Good afternoon. My name is Joe Hewitt. Welcome to the United States Institute of Peace. I am the Vice President for Policy, Learning and Strategy. And it is my great pleasure to welcome all of you today. We have a fantastic program that closes out a very busy month that we have had looking at issues related to gender and conflict on this, the National Women's National History Month. Let me just say a little bit about USIP for those who are new to this place. USIP was founded in 1984 by Congress as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical and essential for US and global security. We pursue this vision of the world without violent conflict by working on the ground with partners. We provide people, organizations and governments with the tools, knowledge and training to manage conflict so it doesn't become violent. And when it does become violent, we use these tools to help resolve it. Every day my team works to collect, organize and disseminate knowledge and evidence from our programs to inform better peace-building programs in the future. And what's very crucial on our team is that we have a gender policy and strategy team that is led by Kathleen Keynes, who you'll meet in a moment. Every violent conflict one way or another is experienced differently by men and women and boys and girls. That means that to fully understand how the consequences of conflict are felt or how the causes of conflict are experienced, we need to be able to understand it through a gendered lens. It's not just when we talk about gender, we're not just talking about women. And I think one of the really fascinating things about this month that we've just had is that a lot of the exchanges of knowledge that we've had in this building have been had over issues that break down some of those molds that are not quite right. So we began this month with an event that looked at the role of women, not as peace builders, which is often the cliched way of understanding women in conflict, but rather as conflict actors themselves. And today we finish a very, very good month with what's going to be an amazing program looking at the role of men and masculinity in conflict. And so I'm really looking forward to this panel. I think we're in for something very excellent here. I'm especially interested to know what it means to unpack and understand what it means to be a man in the box. So we're going to find out what that means in a moment. It is now my very great pleasure to introduce you the director of the gender policy and strategy team, Kathleen Keynest. Everyone, thank you so much, Joe. And I also want to add my appreciation to our partners Promundo and Axe. These are great partners. We've really enjoyed the engagement of bringing this program to you here today. So stuck in the man box. What does this really mean? In retrospect, when I think of the man box, I go back to a time when I was doing my field work in Soviet Central Asia while the Soviet Union collapsed. And I began witnessing how masculine identity shift was happening. And it was interesting because I was actually there studying what was happening to women. What I came out of that experience realizing that we can't see gender as this kind of biological straight jacket. I really began to appreciate how gender is coded into everything we do and every institution we belong to. And that during times of heightened change, these gender identities and relationships also change and sometimes change drastically. So this afternoon, we have an opportunity to look firsthand at the results of a brand new study about the man box, which really investigates the way in which boys and young men are socialized and the pathways forward in terms of thinking outside the box. And so we're going to have a presentation of the results and then we're going to be joined by other experts for a panel discussion. And we want to leave a lot of time for discussion with all of you. So I hope you're thinking of good questions, comments, and also to remind you we are on Twitter. Hashtag man box, hashtag USIP gender. And to also note that we are being webcast today and all of this will be up on our website tomorrow. So without further delay, it is my pleasure now to introduce my good colleague, Gary Barker and his good colleague, Brian Heilman, who will present the key findings from their study called the man box. Gary and Brian's detailed bios are with your agenda, but let me just say that Gary Barker is president and CEO of the NGO Promundo. He's also the co-founder of MenCare, a global campaign to promote men's involvement as equitable, nonviolent care gurvers, and also the co-founder of MenEngage. Brian Heilman is a fellow at Promundo. He is an independent researcher and evaluator and the lead author of the 2016 State of America's Fathers Report and the co-author of multiple reports using the International Men and Gender Equality Survey. I'm going to welcome you to the podium and we look forward to hearing more about this man box. Thank you. The forward, right? These work, right? So we can move around. Cool. I'm going to start off and then Brian's going to share the results with you. So we start off with the question, why the man box and why here at USIP? We've been talking a lot and a long time and we will continue talking more about what gender inequality and what rigid norms about masculinities mean for girls and women. And we're not done. We've not achieved the full equality that we need. USIP has been done a lot of pioneering work about saying why it matters to have women's full and equal participation at the table when we're doing peace negotiations and rebuilding countries after conflict. We've asked those questions and we're clearly not done. We haven't asked as much, what does this mean for men? How do we engage men not only as allies in the cause of gender equality but also saying what do these things mean in the lives of men and boys? And that's this thing that we've decided to call and many others call a man box. And this is, it's often easier when we have conversations with individual men or with political leaders. It's often easier to talk about we need men to nudge to be part of the gender equality agenda to do this for women. The more silent conversation or if you want to see men look at their shoes in about a moment's notice is to say, how's that manhood going for you? And then we'll start that movement of going, yeah, let me talk to my friend Brian over here. So this is what we want to do. We want to ask these difficult questions. Just about any man that we talk to, any man that I've come across or spoken to, they can, we'll have some moment where we'll say, you know, oh yeah, that's what you mean by the man box. One of mine is, well, a few decades back, I was an undergrad in university. There was a rowdy party over the weekend, lots of alcohol involved. Girl had passed out from drinking so much and stories going around of several guys having had sex with her after she had passed out. The first round, it goes around and there's kind of laughing about it. And then the guys who were involved basically said to the rest of the guys, yeah, they did this. And then there's, there was those long silences. Was anybody going to acknowledge that is not consensual sex and this is not okay? And there, you know, I don't know how long those went on. Was there hours? Was it a couple of days before some of us said we have to speak up about this? That length of time to me was a very clear moment of the man box. Why was it so obviously right that we needed to speak out about it? But we took so long before we did it. And that took so long, any minutes that lasted before we started to take about, to talk about it was far too long. So this is what we want to talk about as the man box. Why is it that it keeps us from doing things that we know are the right thing, connecting to people the way that we should, taking care of ourselves, taking care of our own health and mental health? We are thrilled that about two years ago, we started conversations with acts that had been doing some, well Unilever, its parent company had been doing some really interesting things of pushing definitions of beauty and women's place in the world as full equals in all ways with their dove campaigns around alternative ways of thinking of women's beauty. And thrilled that as part of acts, they were interested in rebranding, but also, and we'll hear from Rick about that, but also in engaging in a conversation about where is manhood today? What is it up to? How do we understand it so that they as a partner, as a private sector partner thinking about where men are could be part of that conversation? Thrilled of course that USIP was willing to have this conversation too. So let me set up a little bit the study. It's one thing to tell these individual stories, but we said how much does this exist out there and what does it mean? We started off informed by some pretty somber data, which is about a third of adult men in the US have said they've ever experienced depression. We often think that women's rates are much higher, but in fact rates are about the same. The big difference is that women are far more likely to about twice the rate to seek help for depression than men are when they have depressive symptoms. We see that in the next issue, which is that men's suicide rates, suicide being the leading cause of death of young men in the US, men's suicide rates are about four times higher than women's in the US. Globally, we've got from UN data, WHO data, to be specific 800,000 deaths a year from suicide. That is far bigger than the 500,000 deaths a year from homicide, and it's larger than the number of deaths every year from conflict. We don't talk much about the gendered face of that. Two thirds of those 800,000 deaths are men. Even when they're men, we know that women often pick up the pieces with families and lives and carry on. You see some data there about traffic accidents, the list could go on. If we talk about homicide and incarceration, and one of the issues we're also seeing is school performance. We've talked a lot about getting girls in school now. We know that boys are more likely to repeat a primary grade than girls in 90 out of 113 countries. We know something is amiss with these ideas of masculinity. What are they? That's where we started out with this question of the man box. What does it mean to be a young man today? How is the young men supposed to act? We did this in three countries, the US, the UK, and Mexico, and we wanted to look at how men could, are they aware of these norms out there of what it means to be a man? And the first overwhelming conclusion is that yes, young men, two thirds and above, say, I have been told that a man has to act a certain way. In a sense, I can read there's a box there that somebody's trying to push me into. It is real. What we did is to gather the data, the next question becomes, so what does it mean that this box exists? We did surveys with men in three of the countries. These were both telephone and online and focus group discussions in the three countries as well to hear in young men's own words. And we wanted to, as we asked about it, we also had to do a lot of inquiry about saying, so what is the man box? What is it comprised of? And these are the things. As we looked at the literature, other research that we had done in other parts of the world, listening to men, thinking about our own experiences, one piece of these, what we call the seven pillars of the man box, one is self-sufficiency, the other is acting tough, one is physical attractiveness, one is rigid norms about men's roles compared to women, one is around heteronormativity, I think it's better to call this, and homophobia, one is heterosexuality, this idea that men can never say no to a sex act, and one is around aggression and control. These are what we think and they hold up quite solidly across the countries that we've looked at as the seven pillars of the man box. So I'm going to stop there and Brian's going to share with you the results and then we'll come back to the table. Okay, thank you so much for such a thoughtful introduction to the study, Gary, and it's a great honor to be able to be here with you all. I hadn't expected that we would get the prompt of what was your man box moments a little bit, but I shared one with Michael backstage even, and now I'm thinking of it as I kind of step up to a stage here again, it links in a couple of different ways that the moment I thought of was my sophomore year in high school when I decided to leave the locker room, as it were, in favor of the rehearsal room, and I didn't go out for basketball anymore and instead joined the high school musical, and remember feeling at that