I’m not a dad, but I’ve found myself in the unexpected role of mentor to younger cousins and a handful of other boys and young men. It’s a strange time to grow up male. Between YouTube, TikTok and a carousel of self-proclaimed gurus offering “the cure” for what ails men and how to successfully court women, the noise is deafening, and too often, downright incendiary.
Richard Reeves is cutting through that noise. The British-American writer and social scientist has emerged as one of the clearest, most influential voices on the issues facing men and boys today. A nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, Reeves is the author of the 2022 book “Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It,” named a book of the year by former President Barack Obama, the New Yorker and The Economist.
In 2023, Reeves founded the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), where he serves as president, and he also chairs the U.K. Institute for Boys and Men. AIBM’s mission is to conduct nonpartisan research into the wellbeing of boys and men in the U.S. and develop programs and policies to help them thrive. Its focus spans mental health, employment, Black boys and men, and fatherhood.
Reeves and AIBM have been a focal point for philanthropy’s attention to the issues boys and men face — attention that remains limited, but may be set to grow. The institute has already attracted some big-name support, including gifts from Melinda French Gates and the Packard Foundation. French Gates’ support, which followed her departure from the Gates Foundation last year, came in the form of two $20 million commitments — one to Reeves and another to Equimundo’s Gary Barker — with the stipulation that they redistribute the bulk of the money as they see fit (more on that below).
French Gates joins several other notable funders that have shown an interest in tackling boys and men’s issues, including the Ballmer Group and the Obama Foundation. My colleague Martha Ramirez also recently looked at a California-based network tackling these issues on a local level, with a particular focus on boys and men of color.
Reeves, meanwhile, is taking on the challenge nationally. I caught up with him to talk about the state of boys and men, how philanthropy can be a stronger ally, and how AIBM has managed to secure major early support.
Can you share what drew you into this work in the first place? What you were seeing that convinced you to dive in, even knowing some colleagues and peers saw the topic as potentially incendiary?
The short answer is that it was a combination of seeing data at work, and then dinner table conversations at home. At Brookings, I was working on economic inequality issues, a lot of stuff on intergenerational mobility, race and education. Doing that work, I would just stumble on these data points that really suggested that it was very often boys and young men who were struggling the most. These data points would be mentioned but often passed over. It never became the main story. They would be the afterthought or in the appendix.
Raising three boys, I was learning what they were hearing at school and the live debates. In their 20s now, it coincided really with the rise of the online world: Jordan Peterson, the online podcasts and so on. The short end version of saying this is that I kept wishing there were more places like Brookings doing work on this issue so that I could refer my sons to those pieces of work. And so I ended up doing it myself.
There are a couple of data points that were really striking to me. One was data showing that all of the Black-white gap in upward mobility was explained by Black men. That was a big one. When the pandemic hit, the initial release from the Education Department showed that the male college enrollment rates dropped seven times more than the female ones. In the first year of the pandemic. No one was writing about it. If the female college enrollment rate had dropped seven times more than the male one, I know that it would be in the highlights. I just think there was this inadvertent neglect of these issues. So I realized that we are lacking a good-faith, empirical, solutions-focused debate about what’s happening to boys and men.
Some people warned me not to not go anywhere near these issues because you’d be cast out as a misogynist. Really? Even if I have boring charts? This is one of the mottos of my new institute: to keep it boring. As my son points out, I’m the perfect person for this job. If you want problems to become grievances, all you have to do is ignore them. And I felt that’s what mainstream institutions were doing — they weren’t able to have good-faith conversations for fear of being seen as anti-woman. So I’m here now, with my boring charts.
I was going to save this question for later, but since you brought up “boring,” is the challenge more about the data itself and people not knowing it exists? Or is it more about the storytelling aspect and the way you’re delivering the message?
I think it’s a bit of both. First of all, the facts are there and they need to be highlighted. It needs to be someone’s job to highlight that. One of the things I’m doing with my philanthropy is supporting better journalism because even when the facts are known, it’s very often no one’s beat, say, men’s health or whatever. That’s changing now. Claire Cain Miller at the New York Times is a great example of someone who is a gender reporter now focused on boys and men.
