The New Women’s Issue: Men

NEW YORK—The finger snaps echoed throughout the auditorium as a few hundred people listened to Chasten Buttigieg, an LGBT activist and the husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, discuss the importance of supporting the LGBT community. “The title of ally is something that we all have to sit with,” he said. “Have you given yourself that title, or have you earned it?” The crowd was gathered at an event space in the New York Times building in midtown Manhattan for a conference co-hosted by Moms First, an advocacy organization focused on policies that support mothers in the fight for gender equality.  

You’d expect such a gathering to explore the challenges facing mothers, the wage gap, solidarity between feminist and LGBT advocates, or abortion access. Indeed, Moms First hosted a summit last May that centered on many of those topics and featured appearances from Democratic female luminaries like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.  

But at this year’s summit, the group chose a new focus: men. 

“We’ve been sold this con that progress is a zero-sum game,” said Moms First founder Reshma Saujani at the opening of the Future of Fatherhood Summit earlier this month, “that when women move, when women rise, men have to fall, that when we focus on mothers, we forget about fathers, that when we lift girls up, we pull boys down.” 

Saujani, who’s made a career out of building female workplace advancement programs like Girls Who Code, admitted that she’d neglected the challenges facing boys and men for too long.  

“I know how easy it is to fall for the con,” she added. “While our boys are falling through the cracks, the systems around them, schools, government, workplaces, and even loving families, they don’t know how to catch them, so we look away, but we can’t anymore.”  

Over the course of an early June afternoon, men’s groups representatives, researchers, educators, and Democratic political figures explored ideas for addressing the educational, economic, and social challenges faced by men and fathers. What emerged from the conversations were a few concrete workplace and education policy solutions, like paid family leave and getting phones out of schools, alongside some less-clear prescriptions for positive masculinity and parenthood. But what was most on display was a collection of left-of-center organizations grasping for a new way to approach men’s issues. 

The truth universally acknowledged was that the men are not alright. One men’s group shared some of the key findings from its newly released “State of American Men 2025” survey.  The results were stark. Male respondents experiencing financial instability are more than twice as likely as women to contemplate suicide, according to the survey of more than 2,000 men, women, and people identifying as nonbinary by Equimundo: Center for Masculinities and Social Justice—the group co-hosted the summit alongside Moms First. Large majorities of both male and female respondents define manhood as being a provider, even as men’s job and educational prospects have been in decline relative to women for years. Nearly 70 percent of young men surveyed believe that no one cares if men are okay. 

Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist whose research on social media and digital life is shaping government policy across the world, spoke and offered some light as to why boys and men report such dire feelings. Haidt detailed some conclusions in his bestselling book The Anxious Generation on how the “great re-wiring” of childhood has affected boys in particular. “It’s open season on boys’ dopamine systems,” Haidt said of the pervasiveness of digital devices and online entertainment, including social media, video games, and sports betting. He outlined several cultural and policy changes needed to help boys flourish, including removing digital devices from schools and much of homelife, keeping kids off smartphones and social media til their late teens, and restoring a play-based, independent childhood.   

Speakers from men’s organizations like the Movember Institute for Men’s Health—the group behind all those men sporting mustaches in November—and City Dads Groups—a chapter organization founded in the 2000s to connect fathers and push back against portrayals of men as incompetent and uninvolved as parents—shared their practical experiences on supporting fathers and men at the community level and working on men’s health issues. Business leaders discussed how to expand access to parental leave for dads and get more men to actually take leave in states where it’s offered. 

But the elephant in the room was why Moms First and like-minded liberal advocacy organizations are just now talking about men’s issues. Social science research on the importance of fathers for childhood development and data on declining educational and workplace outcomes for men and boys have been clear for decades. It’s been 15 years since Hanna Rosin penned the provocative Atlantic essay “The End of Men,” and almost three years since Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men offered a model for liberals to engage with men’s issues compatible with advancing equity goals for women.  

So, why now? In short, Donald Trump won. “I had this awakening after the election that ‘Oh, we’re not winning these things without men,’” Saujani said, noting the idea for the conference came together about six months ago. Commentary early in the 2024 election cycle emphasized the challenges the GOP would face from female voters in a post-Roe v. Wade America. But Trump’s victory highlighted the gender gap in voting and how underwater the Democratic Party is with young men in particular.  

Since the election, much digital ink has been spilled on how the left can reach men, with many arguing Democrats need their own Joe Rogan and accompanying army of podcast bros, suggesting the problem is primarily a matter of messaging. There has been less self-reflection on why so many young men feel alienated from progressive politics in the first place and more receptive to the right, and in some cases, its darker online voices. 