point that, you know, like would my dad be kind of ashamed of me that I'd made this decision, and even so even to kind of question whether like a real man would want to pursue singing and dancing on a stage rather than athletics was kind of a formative moment for me, but I pursued that musical life and makes me a little bit more comfortable on a stage even now, and so that's my owning my a little bit of breaking out of that box, but to get to the real message, I have just six, seven minutes now to run us through what's presented in a 60-70 page report, so we'll have to go really quickly through all of these topics, but I'll give you some of the main messages and then look forward to discussing throughout the day. Oops. There we go. So first thing that we really wanted to do in this study was to determine, even to dig a little bit deeper about the extent to which young men are experiencing these social pressures about how to be a man, so not just have you heard a message that you should be a real man, but item by item broken out into those seven themes that Gary presented, do you feel that society tells you that this is how men should behave? So I've got just a selection of those 17 messages here, just five of them, things like a guy who doesn't fight back when others push them around is weak. A guy should always act strong even if he feels scared or nervous all the way down to, of course, men should figure out their personal problems on their own and not ask anybody for help. This is far too many numbers to expect you to read on a slide in a presentation, but you can see that more than half in every of all of these items are guys across all three sites said that, yeah, I get this message from society. I get this pressure. So we can conclude that that man box is really alive and well. Those social pressures are real. We even had one participant in a conversation here in D.C. kind of capture this idea really well in his own words. He says, how does society let men act? Because of society, the pathologies and powers out there, men can only act a certain way. If you do not fit into the box, you're not labeled as a male or one of the many labels we have talked about. So even he, in his own words, not knowing that the ultimate report would have this idea of a box, that was his own idea. But then we wanted to take that social pressure and see the extent to which men were also internalizing it. And they were themselves agreeing with those statements. And here's where things get really interesting. And we have to kind of live with multiple realities at once. At the one hand, you look across a similar selection of five items and see that the majority of guys, in most, though not all of these, are not agreeing. Got up to two thirds, three quarters in some cases of young men are telling us, no. In my personal opinion, I don't agree with this thing. So to a certain extent, men are rejecting these social pressures. But I don't know that a lot of us would feel really proud or excited about the fact that upwards of 50 to 60 percent of men agree that they always need to act strong even if they feel scared. Or that fully two fifths of men in the top row believe that a man who needs to fight back if others push him around. So we kind of have two stories happening where the majority of guys are rejecting the messages, but still kind of too many are really clinging on to them. And from one to the other, it might be a different young man who agrees with one thing but disagrees with others. So then to really, for the methodology focused folks in the room, to really understand what we mean throughout the report and throughout the findings by this idea of being in the box or out of the box. Like Gary presented, we have these 17 messages that look similar to the ones that I just shared. And those 17 messages align themselves according to seven different themes of masculinity. And each respondent was able to tell us that they really agree with this. They only slightly agree with this all the way up to they very strongly disagree with this item. And we kind of code that with a numeric score. And when we add those scores up across all 17 items, then we can kind of come up with each individual person's score on that scale. And then anyone who had a score on that scale that was at or above the average for their country, so an at or above meaning a more inequitable views for their country, we coded those men as in the box. And then anyone whose score was below the country average, that's who we're calling outside the box for all of these analyses. And so I think that's helpful to remember because when you see the phrase, the men most in the box and things like that throughout the report, you might think, okay, this is just a very small selection of men holding the most extreme views. No, we're talking about fully half of the participants in our study and even men with kind of a mixture of attitudes. So we'll walk through the main, I think it's six themes of outcomes really, really quickly here. Each of these gets five pages in the report, but like one slide right now. But let's dive in the first area we looked at was life satisfaction and self confidence. And this one at first was a little surprising to us that the men who are more in the box and holding more inequitable views also were pretty kind of satisfied with themselves. They told us that I'm the man. They had higher ratings of their own life satisfaction than the other men. So we had to kind of grapple with this one and ultimately realize that there is a certain sort of comfort that really comes from aligning yourself and your identity to that socially prescribed definition of manhood. But understanding this in a fuller context, we start to see all of predictably the findings that would be more reinforced by other social science research that we're based on here showing that being in the man box has many negative outcomes. So here we see that that bravado is actually masking a lot of depressive symptoms and frequent thoughts of suicide. So Gary shared these grounding statistics from the U.S. and from the world of how pressing the trends related to depression and suicide are for young men. And now we've started to see a little bit of the root of where that comes from. So being in the man box is associated with it's actually at least two up to four times as high of a likelihood of saying that you thought about suicide within the last two weeks. Young men in the man box are also about twice as likely to show depressive symptoms. Had another thought on this one? Oh, we actually get to dive into this one. Good. So again just to prepare you to read the report, you're going to see a lot of these green and red tables throughout the whole report. And what it's doing is for each of the three countries breaking out those trends based on who's in the man box or outside the man box using that figure that I described. And here I guess you could, the main point to observe is sure the links with being in the man box but also just how tremendously high all of these numbers are regardless of whether you're inside or outside the man box. And when we add up these first two columns of depressive symptoms using an internationally standard kind of screening tool for depressive disorder, we found that about 40% of men across all sites would have met a screening standard for depression. And that's regardless of being inside or outside the man box. So we see tremendous levels of depressive symptoms but a particularly strong relationship with subscribing to those restrictive notions of manhood. Okay, third area is friendship and support seeking. So we know that guys are feeling down. We know they have depressive symptoms. We know they're even thinking about suicide but are they seeking help? Unfortunately, not very much. We're actually excited to learn that men were pretty willing to see themselves as support givers, that they helped a friend who was going through something difficult. But it's rare that men in our samples in these three sites would seek out help for their own experiences of mental health and certainly not from anyone other than women in their lives. They would go to a romantic partner. They would go to their mother. Those were the first two figures that they reported seeking help from but much less often they're male friends and very, very rarely their fathers. An interesting item that comes up here in the report too is that men inside the man box are about twice as likely to tell us that recently they refrained from doing something because they were afraid their friends would see them as girly or as gay. So we see a strong link in them with the man box alignment and that restricting one's own behavior in a sort of homophobic way. Fourth area is risky behaviors and here we see that the young men inside the man box are much more likely to engage in a set of risky behaviors, particularly binge drinking but we also see that young men and this again relates to a statistic Gary shared are up to two to three times more likely to have been in a traffic accident recently and here I think we get a little glimpse of the interplay of the man box and binge drinking so that's in Mexico City young man says that's when you end up drinking going along with the group and drinking again and again to avoid being labeled as the one who doesn't drink and you want your friends to think you're like them so he didn't use the words man box but it's clear he's trying to fit in with some kind of a socially prescribed set of behaviors. We also wanted to turn a lens on men's relationships with their own bodies their own confidence not just in terms of their life but in their personal and physical attractiveness and here we found persistent links in the young man's responses that attractiveness is really defined by muscle bulk by your body shape much more than the kind of individual inward confidence that we saw in the video that opened the session being the defining measure of what makes someone attractive in the world so okay I'm a quantitative researcher in front of a group I have to at least show one bar chart this is the only oh no we saw one earlier but I get this one so here the gold bars are saying the men who agree that I'm satisfied or I'm very satisfied with the size of my muscles this is the majority in all cases but I can tell you by comparison with other of the reports of self-satisfaction this was the lowest rate of satisfaction with any element of a body or any element of one's attractiveness that we found in the survey and then the sort of dark gray bar there is showing that a substantial proportion of guys across all three sites out of a long list of their body parts and various elements of their appearance the vast majority selected one or two things their weight or their body shape as the top thing that they would want to change and so this is just helping us understand how body image really sits in a male body as well okay and then to wrap us up on the sixth theme that we looked at and this also goes back to the the framing and the motivation that Gary shared we're not trying to look at men completely in isolation as if they don't have interactions with others around them in their lives and we know through a lot of research that subscribing to more restrictive gender norms is linked with a young man's likelihood to perpetrate violence against women in his life against his peers against others against himself as we saw with suicide statistics and so we can see definitively here again in the US UK and Mexico that the man box is a very violent place and that those who agree more often with those restrictive notions of manhood are dramatically more likely to to experience and to use different forms of violence so to break these out just a little bit we see that these young men in the man box are actually more likely to report that they've experienced violence up to 1.5 times as likely to experience a verbal kind of bullying and then with online and physical forms of bullying up to as many as three or four times as likely to experience this as their peers outside the man box based on the country setting so they find themselves in violent situations as well but the numbers leap even more shockingly to the eye when we look at these young men's perpetration of bullying up to as much as six or seven times as likely to report that they perpetrate bullying in an online forum against a male peer or that they've used physical violence just a tremendously strong link there in all of the three sites and then also to show how of course attitudes and norms based on a kind of hypersexual identity or on an identity that sort of approaches women's bodies as somehow entitled to men or this kind of a sexual attitude we