When the data came out from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey on girls’ mental health a couple of years ago, it got a lot of attention. It was a lot of people’s beat. But when, a few weeks later, they put out the suicide data showing a massive rise in suicide rates among men, no one covered it because it was no one’s beat, right? There were no think tanks or researchers doing a report on male suicide.
But how you do it matters, as well. It has to be done in a way that is not polemical. More just in the sense of “these are some disturbing facts here, perhaps we should look at them.” Another issue is that when something takes too long to get recognized, and there are people working on it, they can end up getting quite frustrated, and then that frustration comes across in the tone and they become quite grievance-based. I can understand how people can get frustrated. But it’s not because of some plot or conspiracy, or that society has become some man-hating, feminist hellhole. It’s an institutional challenge. It’s an inadvertent neglect, by and large. So this is why I think the tone with the debate about boys and men needed to shift, as well. We just wanted to lower the temperature around all of this stuff, so part of the goal is “let’s just chill” and assume that people do care about male suffering.
Has there been a moment so far that made it clear that the American Institute for Boys and Men needed to exist in the nonprofit space?
During COVID, I just realized how many reports were coming out on how the pandemic was affecting women and girls. That was because there are a bunch of institutions, agencies and offices whose sole job was to wake up and think “how is this going to affect women and girls?”
And yet, the pandemic was affecting men, too. In some ways, more profoundly. There were no reports. Even institutions producing the data were very reluctant to point things out. I got the data on male death rates from this very good feminist global health organization. So when I published on this, I tagged them and thanked them on social media. Literally silence. The whole way through, you can tell this is not what they wanted.
To be clear, if you are a women’s organization, hallelujah. I’m not expecting women’s organizations to suddenly start becoming organizations for boys and men. All I’m saying is, absent any organizations, any institutions that do the same for boys and men, you just end up with an asymmetry. I thought that was glaring during COVID. So I just saw this institutional gap.
Now, I’m going to give you an incredibly wonky example. There is a bipartisan [congressional] working group on paid leave. We put a submission in that there should be dedicated paid leave for fathers. We got a couple of calls from senate offices and were told that no one had proposed that out of hundreds of submissions received. I was a bit shocked. But of course, all the other organizations that are pro-paid leave come out of the women’s movement. And most of the organizations typically focused on boys and men, meanwhile, have generally come from the more conservative side. So they don’t want paid leave. This was a moment of, why do we need to exist? This is why.
We’re also working on the lack of reproductive health coverage for men. Under the ACA, reproductive healthcare is covered without cost for women but not for men. That’s just bad for everyone. This is actually one of the reasons why we have more female sterilizations than men in the U.S. Who else is going to take up an issue like this, except AIBM?
There are no program officers for boys and men and that’s still largely true. But I don’t know if it will be in five to 10 years. I hope that people will start to say — and Melinda French Gates is a good example of this realization — that “you know, we can do both.”
Speaking of Melinda French Gates, she gave you $20 million to then distribute to other organizations? Where have you found that pot going to?
That’s correct. $20 million, very trust based. We’re allowed to put $5 million of that into our own organizations and the other $15 million into donor-advised funds [to distribute down the line]. So some of it was able to support the work of the institution and the rest of it went into this fund. I am very pleased to say that $5 million has gone to a funder collaborative that is still in progress. There are at least another three [funders] that have come for $5 million to have a funders’ collaborative for boys and men.
What I’ve done with my philanthropy so far is to support a couple of things. I’ve mentioned journalism. I’m also supporting work around understanding the narrative and story about fatherhood in media. I think fatherhood is a very important dimension in this debate. I’m supporting some efforts to increase the share of male teachers, including of men of color. There’s a Black male educator convening in November organized by the Black Educator Initiative. Those are the kinds of buckets so far.
I think I’m going to want to invest quite a bit more in breaking down stereotypes around occupations like [teaching]. One of my sons is now a fifth grade teacher in Baltimore. I’ve done my bit, I’ve produced one. And I’m pleased to see the governor talk about this, too.
