Transcript of the Price of Masculinity Norms with Guests Dr. Ronald Levant and Andy Cooper

Image of various men

Deborah: Welcome to Parity, a podcast for everyone ready for a workplace of true gender parity with equal numbers of men and women at all levels of organizations including the coveted top positions. Women have had the right to vote for 100 years, but most experts believe that we will not achieve workplace parity for another 135 years. 135 years is a very long time friends to wait for equality. The goal of this podcast is to accelerate this change by being a coach, mentor, and trusted friend for all of you who are ready now.

I'm Deborah Pollack-Milgate and waiting for 135 years until we achieve workplace parity is not okay with me and that is why I said yes to my good friend Cathy Nestrick when she asked me to join her in starting this podcast.

So, friends, if you've listened to the Parity Podcast before, you may be confused about now because I have just said these words for the very first time. But don't worry, Cathy is not only in the driver's seat on the tech side, but she’ll be back for the next episode. She stepped away today, get ready for it, to make way for men's voices. Yes, you heard me correctly today, I am joined by a special guest co-host who happens to be a man and before I introduce my guest co-host and our very special guest, let me tell you what we are up to today because I think you will be as curious as I am to have this conversation. So, for those of you who have listened to us for a while now, you know that Cathy and I believe that women will not be able to achieve workplace parity on our own. We have learned we have leaned in as far as we can, and men have to play a key role as our allies in this process. You also know that we work hard to identify gender stereotypes regarding women, which we sometimes don't even see because we are so used to living and breathing these stereotypes and to bring about parity in the workplace.

We need men because it is hard work for all of us to shift the workplace and we know there are plenty of gender stereotypes to go around in the same way that we as women may have been socialized to be meek or passive friendly and agreeable men have their own very real stereotypes and expectations to contend with. They've got to live up to the ideal of masculinity and so now I need to stop, I'm going to stop because today's conversation on masculinity absolutely calls for me to bring in the very first men to appear on the Parity Podcast. Today listeners, I am joined by my co-host Mr. Andy Cooper. Andy is Associate General Counsel at Meta, a former Vice President at UPS. You might have heard of them too and a recognized thought leader and commentator. In one of Andy's recent interviews with American Lawyer media, he emphasized that inspirational leaders are vulnerable and this sort of stood out to me. That is one of the many interesting points to take up today in the context of our discussion on masculinity. I am thrilled to have Andy here because I know him to be an always engaged, very deep thinker who will not hesitate to post the questions that demand to be asked. So welcome Andy and thank you so much for joining me today as a co-host.

Andy: Well, thank you Deborah, I'm grateful to you and Cathy for letting me join you for this special episode of the Parity Podcast. Honestly, I only have two credentials for joining you today is being your friend Deborah since we met years ago. You've consistently and probably unintentionally validated that you're one of the sharpest driven and technically competent lawyers that I've had the pleasure of knowing. Um and second, I'm a girl dad. I am fascinated with the topic of socialization and want to learn as much as I can about how to raise a successful girl in modern times. She's going to have to deal with a lot of men in her life in professional settings and traditional masculinity ideology, which we'll talk about today is important to understand what she can do to overcome it and what I can do in a corporate environment to address it as well. So, thank you again for letting me join you today.

Deborah: Oh, Andy, thank you so much for your very very kind comments. Um and right back at you. I am so happy that you are here today and I'm so glad that we are joined by someone who has devoted his career to thinking about masculinity. So, with that, would you like to introduce our guest?

Andy: I’d be happy to. Today, we are joined by Dr. Ronald Levant. Dr. Levant is an author of 19 books and author, coauthor, editor and coeditor of over 250 articles. His most recent book is called The Tough Standard, I've read it, it's an amazing book which examines the connection between masculinity and violence. Dr Levin is a graduate of UC Berkeley and has his doctorate from Harvard in clinical psychology and public practice. He's been engaged academically at a number of universities over his long career and is currently a professor emeritus at the University of Akron. He has been one of the leading pioneers of the field of the psychology of men and masculinity, and played a leading role in developing this new field in the late 19 eighties and 19 nineties. He has also been active in the A. P. A. The American Psychological Association and served as its 2005 president. Ron, welcome.

Ron: Thank you Andy, I'm glad to be here with you and with Deborah and Cathy.

Deborah: I'm just stunned. We got you Ron. So, I'm so excited that you agreed to talk to the Parity Podcast. We are absolutely thrilled to have someone of your caliber on this show to help us dig into this topic. So today listeners, we will be talking to Ron about what masculinity even means, what is the word masculinity? We'll talk about how children are socialized early on to behave and gender conforming socially constructed ways, and we'll also discuss how those socially constructed masculinity traits may play out in the workplace, which, as our listeners know, is really the focus of this Parity Podcast. We'll also explore men's wellbeing and the ways in which our societies focus on masculinity in its traditional construct can harm both women and men. So, this is a tall order. Um and all started off with a question to you Ron. And that is um just as an introduction to you, what led you into this important area of study when, you know, I think is Andy alluded to, it didn't exist well in clinical psychology, we often say all research is research meaning. I guess that was a slow one, meaning that we know what that means.

