Men are struggling. Here’s how your philanthropy can help.

Shortly after departing the Gates Foundation in June, Melinda French Gates surprised 12 people with a $20 million grant each. Most of them were doing work focused on helping women and girls’ mental and physical health globally — a cause she has backed for years.

But one grant went to Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, a new nonpartisan think tank distinctly not centered on girls or women. “I doubt anyone was more surprised than me,” Reeves told me.

As never-ending headlines will remind you, women globally face sexual harassment and assault, the rollback of reproductive rights and bodily autonomy, gender-based violence, and in low-income countries, limited access to education. It can be easy to forget that in many ways, women are doing much better now than they once were. As recently as 1970, girls trailed behind boys in academic performance. But at least in the US, today’s women have more than caught up: Many more women earn bachelor’s degrees than men, and young girls outperform boys in K–12 schools.

As a progressive person, it can feel uncool — problematic, even — to wonder whether men are doing all right. Okay, so maybe men have fallen behind for a cosmic millisecond, after millennia of reaping the patriarchy’s rewards. Should I break out the world’s smallest violin?

“I think some visceral skepticism about this is entirely appropriate,” Reeves said. “I think that to try and wave that away is just naive.”

But the world does appear to be in the midst of a masculinity crisis: Today’s men and boys are lost, lonely, and dying by suicide at alarming rates. The increasingly toxic, polarized political landscape largely hinges on young men desperately seeking affirmation from whoever will give it to them. Moderates and the left have struggled to construct a more palatable modern masculinity, and it’s driving many young men toward the far-right “manosphere” — where anachronistic attitudes about women, society, and gender roles are resurging. 

Men need better support, but that does not need to come at the expense of helping women. People of all genders are enmeshed in the same communities — if men can help each other find their place amid changes in the culture and the labor market, that security and self-confidence will have ripple effects across their social networks. Shifting some focus — and charitable dollars — toward issues specifically affecting men’s health, education, and employment will benefit everyone. 

The making of a masculinity crisis

The World Economic Forum created the Global Gender Gap Index, a benchmark tracking gender equality in 2006; since then, they have detected only a 0.1 percentage point improvement in gender equality. Women still get paid less than men and will likely shoulder the worst financial effects of the climate crisis.

But it is also true that gender gaps in education and health have nearly closed and women have gained an earth-shattering amount of economic freedom in less than a century. Before 1974 — when some Gen X-ers were already well into elementary school — US banks could stop women from opening an account without their husband’s signature. Now, roughly two-thirds of women worldwide have bank accounts, about the same as men.

People can feel the difference. In a recent Pew survey of over 6,200 American adults, most agreed that women are doing better than they were 20 years ago in terms of being promoted to leadership positions at work, getting well-paying jobs, and being admitted into a college or university. Most people also said that evolving gender roles — more women working outside the home and more men taking charge of chores and child care — have helped women lead more satisfying lives.

“One of the huge contributions of the women’s movement has been to break away from a narrow view about what femininity is,” Reeves said, “without destroying the very idea of femininity.” 

Just look at Barbie. Since debuting as a model in 1959, she has had over 200 careers in six decades, spanning nearly every industry imaginable. Barbie’s career journey reflects the expansiveness of girlhood: Increasingly, young girls are taught to imagine themselves as whatever they want, whether that’s a ballerina, a business leader, or a microbiologist.

But Barbie’s boyfriend, Ken, has held only about 40 jobs since his debut in 1961. Of those, roughly half involved sports or serving in the military. As Greta Gerwig’s 2023 blockbuster movie put it: “She’s everything. He’s just Ken.”

In the real world, as women gain ground in school and at work, many men feel they are falling behind — and they don’t have many good options to find support. Male vulnerability is widely stigmatized, leading men to stay silent when they’re struggling. 

The left seems to fear that focusing on men will undermine women’s progress. The right, meanwhile, responded with reactionary gender politics, accusing the left of trying to destroy traditional masculinity entirely.

