Can the women-in-STEM playbook bring more men to “HEAL” fields?
Campaigns encouraging women to enter STEM fields are paying off, though there’s still a ways to go. Meanwhile, fields like teaching, psychology, and social work are becoming what the author and scholar Richard V. Reeves describes as “progressively female.” Now Reeves and colleagues at the newly formed American Institute for Boys and Men are pressing for a comparable effort to nudge more men into such fields.
“Men can HEAL,” is how Reeves puts it, deploying his preferred acronym for the health, education, administration, and literacy sectors. And, he says, higher ed needs to play a key role.
The techniques that have propelled girls and women into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — such as scholarships, early outreach, and mentorship — are directly applicable for the HEAL fields, he told me this month. “Let’s just take that playbook.”
Reeves is the founder and president of the institute, which he created in the wake of his 2022 book, Of Boys and Men. The book describes how males are falling behind in education and the workplace. (For a quick preview, check out Reeves’s interview with my colleague Karin Fischer during our most recent Chronicle Festival.)
Some of the stats that animate his work really are startling — and, in some cases, quite disturbing: We know that women have been outpacing men in bachelor’s-degree attainment since the early 1980s and in earning their master’s since the early 1990s, and that many of the blue-collar jobs once held by men have been gradually disappearing. But did you know that suicide rates among men are four times higher than among women? I certainly didn’t. (Tragic side note: Reeves told me that when he’s speaking on these issues at campuses, more often than not, a college leader will later tell him privately about a recent student suicide.)
Nor did I realize just how feminized certain professions — and the college majors that typically lead to them — have become. As recent institute research on teaching and on social work and psychology shows:
- Men account for just 23 percent of elementary- and secondary-school teachers in the United States, down from 30 percent in 1988. More than a quarter of all students are boys of color, but only 6 percent of teachers are men of color.
- After reaching a peak in 1988, the number of active male psychologists and social workers stopped growing. Only 10 percent of master’s-degree recipients specializing in developmental and child psychology in 2021 were men. In counseling psychology, the largest subfield for those with a master’s, only 18 percent were men.
- Starting around the same time, the share of advanced degrees awarded to men in social work dropped from an already-low 17 percent to 12 percent (from 1991 to 2021).
This matters because there’s evidence that children do better in school when they see teachers who look like them. And Reeves said men’s reluctance to seek out mental-health care may be related to how feminized those professions have become.
Through the institute, and a newer effort involving colleges called the Higher Education Male Achievement Network, Reeves is hoping to bring wider attention to these disparities, although initially, he told me, the network’s main focus will be on increasing male enrollment, persistence, and completion generally. The enrollment crisis is galvanizing attention, he noted. “We have one million missing men in higher ed right now.”
There is also an interesting wrinkle to these efforts. Drawing attention to situations in which men are faring poorer than women, Reeves said, can sometimes trigger some reactionary responses and provoke social-media outrage claiming that the interests of men “have been overrun by woke feminists.” That means walking a bit of a tightrope as the institute works to help build up a field to respond to the problem. “Keep it boring,” Reeves said, is one of the institute’s internal mottoes.
The United States isn’t alone in seeing men faring more poorly than women. Reeves said it’s a phenomenon he’s observed in many other industrialized countries. And elsewhere, he said, the issue is beginning to garner more of the national attention (a national commission on boys and men in Denmark, a new focus by Britain’s Labour Party) that he’d like to see in the United States. Here, he said, “there is still a lack of awareness.”
Actually, I think higher ed has already begun paying some attention to the issues of male educational attainment, considering the number of initiatives I found when searching the internet on this topic just this week. (Try Googling “male achievement in higher ed” and you’ll see what I mean.)
But I hope the sector also starts paying more attention to the shortages of men in those HEAL fields Reeves has highlighted, although the relative lower pay in some of these areas doesn’t help. (Salaries in nursing are rising as more men join that field. “Coincidence? I doubt it,” said Reeves.)
To find more men for social work, psychology, teaching, and office jobs that can often involve managerial opportunities, Reeves suggests that colleges look toward older students and career-changers, and also beef up recruiting at high schools. Western Kentucky University’s Young Male Leadership Academy, which uses outreach and scholarships to encourage high-school boys to consider careers in teaching, is just one example. (The dean of its College of Education and Behavioral Sciences, Corinne Murphy, told me she’d love to expand that to psychology if it could find the funding.)
Scholarships go a long way, Reeves believes. And just as important, he said, is how the outreach is handled. “Send guys out to do it,” said Reeves of the recruiting. “Kids believe their eyes, not their ears.”
What low-income students need
To help low-income students finish their degrees on time, colleges should work to offer generous financial aid, provide comprehensive wraparound services, and communicate thoughtfully about difficult topics, experts said during a recent Chronicle virtual forum.
Here are two takeaways from “Keeping Low-Income Learners on Track,” which was moderated by Katherine Mangan, a Chronicle senior writer, and underwritten by the Ascendium Education Group as part of our series on student success.
Financial aid is only a start:
“Research shows us that providing financial support to students helps get them in the door,” said Alyssa Ratledge, a research associate focused on postsecondary education at the nonprofit MDRC. But often it’s not enough to keep them enrolled, she said, “particularly getting to an on-time graduation.” Students also need resources like advising, mentoring, tutoring, as well as time-management and study skills, Ratledge said, plus social support and “a sense of camaraderie on campus.”
Comprehensive or multifaceted support programs are the interventions with the biggest impact, Ratledge noted, because they can address multiple needs students have throughout their time in college. These efforts are often expensive, she acknowledged, but ultimately they can pay off for colleges and state governments: “You’re getting so many more students to graduate that your cost per graduate goes down.”
Try new messages — and messengers — when discussing academic probation:
Take care not to imply that negative outcomes are foregone conclusions, Ratledge urged, and avoid language that could be perceived as threatening. That might mean revising standard notifications, said Robert Ream, a professor of education and an associate dean for student success at the University of California at Riverside: “Our advisers see the power of the words we use with our students, and they’ve said we need to think differently.” Colleges should also consider, Ratledge added, that some students who are struggling academically might respond better to hearing from a trusted professor on this topic, as opposed to an academic adviser they may not know as well. —Graham Vyse
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