do see that men in the man box are three to six times as likely to tell us that within a recent time period they made an unwanted sexual comment to a woman so we can start to understand these this stew of a real restrictive masculinity as a root cause of many harmful elements of life certainly many in the bodies and in the lives of young men but also extending out to their romantic relationships their family relationships their peer relationships as well and with that I'll thank you for your kind attention and hand it back to Gary to conclude thanks for sure so before we go into the panel we want to just wrap up so what do we make of all of this we're the publication just came out in print an hour and a half ago so we are we are still delving into this we're very excited to be able to share it with you and to hear together with you the first headline we take is that we might like to think that these versions of manhood feel something like from the last century but they are very much alive and well we were we were I should say we were pleased that on many measures most of the young men across the three countries and we see this in other countries where we've carried out the international men and gender equality survey that the younger generation of men in many parts of the world is reasonably accepting of women as their equals that part came through in pretty similar ways across the u.s the uk and mexico and the other part that came across quite similar is just how restrictive the manbox is for men themselves in very similar ways across three different cultural settings the other challenge that we have going on with it and that brian pointed out is that there's both this sense of security by being in the box particularly if you don't know where your future lies if you don't know what employment looks like or where where you're headed in this transition moment of your life as a young person the manbox gives a sense of security of that affirmation of you I'm the man and I'm living up to what people think I should do we continue to recognize and hold up guys for that so it it does give you this sense of false security perhaps at the same time it masks all these things that we I think came out really strongly and it also suggests just how confused and complex young men's relationships are they feel like they can offer help but they can't ask for help and when they do ask for help it's still largely a feminine thing I can seek help from women I can seek help first and foremost from mom and second perhaps from a female partner last on that list was fathers and male friends so again we have this notion that who helps us as men get over our own stuff is women so again we've got to think about what that means in terms of promoting a culture of care and that care being as something that men can do is not simply a feminine trait but that the connection and the care of others is as much a masculine trait as a feminine trait the other part is just how isolating the male box the manbox is it gives us this sense that we're all these kind of islands on our own and in our own silence that we can somehow even fix ourselves to get out of the manbox and we've got to step back from that and say this is a societal thing this is not about blaming individual men of course we need to hold individual men accountable but it's about saying what do we all need to do as policymakers teachers families parents who raise sons and daughters to build on what we've done to make the world a bigger and more expansive place for the lives of girls we need to think about how we free boys in a similar but not the same ways to be able to embrace our full humanity in terms of being able to to be connected with others so we end on a note of saying we don't think we don't offer this as replacing any of the work that we're doing to empower women and girls this doesn't save that this doesn't make gender equality you know kind of happen in four seconds by simply adding this discussion about the manbox but we do have a belief that without touching on these toxic ideas of masculinities we don't achieve the full promise that gender equality offers us thanks very much well thank you very much wow we have a great discussion in front of us and I'm looking forward to just not only starting the discussion but getting you all involved and so first though I'm going to introduce you to our panelists you have their bios but on my left is Darius Kemp director of mobilization uh the representation project what we just saw Michael Reichert on his left executive director of the center for the study of boys and girls lives at the University of Pennsylvania Rick Struble from global he's the global vice president of AX Gary you just met and yeah here Zavalleta is the executive director of HIV Young Leaders Fund and I encourage you to read read all of their bios but let's let's just jump right into this Darius we've seen some of this top line research findings on the impact of the manbox and we just viewed this remarkable trailer the mask you live in given your work what do you see the role of media and messaging around all of this issues of the manbox and how do we challenge ideas about the manbox so solve all the problems basically yeah we'd like to solve we're gonna get there um you know as many times that I've talked about this uh being with the representation project um the answer is always changing and growing because I'm always learning and we as an organization and is always we're always learning and learning more about what people need what messages work and don't work um but I'm gonna say the most important thing I think um I think I learned from our youth summit we host an annual youth summit our first one was last year we're hosting again this year um well last year and this year will be in san francisco the next few years it may not be we'll we'll see how that goes um we're very excited august 5th but but I remember after our first summit um a bunch of the youth um mentioned even though I thought we had a very diverse group of people on the stage and engaging um there were still gaps uh in terms of representation on the stage and the people who identified in that way noticed it immediately which is what always happens I notice when I'm the only black person in the room which happens quite often believe it or not in professional settings and in academic and work settings um so when I don't see myself reflected on the stage I instantly point that out I notice that I see that and so media plays a really important role um because media uh lets people see themselves in a place where they never thought they would be um if I can if you'll indulge me for a second when I was a kid I still am in in love with the show but when I was a kid seven eight years old a huge dr. who fan I know who in alabama in 1988 a black kid living in a poor black community loves dr. who I do but but and I still do love the show but to this day I am still rocked by the fact that I've never seen a black doctor I've never seen myself in my favorite TV show that's been on for over 50 years um and that disturbs me and and um when our youth and when when when people that we want to change the the men that that gary and uh uh talked about in the survey we want to engage with those men uh we want to give them a different way to view themselves it's really important that hollywood and new york and all these media capitals of the world take a stand and show that diversity show the diversity and show uh that men can care men can reach out and how do we do it michael in terms of socializing boys you've been studying this for a while what are you finding in terms of how uh we actually how we socialize both men and boys girls and and women because this is a social construct it doesn't happen in isolation yes i've been doing this a long time um i was reminded of that uh six months ago um uh my my grandson arrived um and 31 years before that my first son was born and uh uh holding my grandson who's six months old tomorrow um what i'm struck by is uh the openness of his gaze and the depth of his search he's looking for me to reflect back to him something of reality so i'm a developmental psychologist and i have uh dug deep into understanding how we produce 18 to 30 year old males that that uh find themselves so um so quick to tuck ourselves into the box um darius's movie the mask you live in begins to be fair is jennifer's move jennifer's movie the movie the mask you live in begins with a quote from george orwell from a 1938 essay shooting the elephant and the quote is he wears a mask and he grows to fit it and my work has been all about the growing to fit it part of that and the thing that i would say that i agree with uh kathleen is that we do that there's there's certainly the boys agency and range of choice but but in in many many contexts that range of choice is really narrowed by the structures and the opportunities the rewards and the pressures that we create as we invent boyhood i've been thinking a lot about boyhood because of this grandson and his trust that i have it covered that i know what i'm doing and that i'm doing what's best for him and uh it's it's it's sobering and and sad and and and uh feelings like that when i realize that i can't circle wagons around my grandson and i can't ensure that he's not going to encounter the kinds of pressures and disrespect and danger that that jams males into this developmental constraining suppressing soul-sucking context i've got bad news and good news the bad news is we're in a time where there's this discourse of crisis you know books like the demise of guys the end of men the trouble with boys boys falling behind these are the the best-selling titles of the last 10 years or so the good news first this is not new um we're we're newly recognizing that this is the case the my particular research has been in the area of education and in fact boys have been there's been a gender achievement gap since 1900 in the us boys arrive at kindergarten already behind girls in terms of many many outcomes what's called soft skills so it's not new and i think the other other good news i think is i think it's i think the the the structures of masculinity the the man box the mask of masculinity i think it's being stretched to a breaking point and that we may be at a moment not so much of crisis but of creative disruption i think we may be in a time when as parents and grandparents educators we're actually being driven to acknowledge that this isn't working and in our deep commitment to the males that we care for our our brothers and our friends and our sons and our grandsons our students we're we're being driven to acknowledge that this traditional mode that we're still rather wedded to even the best hearted people are still wedded to it i think that we're being driven to acknowledge that it's not working and we're in a moment i think when uh as we as we search for where to find answers we're paying attention to boys we're listening to them and what they're teaching us is actually quite revealing research i did recently in six different countries led us to the stunning insight that boys are relational learners that in fact having a relationship with a teacher or a coach is a make or break feature for engaging males in learning you know knowing what we know i think is the biggest way forward actually acknowledging that we know that these males these children are human beings and they need what human beings need things like relationship opportunities to express our feelings things like that and i think that this moment in history when we're really at the edge of how far i think this traditional masculinity can stretch i think it's a it's a real opportunity well that's a perfect pivot into talking about how we actually look at selling masculinity and we're so glad you're with us today rick because you have a particular perspective as somebody who really understands the business world the marketing unilever is a leading manufacturer of consumer goods such as ax male grooming products and yet ax has really been looking at this issue funding research to understand what are these young men and what are their identities and can you kind of give us a sense of the change that you've seen from your perspective because rarely in a washington kind of policy world do we talk about the private sector and the business model and what roles you are also playing in trying to break out of the man box so happy to have you on board yeah thank you kathleen it's interesting to sit here to represent the private sector in the middle of very small people i'm the one who tells deodorants basically that's what i think but apart from that it's it's super interesting that the type of work that i can