Well-established institutions have contributed to that gendered polarization. A few years ago, new research led the American Psychological Association (APA) to conclude that “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression — is, on the whole, harmful,” aligning with the public discourse around gender during the Me Too movement and its critique of “toxic masculinity.” 

But some advocates for modern masculinity fear the APA’s insinuation that masculinity itself is the problem was an overreaction that generated a worrying backlash. As established models of masculinity were dismantled, no coherent alternatives have emerged to take their place, leaving a void open for the manosphere to fill. “It’s a bit like the kaleidoscope’s been shaken but the pieces haven’t settled yet,” Reeves said.

Feminist allies like Justin Baldoni made undefining masculinity a personal brand, exploring what it means to be a modern man through panels, podcasts, and memoirs. But “you’re not going to pull in the masses with the Justin Baldonis of the world,” said Zac Seidler, global director of men’s health research at Movember, a global men’s health charity. 

Men are going through an identity crisis, where seeking motivation, purpose, and meaning have become rooted in politics, acting as a pipeline to radicalization rather than something deeper like community. Reeves said the tricky part of getting men unstuck is asking, “How do we not get trapped by something, while still recognizing that it is a thing?”

In 2014, then-President Barack Obama attempted to walk this line with the My Brother’s Keeper program, which collected over $300 million in the mid-2010s to expand education and job opportunities for at-risk young men of color. At the time, many people pushed back against their gendered mission. In a 2014 essay for the New York Times, law professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw — who first coined the term “intersectionality” — wrote that the initiative “amounts to an abandonment of women of color” and that progressive support for the initiative signaled “the consequent erasure of females of color is regarded as neither politically nor morally significant.” Over 1,000 women of color agreed, signing a letter arguing that women and girls should be included in the program.

Their vigilance is understandable: The vast majority of philanthropy is gender-neutral, with nearly a third of charitable donations going to religious organizations alone. Less than 2 percent of philanthropic giving in the United States directly benefits women and girls. While $10.2 billion out of $516.65 billion looks like a shockingly small slice of Americans’ donations, some estimates suggest that initiatives focused on men and boys receive an even smaller slice of our charitable dollars.

Because most men’s health initiatives are relatively small and underfunded, “a little bit of philanthropy could really go quite a long way,” Reeves said. Grants like the one he received from Gates send a strong signal to philanthropists that advancing gender equity isn’t a zero-sum game: Addressing issues affecting men and boys doesn’t have to take anything away from women and girls. 

The data has spoken: Men are struggling

This identity crisis appears to be manifesting, in part, as a mental health crisis. Men are four times more likely than women to die by suicide, and suicide rates have risen by 30 percent among young men since 2010. If men’s suicide rates were the same as women’s for the past 25 years, 546,000 men might still be alive today — that’s greater than the population of Atlanta.

That violence also turns outward: Men commit 90 percent of homicides in the US, and make up over three-quarters of homicide victims. Of 172 mass shootings that happened between 1966 and March 2021, 168 assailants — nearly 98 percent of them — were men.

Over the past 20-odd years, public health campaigns have focused on getting men into therapy. They’re working, kind of: While women in the US are still more likely to seek mental health care than men, the fraction of men who received some form of counseling roughly doubled between 2002 and 2023.

The real problem, Seidler wrote, is that “the focus on getting men through the therapy door has led to a neglect of what happens once they get there.” The APA itself frames masculinity as harmful and places the burden of becoming an optimal therapy participant on men in distress. In a survey of over 2,000 Australian men, almost half said they dropped out of therapy without telling their therapist. When asked, over half of them said they didn’t drop out because of stigma or cost; they left because they didn’t feel connected with their therapist.

Rather than condemning manhood outright, Seidler advocates for therapists to work with, rather than against, stereotypically masculine traits like stoicism, protectiveness, and problem-solving.

“There are certain facets of traditional masculinity that have served men very well, and that do not need to harm women or other groups,” Seidler said. “How can we talk about them in a positive light, and try to make them healthy rather than harmful?”

