced by a group, and they don't see and hear those problems being addressed directly by mainstream institutions they can turn into grievances. And grievances are weaponized by the “manfluencers” (to use Christine's term) or even people at the ballot box. So I think we have a responsibility to take those problems seriously.

Third, we can do so even as we continue to do the necessary work for women and girls. We can think to thoughts at once. We can do two things at once. We have to make men young men feel like gender equality, gender equity and feminism are things that are for them and that we're not only asking them to be good allies - which we should - and we're not only asking them to examine their own prejudices - which we should - but that we're also working for them because if young men feel like we're not working for them we're not speaking for them they'll go find someone who they think is And we may not like who that person is.

If not us, who?

Rachel later asked us: “Should we now be advocating for boys and men?” I replied as follows:

We need to advocate for boys and men when the data suggests that there are areas where they're struggling, and the evidence is now quite strong, without in any way giving up the advocacy that remains necessary for women and girls.

We also have to address the question of how to be, as well as how not to be. A positive vision is best answered with real people, in real life rather than online. As a general proposition, boys and young men - in fact everybody - believes their eyes before they believe their ears. So one of the many things I love about Joshua is that he's going to be an educator. That makes him a minority in the U.S, where we have seen the share of male teachers drop from 33% when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 to 23% today, and falling. We have also halved the share of men in social work and psychology.

The work we're doing to promote women into traditionally male professions and occupations is absolutely necessary. But where is the equivalent work to at least arrest the decline in the share of men in our classrooms, in psychotherapy, in the mental health professions?

I think this is a deeply feminist call, but I don't hear almost anybody talking about it. The Andrew Tate’s of this world and the misogynist right don't care. But too often it feels like more progressively-inclined organizations are also not taking up those issues. That creates a vacuum. And the internet abhors a vacuum. We need to be filling that vacuum, rather than leaving it vacant for the manosphere.

We will surely continue to struggle with these difficult questions, and often disagree (without being disagreeable). But I must say that I’m hugely heartened by the way organizations like UN Women are starting to take seriously the growing evidence for the challenges of many boys and men in many advanced economies.

Because, we have to rise together.