do because i can look into what drives the needs and the ones of young men in general and it's it's a super exciting moment as a market here if you look at how quickly society is changing right now and it's changing in various different ways and of course it's changing in the way that young men define masculinity and the man box meaning that people outside of that target group guys who are or society which includes older people who are defining their world as a particular one and what we are seeing is that being a man and defining what what it means to be a man used to be very simple you know they were very clear rules that society was giving you that you needed to look like that you needed to do this you needed to behave like that and there was basically no way out so that was simple in one way quite sad on another because i'm sure that man box has existed for a very long time without anybody recognizing it however what we see now is that that masculinity and that view on masculinity in the young generation has moved on a lot and we as marketers and acts as a male grooming ground for young guys needs to adhere to that needs to make sure that we are with those guys and talk to them on their own terms and be relevant in their lives now if you look at the research and you see the issues the issues that young guys are describing they're saying and they're saying it here in this research they also it confirms some of the learnings that we had which is their society is putting a lot of pressure on me but i don't really want to talk about it because you know it's not a thing that i would do as a guy but if you put them in a room alone you say it say if you can talk to me you know i'm not gonna say anything so please i did never mention that that that is something that is really interesting when they start opening up and they talk to us and then they say well you know if society probably society tells me that i should act tough even if i'm sad even if i'm nervous i shouldn't show any emotions i shouldn't do this and shouldn't show that now if you look at that from a lens of a brand and an axis 33 years old and it's a brand that yes provides you know body sprays deodorants body washes stuff like that so stuff which makes guys smell better and and and look better hopefully but even more interestingly my job is essentially i'm in the in the business of attraction you know it is about confidence and it is about attraction so i'm trying to help young guys feel more confident so what we are finding as a brand is that there's something in the way for those young guys to feel confident so if my role is to stand by their side as a partner in their lives and nowadays with the progression in digital with social a brand is almost like a friend for young guys it is next to them you know it's part of their lives you can converse with the brand you know you can ask ask a question and acts will respond to you and therefore often young people trust brands more than they trust politicians than they trust authorities so therefore we have a big role to play here and it is it is super relevant that we as an attraction brand help to tear down those those barriers that have been put up there so when we looked at that research we understood that men are in trouble and they are in much deeper trouble than what we were assuming so we knew that they were struggling with a man box we didn't know that they were so massively and so consistently struggling with mental health with depression with suicide to that extent and therefore that is the thing that we want to want to help change and that's why we helped fund this and why I'm so keen that I can sit here with you guys. Can you show something here? Yes, so there's there's different things that we are doing on the one hand so we have the perfect partners as a brand which is the NGOs that we work with and we work with a representation project we work with from below and we work with another NGO called ditch the label and they are one of the biggest charities who help tear down bullying and the effects of bullying and you saw in the report and what Brian was mentioning before bullying is a big issue and almost half of the guys out there experienced bullying in the last four weeks bullying of some kind you know whether that's bullying whether that's verbal bullying physical or really going you know to detrimental means so to really really impact their lives so bullying is a big issue and ditched the label is has a fantastic program to help those who are being bullied and those also the perpetrators themselves to get out of that vicious cycle and I think it's a fantastic NGO that you should have a look at so that is what we're doing to really change and to help change society and toxic masculinity but we're also doing advertising and obviously that is that is a big thing that we talk to people on a daily basis we change the way that we communicate to men and we have a a new theme if you want to call it that which is find your magic and find your magic we launched last year with a tremendous success and I just wanted to show one example of the campaign now back to you thank you thank you so how do we begin to look at all of this work Gary you know you've been researching men in conflict settings and we have this now tremendous baseline we have three countries that are not in conflict but you're showing us what kind of problems we have in terms of men and their feelings of being really stuck in a box um how can we like extrapolate what what does that mean for a man who is living in a violent conflict can you guess at this or do you have some more research for us sure we've well some in partnership with us ip and and other organizations we've been asking similar questions in a few conflict affected countries drc recently in palestine and lebanon and a project together with us ip and elsewhere not quite asking at the same way and certainly you're an anthropologist so i'll be careful about making generalizations obviously each of these contexts has its own story to be told and issues of ethnicity and social class and historical context come into bear but there are some similar things around whether this emotionally restricted version of manhood allows men to be contributors to rebuilding peace and rebuilding households or whether it turns them into or restricts them into into expressing their emotions in the forms of violence so whether we've done interviews and now direct work with men who are husbands of women rape survivors in the context of the democratic republic of congo whether those guys can find an outlet to talk about their own trauma from that event is often a determining factor whether he ends up using violence against a spouse who's already a victim of violence or whether he becomes a supportive partner who tries to break down the stigma that she faces in her community we've recently interviewed or our partner organization abad has recently interviewed and with collaboration with us syrian refugee men who are in lebanon syrian refugees now making up about a quarter of lebanon's population so both syrian refugee men and the population in lebanon feeling this tremendous wave of the syrian refugees coming into the country and multiple stories there as well some men becoming closer to their children opening up finding a moment that in that displacement not being the provider anymore becoming quite involved in caregiving far more often was the story of men who close themselves off emotionally they feel marginalized in the way that humanitarian aid is given one of the guys in the interview said or actually was a woman who said this she said men can't go to the humanitarian aid site to ask for aid because men can't do that so the very moment that your life and your family's well-being depends on asking for aid that is seen as a feminine trait some of the men talking about as well he couldn't go out on on his own alone because security forces pick up men if they're out on their own kind of a bit of profiling going on he would go out he would always make sure they had to go out with a woman so imagine this flipping around gender norms where we used to women only feeling safe if they go out with men a lot of men feeling their heads quite turned on this notion of I'm no longer the provider and I need her for my physical protection when I go out a lot of men aren't faring very well with that and in fact most of the time it was women who could tell about the pain that their husbands were experiencing them themselves very little ability to talk about that we also did a household survey Lebanese men Syrian refugee men about twice the rates of depression for the Syrian refugee men women had higher rates men had again similar trends to the U.S. about half the rates of seeking help for it I think the stories could go on we've also interviewed Palestinian men who were in detention because of the ongoing occupation and conflict with Israel and talking about how they wanted to gravitate toward a sense of manhood if I'm the one in control kind of grappling with I want to be even more conservative as a form of resistance but coming back and seeing that their spouses had taken care of that there went you know their wives really could do everything while they were away and again spinning their heads about how they talk about gender issues but they could talk about her they did very little talking about themselves so again this emotionally restrictive form of masculinity in different cultural forms in different contextual forms it's alive and well out there and it doesn't it's not that it resolves you know the roots of the conflict in Syria or in Palestine or the other settings we're working in but to have those who are involved in designing services in looking at what peace may look like in Syria someday if we don't understand it then we're often kind of exacerbating the very problems that we're trying to work on so again huge differences but I think the this enjoining men to we can talk about this there are other ways of doing it finding your peace of mind to talk about it as well as finding your you know the magic and being able to connect up to others and to be your genuine self holds up for us whether it's in a high school in Washington DC or whether it's in a refugee setting in Syria yeah I find that actually stunning the continuity of of the predicament and the isolation of young men in whatever predicament in a high school backyard or in a situation like you mentioned in Syria we're going to come back to this but I want to get Yahir involved part of the study was on Mexico and so I'm interested in your reflections of the results and also how you see these kind of rigid views of manhood affecting both men and women and the impact in in Mexico how do you see it playing out even in your own life well I have to say that this this morning I was working I was getting ready to start the day and I received this message from a friend in Mexico saying he was feeling sad he was feeling anxious he worked with me I have this pressure in my chest and I just want I just feel I need to cry I was like oh well you know like try to let it go maybe you have to it's okay if you if you cry a little you will feel relief and he was he replied me and I can actually note the ironic tone in his text if I can say so he was telling me no because men don't cry it was like you're kidding right no I'm not kidding I mean like you know I'm surrounded a lot of guys here he works in an IT department in a business private sector so I was like yeah okay I get it so we love the conversation there but it somehow reminds me like when I was a teenager and I was in this school and there was a day when I broke up with my girlfriend and that time so I was very sad and I felt the same I had the same feeling that I wanted to cry but I didn't and I couldn't because I was there and I was with my friends and the way that a young man should behave like you shouldn't cry in front of people so at that time I also had a lot of confrontations in terms like I consider myself I always consider myself like a very sensitive guy and it was very difficult to me to reach out to girls because at some point it was like girls saying okay it's good that you're very sensitive but on the other hand it's like my friend saying well you know you should be rude you should be more like the conqueror you should try to conquer the girl and that was very challenging for me at that time so eventually I I stick out of that problem because I accept my sexuality as a gay man so no more dealing with reaching out to girls and sticking out of that box but actually it's switching to another kind of another man box which is what is it to be being a gay man in Mexico and as you know I