Of Boys and Men

19 May 2025

When I saw my favourite book roasting podcast (If Books Could Kill) covered this book, I figured I’d read it first and then see how the podcast would roast it.

The book posits that thanks to feminism, women no longer need to rely on marriage (and men) for financial stability. But that it has left men in a weird spot where their societally defined role as a breadwinner hasn’t really been updated with the times.

The author offers 3 solutions to try and help men in today’s society:

  1. Start boys a year later than girls at school to account for the different rates at which boys and girls mature. The podcast raises a good point that a) what do you do with childcare for the boys for an extra year and b) won’t that cause stigma because it sends a message that boys are dumber than girls (at a young age anyway?)
  2. Similar to the STEM drive for women, we should be having a HEAL drive for men to get them into traditionally “caring” roles like nursing, teaching etc.
  3. Men and women get 6 months paid parental leave each - which ties into the idea of making childcare a bigger role in a man’s life, since being the breadwinner is no longer the default option. The author does say though that maybe women can handle more of the younger years while men take on the older years… Could be interesting but not sure I agree.

Points 2 and 3 sound good, although it sounds quite expensive to get governments to implement. HEAL roles are criminally underpaid, and I feel like are less respected as professions in society - maybe bringing more men into the field could inadvertently help fix this as it becomes less of a “woman’s job”?

And similarly with parental leave, at the end of the day women having to do more of the childcare is the real career killer, so we need to remove that assumed responsibility as much as possible so I’m in full agreement there.

However the author also doesn’t think we need gender parity in STEM - his reasoning being that although it’s taboo to say, some women are more likely to tend towards “caring” roles as a gender, and so maybe we should aim for a slightly lower number (I forget what he suggested, maybe 40/60?)

He also points to statistics where the gender ratio in STEM is closer to even in poorer countries, but surprisingly still very skewed in richer countries that have better gender equality overall - and so posits that this is because women are more likely to enter STEM when they need to financially, rather than because they truly want to do it as a career.

… A quick Google about this finds a study which terms this as the “Gender Equality Paradox” and that this could just be because the male/female stereotypes are stronger in richer countries, so it seems like the author may be wrong on that point. STEM does pay more, and so if we want to close the gender pay gap we probably should continue to aim for parity as much as possible.

Listening to the podcast afterwards, it went less roasty, and was more a good faith take on the topic. I only ended up getting halfway through it before being distracted by other things. Although the comments on Spotify were all pretty outraged that the podcast hosts went too easy on the book, I do think we need more conversations like this. I think people get a bit outraged because women’s rights isn’t really a “solved” issue and we still have a long way to go so it’s like, why are we focusing on men? But I think with stuff like parental leave or a HEAL drive, it can help men and women at the same time, doesn’t have to be an either or.