News earlier this month of a $20 million Democrat-backed study of young men drew disdain from both the left and the right. The project seems aimed at trying to get progressive messages into online spaces popular among young men, including Discord and video games. To Saujani, it’s another example of the Democratic Party focusing on the wrong areas.

“We basically chase the new flashy, shiny thing,” she told The Dispatch after the summit. “Everybody is like ‘Oh my god, men, boys, men, boys.’ Oftentimes, the solution is going to be, ‘We just need a bunch of New Left podcast bros.’” Instead, Saujani countered, the left should highlight how the current system fails men and women alike.

Saujani and Gary Barker, the head of the Equimundo men’s advocacy organization, argue that the obsession with toxic masculinity on the left or trad wives on the right are symptoms of a gender war that distracts from policy progress they believe could benefit dads and moms. “We keep selling the extremes when the reality is that people are sitting in the middle,” Saujani said. She described a “new model” for policy engagement that unites men’s and women’s issues. “If we want to secure policies that will benefit all parents, then we need to come together, breaking down the silos between those advocating for men and those advocating for women,” the pair wrote in an op-ed earlier this month. “After all, we want the same things: affordable childcare, paid leave and a living wage for all families.”   

The vision seems to offer an opportunity to pivot for the kinds of advocacy groups that have either ignored men’s issues or worked with men primarily to fight “toxic masculinity”—remember the 2019 Gillette razor ad?—and cultivate more support for progressive causes. 

The fact that the summit was organized by a women’s group describing the gender war as a con is a sign of a vibe shift. But it’s unclear whether newfound progressive interest in men’s issues extends to confronting why men became so culturally alienated—and more receptive to the grievance narratives peddled by many on the right and in the darker corners of the ‘manosphere’—in the first place. 

The men and boys crisis has a host of social, economic, and policy causes, but one element contributing to men’s sense of alienation is the cultural messages of recent years promoted by liberal and progressive voices and institutions. As David French wrote last month, the cultural left is responsible for promulgating the zero-sum con—reflected in slogans like “The future is female”—that the summit was premised on rejecting.  

Reeves, the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men who was cited favorably during the event, summarized in Of Boys and Men the progressive failings on men’s issues as pathologizing  “naturally occurring masculine tendencies,” attributing men’s problems to “individual failings … rather than structural challenges,” “an unwillingness to acknowledge any biological basis for sex differences,” and the belief that gender inequalities only negatively affect women. 

At least a partial hesitancy to probe those progressive codes was apparent at the conference. For a summit on fathers, there was relatively little discussion of what is distinct or valuable about fathers relative to mothers or parents in general. Haidt came closest when explaining how fathers are crucial in supporting healthy risk-taking in children, something that mothers tend to be more averse to. Most speakers steered clear of discussing naturally occurring male tendencies, opting to focus on an undefined “inclusive masculinity” and affirming statements like boys need to be allowed to be “soft not stoic.” 

There were glimpses of deeper reflection on men’s cultural alienation. Brian Heilman, a senior research fellow at Movember, emphasized that starting from the “end points” of fighting restrictive norms of masculinity is a poor way to open conversations with men and fathers about the challenges they face. “Can we try to start thinking, not only about an antidote to a problem or how we disentangle problems, but really, imagine what a future of fatherhood looks like that involves just authentic flourishing by dads?” Heilman asked. “It’s a matter of … listening to dads themselves, how they really want to thrive and flourish on their own terms and bring that into being.” 

But that kind of work requires a deeper, authentic engagement with men not so contingent on political returns. It’s one thing to try to get more men to care about paid family leave policies because it helps fathers and mothers alike. It’s another to focus on men for their own sake and expend political capital towards policies that don’t apply so neatly to both sexes, like starting boys a year later in school or creating programs to incentivize more male teachers. It’s unclear how much men are willing to engage with the former—although Equimundo’s research suggests men favor family leave policies—or how much appetite the left broadly has to pursue the latter.

“What I don’t want you dads to hear is me saying, ‘stand up, do what’s right for moms, because we need some he-for-she allyship,’” Saujani told the gathering. “But what I am saying is, from a strictly numbers perspective, we’re never going to win the changes we need to win in this country if half of our team is sitting on the sideline.” Indeed, part of Equimundo’s stated mission is “to engage men and boys as allies in gender equality.”  

But Saujani also told The Dispatch after the conference, “It’s so much more important to bring people together than to get them activated in a political fight. Sometimes we go too fast to ask people to do something around policy, and you haven’t built a connection in a relationship and trust.”

The real question is whether the left and progressive advocacy groups can sustain a deeper cultural conversation about the challenges facing boys, men, and fathers beyond the political necessities of reaching them at the ballot box. The more discussions like the summit the better, but it’s far from clear that the left has found a new model to successfully engage men’s issues, culturally or politically.