mean I'm a tiny bit shorty guy and so I think that I fit also in that I used to fit in that 50 percent of young men in Mexico that do not feel comfortable felt I will I didn't feel comfortable in terms of my body and not being a muscle guy and with that also that man box in Mexico in a young gay man that tells you that you need to be you don't need to be feminine you had to be also the tough guy which is like it's not very different to the one that I was living in the high school or in the secondary school so it's so actually very very challenging in terms of what what it's said to be a man in Mexico or in many other countries in Latin America many other countries in Africa in Eastern Europe anywhere so I think the study is very interesting in terms like it supports questioning like what is it to be a real man like if we keep doing this kind of initiatives if we keep doing supporting or encouraging men young men to try to question their privilege but as a man but also what is it what the challenges of being a man in their own context I think it's we are we are having a lot of achievements in there because we are actually trying to make sure that people are the young men are actually trying to understand what are the contacts what are they what are they facing with and in terms of the work that I do in terms of sectional reproductive health and HIV it also plays a determinant role in terms of how populations for instance men who have sex with men or transgender youth all actually are facing all those men boxes in terms of how that how they can they put in more risk of HIV infections or STIs or many other challenge situations so I think that there's a lot of things that we that we need to do it's in this study I think it's very interesting to see like how in Mexico for example we find that young men are more comfortable like having gay friends or they are they are more open or flexible to to you know to have this to play these activities or to to perform this traditional roles that are attached to or assigned to to women but I mean in terms that we can say that we have achieved some some feel but there's a lot of things that that that we need to do it's not a it's not a gender equality is there is we are at some point but we still need to to to have more much more more initiatives and more more questioning ourselves about our masculinities yeah I'm going to open it up to the panel now because I know you don't all know one another and you probably have questions of one another so I'm just kind of I know you have something here I was actually thinking about what you hear was just talking about because I come from a different cultural context I'm from Alabama I'm a black American my family's history in America goes back to slavery and yet in America I am always the black man in America is always deemed as being the things that are mentioned in the survey hyper sexual hyper aggressive hyper violent that's kind of culturally where I fit in and just on the outside of my race and my my gender but as a queer man also it also is this weird thing that I'm always having these two identities that are always battling each other and these two boxes because the man box is a complicated thing as we all know um but I think it's it's it's fascinating how um I will be stuck in this man box and then I will talk to friends or or engage in like a queer space or people find out that I'm queer and it becomes it becomes a oh you're not you're not like those other guys you're not you're different you're you're not like them and I think that's just something that you know as we talk about I think something that is kind of touching on I think when we look across the world and trying to address this issue as Gary does we need to kind of constantly remember that cultural context and cultural context is very important to breaking down the man box and making it something that people can break out of because when I was in the Peace Corps and I was living in Jamaica probably one of the most um hyper masculine cultures uh uh I think in the world especially if you listen to reggae music you can hear it all there in in many cases um but while I was doing programming at the only male juvenile facility uh in the country um I asked the question who you know how do you view your masculinity versus I don't know say my masculinity right like I'm American man they're like oh well you're clearly a sensitive kind of fufu shishi uh they say you know abadman a chichaman right that's what they would say in Jamaica because they view American masculinity as very effeminate while they view their masculinity as the pinnacle of masculinity so here everyone else is faking it being a man well you know and it was just really fascinating the the process is that these boys had of like oh well you can be kind of like flimsy and feminine or whatever because you're American and all the guys are like that over there but in Jamaica no like men don't do this and men don't do that and it's just that cultural context is just so important I just wanted to point that out and highlight that the box is even tighter even tighter in different places you go others comments comments on the man box your own man box I guess I would like to say uh uh this I think that we don't want to overstate the man box yes it's consequential all those ways that we're sobering and shocking and frightening but in being with boys I was thinking about your story I hear about your friend saying he wanted to cry and feeling constrained and unable to I work at a high school a couple hours a week and I run a class for 17 and 18 year old young men and basically it's an emotional literacy class and it's a chance for them to learn how to talk to each other express their souls to each other and listen to each other so developing emotional skills emotional intelligence skills and I do a demonstration each time we meet in front of maybe 50 you know guys of all types and you know division one athletes and drama people and you know computer geeks and so forth and I simply invite the guys that I'm doing a demonstration with to tell their story invariably they go to the thing that's really that they're really struggling with and and routinely now in this high school group these boys will break down and cry and what it what it what it confirms for me is that the humanity of the males in our society it's intact it's constrained by the boyhoods that we've built and that we're maintaining and the set of choices that are available but right behind that mask is a beating heart and and we get to free boys and help them I think have a broader range of choice so it's great to describe these constraints and name it as a a fact of the social structures that exist but the encouraging thing is that there's a there's a there's a real vibrancy and resistance that's ready to be I think supported yeah that's that's a great way to put it I love it and there's a heartbeat in there yeah yeah I would I can just confirm Michael what you're saying when when we talk to young guys and when we for example when we did the campaign and we started find your magic that video was seen by about 70 million people and we were prepared for some backlash you know we show a guy voguing there is a gay scene there is there is a portrayal of men which is quite different from what some societies would say you should portray on TV so we were prepared for you know quite ambitious comments 98 percent of the comments were positive it was it was super positive to see how men and women gay and straight we're really saying yes finally you know finally somebody is doing this and when I sit in focus groups or whenever I experience young men together in a safe environment all of a sudden the mask is taken off and all of a sudden you see how much they're craving for this you know just show me how how it can be you know take that box away you know just let me live that and what I find very encouraging is the younger you go the more we find that when we think of you know the mating game as we call it you know basically trying to connect with with the potential partner we see that that has changed quite significantly so what used to be about conquest is much more about connection it's much more a relationship which is eye to eye level nowadays and therefore that's also when I look back at the communication that axe was doing before we lost some relevance with guys because we were not in tune with what they wanted and we need to be a brand that needs to be a little bit ahead of them so they can aspire to being there and to be part of that world and that's something that we understood and which is something that I find actually encouraging it's great to see that young generation you know having a very different perspective that's great Gary I know you're sitting over there pulling all these pieces together and I'm gonna I was gonna comment on what Michael said around I think it's easy you know it's easy to hold up a study and the cover looks cool and Brian and other colleagues who sweat it a lot on it it's easier presented as a static picture right that somehow guys are this way and I think it is important that we you know understand the qualitative part of the research which y'all here coordinated in Mexico just shows how dynamic these things are and I think just to echo Michael's point when we've created in programming opportunities for young men and adult men to think about these things and even sometimes life circumstances doing it the mask is a really fragile you know brittle mask that breaks with in some cases quite just a you know the tiniest of taps of giving men the safe space to be able to say you know that humanity is close at hand and it can come out whether that's helping them see the harm that's caused to themselves and others by doing it or simply by those around them changing and saying we expect you to do X and that expect maybe to be the caregiver to make room for a woman to be at the negotiating table and be the leader and you might sit on the back row what would that look like but that if that we can with some little nudges we find we can get men to do the stuff whether it's inviting them for a prenatal visit and saying we want you to be part of this encounter with this new life that's on its way whether it's about a group education session that we and many other organizations I see some colleagues from men can stop rape you know we do this work in school we see that it is possible that this mask can shatter quickly and I think it is it's important as we hold up a study like this to say there's stories of men doing the counter men doing caregiving men standing up against the harm they see other men doing those stories speak even more loudly I think than the than the man box and your affirmation that 98 percent of men saw this compared to your previous ads right I mean acts was doing a different version that some of us may have fantasized about but it never really worked I mean just to say that just add that you know that it is in fact this is what men have been asking for it's not that hard for us to you know to do in some cases pull that in there now what is the more difficult part is the power structures that keep wanting to make this and Darius you brought up the class issue and I think what came out really strongly in the qualitative interviews here young men of color some gay young men young men of diverse settings in Mexico and in the UK particularly some Asian immigrant men in young men in the UK talking about the issue of the powers around me that make me into the bad guy whether we call that racial profiling whether we call that ethnic profiling but the sense that the world boxes me in that some of you have labeled us to be the guys who bring trouble shapes as well daily choices I think that's one that takes a lot more thinking about well finally I would like to say to share our experience well as Gary mentioned I was supporting the focus groups the focus groups in Mexico so one of the most challenging things there it was like inviting people to participate in the focus groups because when I was personally inviting them just you know to have this conversation of why they said to be a man they were like what and do I have to question so that's that's a real problem that people that young young people young men do not necessarily question themselves like were they leaving being a man being a young man they're not questioning their masculinity but on the other hand during the focus groups when some of them open the first door to say okay well my experience is these or I have suffered this and then the rest of the group is like it was like a sort of you know like I feel empathy with you and I also experience that situation so it was very it's