Related Inside Philanthropy Resources:
For Subscribers Only
What kind of donor or foundation do you think is best suited to support the institute’s work? Are there any kinds of funders that you’re particularly hoping to engage?
To start with, it took the leaders of foundations and/or individuals who could understand the broad points I’ve been talking about because there were no existing funds for boys and men and they didn’t have program lines to draw on. Now, I’m very pleased to see that we are getting more research-based organizations like Arnold Ventures, Smith Richardson and Packard.
Over time, what I hope will happen is that the main foundations will actually start to incorporate this into their broader funding lines. In the same way that they would fund the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, they would also fund the American Institute for Boys and Men. So what I’m hoping is that there is an expansion of the way philanthropy thinks about gender and gender equality, rather than some kind of new, radical break. Melinda [French Gates] talks about this quite frequently: that it’s not good for anyone if boys and men are struggling. I hope that she and others like her will come to see boys and men as part of the gender story.
What responses have you seen from the mental health community? Do you find that there’s similar difficulties of kind of speaking about men in this way and getting that kind of targeted support?
That’s a really good question. I will say this. I think that because mental health is largely delivered through state and local agencies, a lot of the action is there. So, for example, I think that when you get a governor like Gov. [Gavin] Newsom really committing very strongly to looking hard at their mental health provision and saying, ‘Are we male friendly enough?’ that’s very, very powerful. So I’d say at the policy level, there’s growing interest in it.
But more broadly, as a good paper from Surgo Health finds, the whole mental health field is, I would say, struggling somewhat to broaden its scope to include the mental health challenges of boys and men to the extent that they should. I don’t quite know why. I think that at some point in recent years, the idea took hold that mental health was largely a women’s or girls’ issue.
I gotta tell you, even when I put my data up showing that the suicide rate is four times higher among men than women, and that it’s risen by almost a third among young men, people a couple of times have said, ‘Are you sure? Because I thought it was the other way around. I thought I’d been reading a lot about teen girls.’ Well, first of all, that might be from a lower base. Second, you might be confusing suicide with suicidal ideation or attempts. And I’m not saying that’s not a problem, but at some point I fear — and this is what the Surgo Health paper finds — that with young men in particular, the whole field of mental health skews somewhat female and is seen that way by young men.
I’m not suggesting that we need more male representation in these professions because there’s something wrong with the women. What I’m saying is representation matters. When only 20% of psychologists and social workers are male, at what point do the alarm bells ring?
What’s on the horizon now, let’s say, in the next six to 12 months?
So we really are moving into more of a partnership model now. Our goal is to build an ecosystem, not an empire. I have no particular interest in building a massive organization or anything like that, but the partnerships, both at policy level and program level, are exciting.
So, for example, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore was first out of the gate in terms of an initiative on boys and men. And we are putting a full-time fellow into his office to work on his boys and men initiative over the next few years. So he is committed long term, and we’re putting, you know, a person in with him, alongside him, that’s exciting to us. I hope other states will be similarly committed.
We are also deepening our partnerships with a number of states in their efforts to increase the number of male teachers, reduce male suicide rates, increase the share of men in these mental health professions, and to improve the share of men in higher education.
So those partnerships are exciting and we are increasingly partnering also with colleges and universities. We have a new initiative called the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative, which is like a community of practice and scholarship. And I think we’re up to 35 institutions now. We’re really, really trying to grow that, because higher education — including HBCUs, community colleges, regional publics — is where the alarm bells are ringing loudest for many people. So we’re really building up work in that space.
And then another area of big priority for us is going to be the whole area of online life. We’ve already partnered with Arnold Ventures to help them invest in research around online sports betting, and we’re partnering with Jonathan Haidt’s lab to do more work generally around online risks and benefits for young men. So I think that whole digital landscape is going to be a big part for us.
And then last but not least, I think building out some of this work on male teachers ourselves, and the pipeline of men into those [fields], is going to be a big part of our work. And just making a more boy-friendly education system is, you know, squarely on our research agenda.
Correction (8/12/25): A previous version of this article misspelled the name of Surgo Health.