The big problem: Most therapists don’t know how to connect with men. Part of it is simply that only about a quarter of therapists are men (and Black men make up a small slice of the psychology workforce in the US). Seidler’s research has also found that regardless of gender, many therapists dismiss men as “not psychologically minded,” and view some young men as unteachable.

Seidler frames suicidality in men as a problem of relationships — not just an internal mental illness, but a struggle to relate with others. Whether it is hardwired or not, many men resonate with a social model that positions them as protectors and providers. When those roles are taken away — through a sudden layoff, for instance, or a devastating breakup — men can lose their sense of purpose. 

Alcohol overdoses and suicide, for instance, killed about three times more working-class men than non-working-class men — and all men are more vulnerable to deaths of despair than working-class women. Reeves predicts that this is, at least in part, because working-class men are more vulnerable to work-related injuries and health challenges that ultimately put them out of work. These men are also less likely to be married or have close friends.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Right-wing influencers already exploit protector-provider tropes to give young men a sense of identity, but there’s room for the political mainstream to work with these themes, too — without maligning women in the process.

How can we help?

Okay, maybe men do need help. So what do we do?

“When it comes to gender,” Reeves said, “one of the things that I hear a lot is that someone puts a program in place, and the people who show up skew female.”

If boys and men don’t show up, Reeves urges organizers to ask themselves what can be done to help them show up. For example, he points to a strategy that military leaders use to invite challenging conversations. They call it “intrusive leadership,” but really, it’s just intentionally asking, “Are you okay?” It sounds simple, but when an empathetic leader invites someone who looks up to them to be vulnerable, it can go a long way.

When I asked experts how charitable donations can most effectively help address men’s issues, they all agreed that funding more research is a top priority. “At the moment, everything is guesswork,” Seidler said. To find out what young men need, elder men need to ask them. “Every young boy is on Twitch,” Seidler said. His approach at Movember: “Go to where the men are.”

For example, Movember recently partnered with BLAST, an esports tournament organizer, to discuss men’s mental health at its world final event. The nonprofit also runs an annual initiative encouraging hairdressers to invite their clients to chat about their lives at the barbershop, where they’re more likely to open up, complete with an online tool to practice starting the conversation.

Reeves also advocates for funding initiatives that train men in HEAL professions — jobs in the fields of health, education, administration, and literacy — to mirror successful campaigns to recruit more women into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Men in Mind, an Australian program led by Seidler, is experimenting with a training program that aims to equip therapists of all genders to better navigate sessions with male clients. Early results are promising, but no equivalent exists in the US.

Reeves said piloting programs like this in the US could be a high-impact area for targeted male-focused philanthropy — not just in psychology, but in education, nursing, and other traditionally female-dominated professions. Existing organizations are mostly small and underdeveloped: the Society of Women Engineers, for instance, had a revenue of $17.6 million in 2023. Real Men Teach, which supports future male educators of color, raised about $26,000. To a nonprofit of that scale, Reeves said, “a little bit of philanthropy could really go quite a long way.”

Funding classroom studies that focus on young boys themselves could help tackle the other side of the issue. For example, studies show that boys tend to benefit from more hands-on learning over a “sit and get” approach. Reeves thinks that “high-dose tutoring,” or close instruction multiple times a week in addition to standard classroom learning, is one option. Investing more heavily in apprenticeships and vocational training, which tend to skew male, is another — young men seem to learn better when goals are clear and results are immediate.

The most important thing to remember: Acknowledging that men and boys are struggling does not take away from the fact that women and girls have struggled for generations. Charitable giving doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game. The cause of gender equality will only be enhanced by empowering men to lift up their own communities.

“We have to lift all boats,” Seidler said. “Without that mentality, we will suffer. Women and girls will suffer as well.”

Reeves agreed: “It’s very, very hard to imagine a world of flourishing women in a world of floundering men.”