very exciting to see like hope sometimes it's just like to pull a little bit that door to say like okay you can see that we all share common challenges and common problems in terms of what is it to sometimes to deal with that man box and but yeah once again it's like it's when when you talk about like you know do you feel comfortable being a man what are you facing being a man this is like do I don't I don't even have to question that like that's a fair reaction that that we face in Mexico in Mexico we're inviting to this young man but unfortunately I mean like fortunately there was a very good response and I would say it like the people were very participative in terms of like sharing their own personal experiences so I think it's a matter once again as I was mentioning in my first intervention is it's a matter of encouraging young men to and men in general to actually you know open a little bit to to experience and to question their set themselves to what is said to be actually a man and actually as Mike mentioned it's a it's a matter also I was thinking about about it's a matter of of aging you know like sometimes it's more like you are more allowed to express your feelings if you are a boy or a very young man but if you are an adult a young a man in in the adulthood just like you are even more restricted to show your feelings sometimes in at least it happens in Mexico so once again the other thing there should be the way that the focus is upwards should be like very interesting how can move forward with that yeah thank you and I know that there are a lot of people even one person already ready to ask a question so why don't we pivot right now towards some of our colleagues here asking a question and maybe we'll take a couple at a time I see one two three right there in that corner and if you could stand up tell us who you are and where you might be coming from they'll help us get to know you too my name is Marie O'Reilly I'm from inclusive security thank you for this fantastic panel this you might move it closer to yes it's very refreshing and badly needed I'm curious maybe in particular Gary but anyone else who may have experience in this area if you could say a little bit more about the links between the findings on the personal and interpersonal level and how that might relate to how leaders male leaders in particular make decisions about whether to go to war and not just individual leaders but then also sort of state aggression and belligerence as we know men continue to dominate decisions about war and peace around the world we also have a lot of research now around correlations between societies who treat their women better are much less likely to go to war is there a similar research out there sort of on the man box at the at the macro level in terms of the behavior of states be very interested to hear your thoughts on that thank you great and we're going to go right to the next question and we'll wrap around again thank you okay hi I'm Meg Lavery from state counterterrorism bureau and this is the only time I'm happy to see a panel full of men I wanted to get some more of your feedback on something that you hear was saying regarding more mature adult men sort of the focus of your talk has been on young men and what is your hope for adult and mature men and also what is the role of the father we've talked a lot about peers mentors teachers mothers you know sisters but what is the role of father in the intergenerational relationship great thanks so much Meg and I think we can say safely this is a very positive mantle right we call these manals hey everybody first thank you my name is Beaumonti Johnson I'm with a group called emergent pathways and it's what's it was touched on throughout the panel I didn't see it of course haven't had a chance to read through the report but intersectionality in terms of race in class in this is sounds like it's I don't know if it's there or not and I would like to offer a resource that was produced about a year ago that was it's called addressing masculine norms to improve life outcomes for young black men it was co-produced by an organization called organizations true child and frontline solutions and I can shoot it to you Gary because I know I have your email but I think it's dangerous at best and definitely incomplete for us to talk about things related to gender without incorporating race in class and the analysis because what tends to happen is the dominant class or the dominant culture is the thing that is compared or discussed or or the frame from which we talk about how these things play out I also appreciate the point that you raised about about life in Jamaica and how it's not even masculine entities it's more manhood is discussed or or or seen and played out in Jamaica in comparison to even black manhood in the US so I would say let's expand this story thank you great thanks for bringing also the lens of intersectionality it's definitely an important one and we'll come back to it and we'll get one more question in this round go ahead please hi my name is Kai Wiggins and I'm currently searching for a job so just last month I graduated from a liberal arts college in New England a college with a student body so liberal that it's actually received a lot of pressure pressing the national media for its recalcitrance to conservative conservative ideologies and among the student body we try to be very conscious and aware of different power structures and systems of oppression with respect to race class gender sexuality faith etc such that you know in observing I guess the dynamics of heterosexual partnerships I've seen that like espousing feminist ideals or quote-unquote being seen as being woke has a certain kind of social and sexual capital in and of itself and in a funny kind of way you see men putting on a mask of feminism whether they're doing with full intent or not as a way to outcompete other men in the competition for potential sexual partners it's a way to be a better man and therefore have more sex and in a funny kind of way that undermines that that totally undermines the objectives of feminism and this is a concept that doesn't really receive a lot of press and a lot of conversation I've actually you kind of get it it's been talked about on sites like Jezebel or everyday feminism and actually SNL has had two skits in you know the more recent episodes that kind of touch on these themes you know what do we do with this idea that feminism can become a mask for men to live in so they can perpetuate you know toxic strains of masculinity how do we address that when you know we're talking about the expression of signifying acts and things that are more traditionally coded as you know I guess um whatever masculinity like how do we talk about the more pernicious or underlying strains of toxic masculinity that we should address great wow what a what a round of questions I'm glad I have all of you to help me well uh this is really diving into the deep end and I'm wanting to know who wants to take on let's start with the the leadership Mary's question about male leadership and what is this relationship between war and and uh the macro side of the storyboard does anybody want to did I get that pretty close okay I can't I'll let Gary talk about war I've never been in it personally um but I can I I can't talk about violence and abuse uh personal level um I was raised in a house that saw fights and arguments between my family weekly monthly uh it was so often I just I can't even tell you how often it was and not just with my dad but then later on step dad I think my point that I think that I've been processing over the years because there's there had been so much violence guns police called abuse um me and my my mom my sister and I lived in a YWCA shelter for about almost a half a year about a little over three months because of all the trouble in the turmoil and I say that um not for any sort of sympathetic thing or anything but to point out that I think violence is this thing um that can be perpetuated by men um but we are all victims of it we are all causes of it we are all people that that uh encourage it and discourage it we are we are all those things uh at the same time um you know it's you know most people I I remember what growing up most people would say like oh your family's having this why don't your mom just leave these guys and why why are they beating there why you know why don't you just leave these guys is it I ask those questions myself it is not that simple we live in a society when we talk about masculinity when you talk about violence these things are never are just just linked they're just linked together and to the point where even women women fall into the these these these tropes and these um these pitfalls when it comes to violence and and abuse and things of that nature so I'm saying all this to say what we need to do as a society is have a conversation about violence and respect uh and how toxic masculinity is encroaching on everybody's freedoms and how it it hurts men definitely it hurts women definitely um you should please check the check out our film the masculine we talk about that a lot but it's just it's just something um that I think men have a primary role in trying to address that's but that primary role is 51 percent the other 49 percent has to come from the other side of the aisle because we all have to fix violence in our society absolutely well what about this mature adult role of the father meg asked about that and maybe you want to go ahead yeah well I have to say that uh in the report you can see that how the people in the survey actually replied that in the case of the UK and in the US it was a very similar number of presentation but it was a very low rate of of young men actually supporting on their fathers to to you know when they have they have sort of certain problem or what they want to talk about like individual uh uh problems or challenges they were facing in case of Mexico it was like six six percent it's a very low rate in terms of a very low percentage of actually young men that are willing to uh trust or to reach out to their fathers to you know to ask for support so I think that we face a very clear challenge in terms of um of how can we encourage uh fathers in this in this case to actually promote like or to to to build this kind of confident circle with their with the kids with their children um in my opinion I think it's a it's a matter that we should we should focus on the new generation sometimes and I can see in my in my own experience like talking with my father of of you know like being gay or of of abortion or of many other things are he is more reluctant to kind of open his mind to that kind of of discussions and I can see with the the the fighters of my friends and so on so I think the main challenge or or the task that we should focus now is in younger generations to actually open the kind of conversations to question their masculinities media schools friends play a determinant role as we can see as as once in the report but my conclusion will be that we should focus on actually to for them for the the future fathers to be more conscious and more out of the man box so they can when there's a time that they will become fathers they will be able to have this confidence and to to create a supportive environment for their children here you want to take on this intersectionality issue of power and class and race and I'm going to come small topics like that um I think the first question of you know what do these mean at the macro level and what might what might big societal level changes look like on this I think is a really good question um you know there's a couple of small countries close to the Arctic Circle that have been thinking about these things for a while and they you know they I'm speaking of some researchers in Norway who have been looking at where men are doing almost 50 percent of the care work they see a strong correlation with nationally representative declines in violence at the household level there's some European data that suggests countries that are closer to something that looks like gender equality also have lower homicide rates so clearly the stuff intersects I think the bigger one that you know perhaps we're not it is a tougher one to get at is the issue of privilege I think getting men to let go of some things that are in our self-interest to be more expressive more socially connected more connected to our children and open in our relationships is kind of a self-interest piece the the world gets better if I open up to the fact that we have not achieved 5050 equality around access to resources and income and who's in control is a really is a bigger tougher one but I think