Men’s lack of deep, close friendships has been in the spotlight lately. A recent Pew Research Center study found that 54% of women say they turn to a friend for emotional support, but only 38% of men say they do. Essayist Sam Graham-Felsen and American Institute for Boys and Men CEO Richard Reeves join John Yang to discuss why some men seem to struggle with maintaining social connections.
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A 16% difference is a huge gap!
Let’s put that in context for a second here; let’s say you are a man with 100 friends, only 38 feel comfortable reaching out to you when they need help. The other 62 don’t feel comfortable reaching out for help, meaning they feel as if they have to deal with it alone.
Now let’s consider if you were a woman in the same setting. 54 feel comfortable reaching out and 46 don’t feel comfortable.
In this case that’s 16 more lives that are negatively impacted in men.
Now when we factor in the actual population numbers for each group it gets significantly worse. And since this study is done on Americans let’s apply that to the entire population of the country using data from Neilsberg Research. With there being roughly 164,545,087 men and 167,842,453 women.
For the men that means about 62,527,133 men feel comfortable asking for help, looks like a lot until we look at the remainder. 102,017,954, roughly, don’t feel comfortable reaching out. That’s nearly 2/3s of men aren’t getting help when they need to.
For women about 90,634,925 are seeking help when they need it. That’s a gap of 28 million people from where the men are! While 77,207,528 are not getting help, 24,810,426 less women are not getting help.
That’s what a 16% gap actually means and it’s insanely huge.
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Slightly over a one half vs slightly over one third is pretty significant.
That’s giving some all lives matter energy. We can talk about why everyone is so closed off in general, but this thread clearly focuses on a particular men’s issue under that umbrella issue. So no, we should talk about the topic, not hijack it for “a larger issue”.
I’m a thread about the wage gap between men and women (10-15%), you don’t say “We should be talking about why the economy is struggling instead”
In a thread about the incarceration gap between blacks and whites, you don’t say “We should be talking about why crime is up overall instead”
You make a great point about society needing to change, and a particular men’s issue doesn’t mean only men need to change, it actually does speak to how broader society considers what it is to be a man. How men decide that for themselves, are socialized by their environment into it, and how they’re treated by other genders. Just as women’s issues are human issues, men’s issues are human issues too.
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It’s not a strawman. Just because the proportions aren’t as extreme as you expected doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Just because we’re talking about the gap here doesn’t dismiss the overall problem of isolation. There are many many threads talking about the problem of social isolation overall. Go engage in those threads that are addressing the problem you’re newly woke to and are holding so urgently now instead of bickering in here about who should be talking about what where.
That’s a 30% decrease.
Indeed.