There is a tendency, I think, on the right, to over-emphasize biological differences

in order to sustain very strongly gendered divisions of labor,

or gendered divisions in the labor market and so on.

The right make the mistake of taking differences at the average, which are true,

and using them to say, and that's why men do X, women do Y.

Welcome viewers and listeners. I'm Mona Charrant, indicated columnist and policy editor at the bulwark.

I'm delighted to welcome Richard Reeves today as my guest. Richard has written an excellent book called Of Boys and Men,

and also founded the American Institute for Boys and Men.

And there's a lot to discuss here.

It's a topic of intense interest to me.

And so before we get rolling,

I'd just like to begin by asking Richard,

what was the impetus for writing this book?

You've done some videos and interviews where you said

you got a little bit of skepticism on the part of some people when you mentioned this topic idea.

What was what propelled you to examine the subject and write about it?

Yeah, well, first of all, thank you. Thank you very much for having me on. I'm really looking forward to this.

I'm a big fan of your work. work well I've spent a lot of time studying issues around inequality

and opportunity mobility in education I've done a lot of work on that and I just kept running

across the data points where it was really boys and men who we needed to be most

worried about i mean just and i think what was happening was that you'd see the data point and say oh

that's interesting and then and then move on because it didn't fit with the narrative right the narrative

...