we can't let this discussion about these things are good if men take them on get in the way of asking those questions about privilege and just one question about the national data I mean the national data what would this look like we're talking with acts precisely about this if we measured at a society-wide level how many men buy into the man box could we correlate that with some things like suicide rates like homicide rates and delinquency like incarceration rates we may not find a really simple correlation but I think asking those questions is really a useful piece to try to move us ahead the question about yeah intersectionality and how do we make sure that's what the colleague is still here who asked the question of you know we can't just look at manhood isolated from social class and race and ethnicity absolutely we we do talk about that in the report we made a point of in the sample it does include men of different ethnicities in each of the countries as well as its representative by income grouping we also want to be careful as we do the analysis not to um because a lot of our work on masculinities wants to say masculinities are problems with certain low income or certain ethnic groups and we also want to make clear that we don't say the masculinities of men of color are a problem of men in conflict settings are a problem as opposed to maybe not looking up the street here and saying there might be some problematic masculinities in our midst so I think it's also we're being really clear as we talk about it that we don't want to say problem masculinities lie with men of color or with certain certain parts of the world so I think that's another we're spending a lot of time right now and Brian's also writing this up and some other colleagues here of some results from four Middle Eastern countries where we've applied some of these same questions and we want to be really careful that we don't put out to the world that's already profiling Muslim men and Arab men as the world's problems and as walking fill in the blank terrorists or misogynist until proven otherwise to say the stories go in all different directions these are diverse everywhere we look men are diverse on these issues and I just wanted to make one comment on the final comment of you know our men wearing this new kind of nicer guy masculinity to get laid I mean that's a that's a you know that is a good question on the one hand just to put this out there more sex is not the problem that's okay we are okay with that we agree with axon consensual sex is fine that's what we're after we want women to be as free to have the partnerships they want us we want men to be free what we don't want is to let that become again a tagline for not probing the questions about real equality and I think the it is easy to get into a well does this the flavor of the month the guys need to look like this or is this really provoking a deeper discussion about we're going to fundamentally question these inequalities so I think if we're getting the provocation going we're on the right on the right track but I think your question is to say let's not let the game be that big we really do have to keep pushing away at it some colleagues in Mexico and Latin America are talking about neo machismo or machismo light it's like he's looking a little bit nicer we're looking a little bit softer so the relationships get along but we're not really questioning the fundamental power inequalities and so I think we want to provoke that to say you know we're okay with you feeling good about this better relationships including sex is okay that we all you know want those things the issue is how do we make sure you you know you don't stop at the power one it's not a very good easy conversation starter so we can often start a conversation about this is good for you rather than hey you want to have a conversation about privilege so it's also about how we how we enter the conversations but I think your questions of not letting us off easy are really key yeah and I'm thinking of Rick how do you respond well to be honest I don't in what we do we hear and see less of that we see more genuine behavior which is more equal than what it what it probably used to be which is very encouraging overall so that's that's what I can say I think two thoughts on one is to think of the issue at hand as a as a father of three two little sons and two and a little daughter so what I see when I read those reports when I see those issues out there is we need to look at gender as a duality and we cannot ourselves try and and and act as if there's two separate issues and there's the issue for my daughter and I used to work on that for five years and campaign for beauty and I love it and I think it's a great thing and we should do much more of that and then there is acts and find your magic and there's everything that we're talking about now and there's young boys but we need to look at both and see how strongly they intersect and I have a lot of had a lot of conversation with feminists and and some of them saying yes yes yes and some saying no no no you're just trying to take you know our ground and we have much more much bigger issues and and I think it's true that there are structural issues for women and girls which are undeniably very very serious and for my daughter's sake I need those to be resolved but at the same time or and at the same time there are other society issues about young men that we need as fathers I think we need to need to make sure we tackle I remember actually I catch myself sometimes you know I have my daughter Isabella she puts my my at that point a four-year-old Leo in a frozen costume and I'm like the frozen thing again you know in my wife where the frozen thing I mean why not you know and of course and then I catch myself of course why not so I think we catch ourselves sometimes as human being just falling back you know that's one thing I think the other thing is as a marketer I think creativity has such a huge role to play here you know this is a very sincere issue and we always look at sincere sincere issues with sincere answers I think the moment that you can open it up to the wider society just bring it on the table of the average family is often through creativity and humor and bringing some a very severe issue in a very light-hearted way I think opens up that conversation a lot we're doing a project with a partner for ours an NGO in the UK called campaign against living miserably and it's called it's called the calm photography project and it is we have asked photographers out there all kinds of photographers very famous ones and just you know people out there to send in a picture of what it looks like to be a modern man today and you know some of them very sincere some of them super funny some of them are just super weird and and I think that's great you know that I think if you look at that whole palette and you look at how creativity can give you access to that conversation sometimes is a really great vehicle to make a little bit of an implant yeah wonderful way to think about it Michael I know you want to jump in well I've just uh I've just been thinking about your question about the liberal context and and what it means for our discussion about a liberate liberatory perspective and I think that the you know the question I would interpret the question as is it possible that we we we're going to find a softer kinder morphing of oppressive and oppressing masculinity adapting to new contexts and opportunity structure absolutely I think in my view that would miss a revolutionary opportunity you know we have a chance to really acknowledge males humanity boys humanity and get it right but I think if we merely adapt to to uh uh sort of the liberal gesture the the dangers will miss that opportunity and we'll just perpetuate this this dynamic I know we have just a couple of questions here I see one did you have one two three let's just get these three questions in and wrap it up and we have a reception to follow right and so please if you'd introduce yourself both of you okay thank you hi I'm Keith I'm Keith Kozloff is that hi um one of the things that um maybe missing from the discussion so far there is a men's movement out there and um as part of that I want to put in a plug for an organization that I belong to it's called the mankind project which since 1985 has provided training for over 53,000 men and then follow on uh men support groups to break out of the man box essentially and to promote the values of authenticity and accountability and integrity and leadership so um just to say if anyone wants information about that I have some brochures so during the reception approach me and then a quick question the first video it's related um noted that the men uh the young men um got support from their mothers and that helped them break out of those stereotypical roles and I was just curious to me that it was only the mothers identified and not uh other adult men I just wondered what the panelists think about the role of adult men I guess that's been touched on a little bit so far great thank you hello everyone my name is Jovan Biggerstaff uh first panel yay Mano whatever we call it I love it um as a gender scholar there are a couple of things that I was hoping that you could speak about a bit more so the first thing are there some really kind of practical and tangible places of intervention right in the ivy towers we talk a lot about the abstract a lot and I'm really interested in where are some places where we can intervene to kind of not necessarily change masculinity but to expand the narrative on what masculinity can be um you mentioned in youth you mentioned at that point of fatherhood are there other spaces of good intervention and then the second question given the role that women often play in helping men articulate their emotionality um how do we think about the fact that a lot of the work that we do with gender tends to be sex or gender separate and is there potential to possibly use some of that emotionality vocabulary that little girls and then women are steeped in from a young age and that men often receive engagement with what their partners or with their parents their mothers to use some sex sex open places right to begin to do some of that intervening work great thank you so much for bringing that into the conversation and I know you're right here all right thank you yes thank you too my name is Kathy quayer I work with the pat american health organization and so of course I'm delighted I saw statistics from the world health organization and practically the statistics on suicide among men we had recently our first debate on gender masculinities and suicide and scenario for if we wish to promote and that allows me to to then comment on and ask really from the panel on the following I'm glad someone already underscored the issue of the diversity the age the ethnicity the geography class etc because we can't do any real analysis without that so I'm I'm glad that's already out of the way but the data presented from the study highlighted from three countries consistently in the findings a difference with Mexico except for from from what was presented the issue on bringing home the money so that I guess can stimulate a lot of discussion right there but what I found interesting additionally is the fact that you did not explore much or at least not in this very summarized presentation I'm sure the issue of what do men do with their leisure time time use in home at work etc which is a key component to understand the dynamics of the privileges of men which brings me to the last comment conclusion number two of this study talks about well really men still feel overall very secure in that box we can call it the jacket the box whatever but they're quite secure in in in the box still to somebody saying or making reference to the wider discussion so far on the status quo and so how difficult it is to change that is really pointing us to say okay what other things we need to do and I would venture to say we need to look at the man box with the humanity and inhumanity in the man box and maybe that will allow us to find different ways to approach the man box and getting out of the man box thank you so much thank you thank you for those thoughtful questions and I'm going to ask each of our panelists to respond to whatever question you want but also you wrap up comment and so yeah here I'm going to start and we're going to come this way how about that well just to just to wrap up I think that of course there's a there's a lot of plays where we can intervene I mean like I think I think that Gary can get into that but I know that that promoted this this piece of work that actually promotes fatherhood and in terms of a man to get involved into actually caregiving with the with the children so in many other places what we can also intervene is that the way that we can open to openly talk about like masculinity sexuality gender equality and many other important topics related to to make a man engage and involve in that kind of conversations to question once again their selves themselves what is it to be a real man and what is it to to have or not privilege and how to to actually make gender equality a reality in in all the context and once again it's so it's better it's it's also depends on different contexts and I can say in Mexico it's not the same to be a man in the rural area that's being many in indigenous area so once again if we need to think about like different contexts and realities that young men men in general are living great point yeah a couple of comments one the issue of you know we heard in the film at the beginning a mother and you know a strong mother as being a a role model for two quite articulate and thoughtful young men on this topic we see a lot in our research with adult men both using household survey data as well as listening to life stories how much a an involved father makes a difference or an involved man of any kind doing hands-on caregiving I think in fact we've seen this hold up in interviews in Latin America we've seen them hold up in the Middle Eastern data that we're just now analyzing that where men and women report that their their father or another man in the household was involved in traditionally feminine tasks of hands-on caregiving women showed more equitable views that is more empowered views about their roles in the world and their sons showed more equitable views about what it means to be men so we do see that very powerful role yes and and it also mattered if their mothers worked outside the home and if their mothers are educated so there is you know let's let's make sure we don't fall into any mothers or the exact answer fathers of the exact answer empowered mothers hands-on caregiving fathers seems to be a really key outcome for children to come out thinking we are both as human beings caregivers and providers we have equal space in the world to be outside the home as well as to do is the care inside the home and that without we can say that but we have to be careful that we don't therefore say a house has to be a heterosexual couple etc we know that we have to say that in terms of breaking the binary of who does caregiving and who does the providing and I think that we can say in a pretty universal way that that equation does seem to hold up when we can break that binary we see children grow up with Michael said this really eloquently looking out whether we are boys or girls or intersex looking out and saying this world is full of possibilities and I am not constrained because of whether I was born male or female that part I think we can affirm and maybe the colleague who was saying you know do we need spaces where guys talk about this alone girls talk about this alone we think it makes sense to have both you know we have to be careful that our solution doesn't create more of the problem we worry about even using words like the man box or real man because it we wanted you know we're trying to help it implode as a concept and so we do have to be careful we want to call it out but we also want to you know make sure that we are focused on breaking the binary so that's you know maybe the the piece that we'll take home it's an issue it's important but let's make sure that our solutions really are about you know opening up that full range of human expression full range of us being men that caregiving is human it's not male or female that being out in the world and being a leader is not a masculine thing it's a human thing women should be open to that every every bit as much so that's the that's the equation that we're trying to bust open and I think thank you for you know those of you who ask questions that tried to provoke us on that these are really key ones and I just as a final word you know acts took a risk stepping out on this and I think it's really it's exciting to see them do that we often critique the parts of the media who don't move in the right direction and this is it's an exciting moment to to you know to be with a company that does shape how men look at their lives and it's saying we're going to take a risk out here and get men to step out I just wanted to add that word and to us IP you know I know Kathleen you the space here is limited in terms of how many sessions there can be this is women's history month lots of things were not done on the the challenges that women and girls face and so thank you as well for offering a space to say masculinity is a part of that equation and to sitting on this mantle with us so it's not so many thanks thank you for mentioning also the fact that this was taken a risk as a brand you know it always sounds very simple at the end when you look at it and everything went well but if you look at even the barriers that you have to turn down inside an organization to try and do something change something which has been working so well for such a long time so why would you change it it's very similar to if you look at society what that people do not recognize that there is an issue that there is an issue with with the man box and everything is going well but like why would we go ahead and and change anything I think that's the attitude that we need to try and break as individuals and and as professionals so I think as as a father or as an individual where I see there's a lot of you know intervention to be done is passion points of young people take sports for example you know I think getting intervention into where boys are together and they are you know crafted to be those young people those young men and I think those are intervention points you know to the question earlier where we really need to need to be whether it's music whether it is whether whether it is sports or other passion points that young men have just lastly I think there is a massive role for the private sector and often there is a bit of hesitance you know there's a hesitance for whether it's from from NGOs I've worked with UNICEF in the past I've worked with them very closely on issue on sanitation around the world and the first year was horrible it was so difficult because and I understand you know you look at that there's the evil private sector and all they want is basically our name and you know they just want to sell more products and it took a long time to work together for to get mutual understanding that actually we have exactly the same objectives and that we can provide a voice to somebody like UNICEF that that them alone they cannot and we can give a voice to a issue like this which is being on terms with young men in their language in the places where they go and actually help them understand that there's an alternative to being in the in the box and so therefore it's my plea to everybody out here to reach out to private sector partners you know to to try and work together and and help on this issue great thank you so much and we're as I said happy to have your involvement and would like more private sector involvement on these issues around violence around conflict and around peace Michael yeah it's hard to be succinct at this point I'm thinking about the question about strategies and I would just have this to say I think that what's remarkable about traditional models of boyhood is how ubiquitous they are across all the differences of class race country things like that how how how generally it's the case Gary's numbers the promos numbers about 90 out of 100 in some countries reported similar findings with respect to the man box so it's ubiquitous and persistent it has you know traditional masculinity has produced bad outcomes for a very long time in education violence mental health and health and yet it persists I think the the the answer to that is that that boyhood wasn't devised wasn't designed with boys in mind there's a core contradiction about boyhood it's not for boys it's for a broader purpose and the contradiction is that boys never fit that box very well there's an inherent revolutionary spirit to be tapped if we can in fact open that up and tap it and and almost any of us can tell stories about simply talking to a boy and inviting him to be himself lifting the mask off his face and I think if we can find ways to do that broadly as a culture and society I think we may tap into something that can fundamentally change a lot of outcomes including violence I think we have to take Rick's challenge of being more creative in that exact approach I think that's that's right I think you began and now you're going to end I think I think being more creative is a really key point and on that idea of like interventions and how do you kind of get to the core of it I think there are a lot of great people and groups out there doing the work I can say on our end at the representation project that we just started a new project which is really awesome where we go and do trainings with athletes male and female at colleges and universities high schools which is really awesome but in my experience at doing that to to also the point of like having single sex or single gendered room versus multi multi gendered gendered rooms what you know you have to have both of those Gary's right you have to have both of those because when I've when we've done the the athletes training with men and women's teams all in the same room the male athletes immediately start posturing and they're like oh nothing nothing's a problem everything is great everything is good but the women will actually try to emote and get get their feelings out there and actually say the things that they want to say in a room with guys about how they feel about sexism and cat calling and all these other things but then subsequently in my experiences of doing this work when we isolate the men and the boys that's when we can have like a real conversation and they're they're able to open up more so I think we all need to understand and realize that like for men in in this world calling them out in a room full of women or in a room full of other men will never get you the response you want you just can't call me you just did this or you just did that where you were never going to get the change we actually want to see and having but I found that when we have these conversations one-on-one or in small groups of like-minded people or people that are supportive it is always better so I you know I really want to push that and I also want to say ask the question um do not be afraid to ask a man how you're feeling today how are you doing at go deeper than oh fine great moving on I've asked that question box checked because I you know I think the point that Gary and you hear and others have talked about around depression and mental health is like really important those are things that I struggle with and there are many days even though I do this work I I have a graduate degree in this work to to a state there are many days where I sit and say like nobody wants to hear a grown man cry nobody wants to hear a grown man whine so I won't talk to my friends about something I won't call my family about something um and so we just need to realize that um that we should just ask the question and don't be afraid to know that you may say something wrong you may use the wrong gender pronouns you may use the wrong whatever word um uh but just be honest and sincere and ask the question and have a earnest conversation with someone well and I think that's what we've had today an earnest conversation about the man box a box that uh I think we all recognize in our different ways and as a as a woman I want to have the last word and say that I think this kind of research helps all of us and we're absolutely convinced in the work we do on dealing with violent conflict that as countries as societies come out of violence it takes a whole of society to rewrite the rules we need men and women together engaged in a gender relational approach and we get there by having men understand the impact of violence and conflict on their lives it takes us a step further toward understanding how many opportunities and how many roles we really all can play in our societies so I want to thank this amazing panel I hope you'll join me and thank you for how far you've come across the sea across many states and worlds and thank you all for a very engaged conversation today please join us outside these doors right here for a lovely reception thank you acts for sponsoring it and we are grateful again for all of you being with us thank you