Ron: Yeah, that's basically uh most of us who do research kind of draw from our personal lives. Those are the things. I mean, you know, I've been involved in this field for over 50 years and to sustain that kind of involvement, it has to be, you know, come from some, some place deep inside of a person. So, in my case I first got into this in the seventies when I was both in grad school and then transitioning to my first academic job at Boston University. And during that time, I was a divorced semi custodial father of a pre teenage daughter, semi custodial because I would have her live with me during the summers when her mother liked to travel and then I would visit her on the weekends. They lived in New York, and I lived in Boston and I really wasn't very good at being a father. I was, you know, just like being a traditional man, I never acknowledged that as a problem, I never talked about it. I just, you know, sucked it up and kept going until 1979. And when I saw the movie Kramer versus Kramer with Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Some of you may have seen this movie as an oldie, but they play and this movie was, you know, produced at the height of the divorce revolution in our country and they portray a couple splitting up. Uh you know, typical of the times

Mrs. Kramer was going to California to quote unquote, find herself, Mr. Kramer was left with their eight- or nine-year-old son and you know, he, he floundered and he made a big mess of things if you recall and from that movie, I had what I call a slow moving epiphany. I mean it didn't get me right away, but over weeks reflecting on that, I began to realize that, you know, it maybe it wasn't, it wasn't that Ron levant was such a terrible father, but that men of my generation, um you know, we're really not prepared for hands on role with our children. And so, I began looking into, okay, gender roles seem to be changing. I mean, I can see dads, you know, increasingly carrying infants and snuggly packs or pushing strollers, but are men getting any preparation for this job we call parenting, which in my view is probably life's most difficult job. The most demanding job that any human can have is to be a parent. And so being an academic, I reviewed the literature and uh I found like five reviews of literature, and I read those, and I was amazed to find that not one of these reviews of literature indicated whether any of the parenting groups that they uh reviewed contained fathers. So, it was as if parent education was synonymous with mother education. So, at the time one of my grad students was my running, but we would, we were training for the marathon, the Boston marathon. So we had a lot of time to chat on our long runs and we cooked up a parent education course for dads, which the grad student, his name is Greg Doyle, developed and evaluated as his doctoral dissertation and as a result of that, um, we had a program that we could kind of offer debts that essentially help them learn how to be a hands on dad. That's how I kind of got into this field.

Andy: You know, Ron, I remember when I had my first daughter and I was going to take some time off from work, some paternity leave and uh, the men in my office were, I would say surprised but probably more shocked at the idea that I would take some time, some time off. Those traditional views of who is responsible for taking care of a child have found their, their way into the workforce into corporate America where the expectation is that if you're a man, it's not manly to take time off to take care of your children. And I think it's very interesting that back in the 70s when you were working on this, uh, that we're still struggling with some of those very issues today. Uh, and I don't think those those issues will, will go away. And another, another thing that, you know, I think you point out in your book, and I think it's a powerful point is that men feel a level of, of shame in some ways when they are required to do things that are traditionally seen as feminine. Uh and we see it the negative effects of this, this this the feelings of shame uh amplified in the corporate environment um with with men who are enslaved by traditional masculinity ideology uh and find themselves in leadership roles. It impacts everyone around them, especially women. And I can’t tell you how many times I've observed a female colleague moderating herself or saying something differently in order to ensure that a male superior or a male peer, does not have to confront the shame of an oversight or not.

Thinking about something in the way that that she has thought about it. So, I'm really excited about going into a little deeper into some of the things that you've alluded to. So, you've defined masculinity as in your book as a set of thoughts, feelings, beliefs and behaviors that are generally considered to be appropriate for men and boys. A social construct distinct from biological sex. You've also said that alongside those behaviors that are generally considered to be appropriate for men equally important, are those that are not appropriate for men. What are some examples of these feelings and behaviors that are appropriate and inappropriate, especially as it relates to those that persist into adulthood?

Ron: Okay, well, thanks for that question. Andy let me just kind of back up to a 30,000 ft view and try to explain for our readers, what we're talking about. You use the term traditional masculinity ideology, which, you know, many viewers kind of would draw a blank on. So, you know, let's break it down what we're really talking about our beliefs. You know, we you know, we and gender are such a powerful dimension of society. So, we all have beliefs about how people should behave. So, I think that's a better way to describe it than ideologies because most people don't understand that other than those academics and these beliefs are taught to Children from a very early age. Um, young boys, um, as early as elementary school and sometimes even preschool are made to feel that conforming to masculine norms is obligatory. Most boys know that the worst thing that can be called or accused of is talking walking, throwing or acting like a girl. That's just, you know, the absolute line that boys can't cross. And boys will punish other boys who cross these lines. Um, we'll talk more about that leader. And so, boys grow up believing that being masculine is obligatory and uh, and they have no choice about it despite what their personalities might be. Now, what are these beliefs about how boys and men should think, feel and behave as you mentioned. They include things that boys are told not to do and things that boys are told to do, and these are kind of the dominant norms in the US today, and I should say as a footnote being that these are social norms, they change. um they change in different cultures and different historical eras, and I'll give an example of that in a minute. But let's talk about what the norms are today. Um first of all, there should be no surprise to you avoid anything that looks feminine because you don't want to walk, talk act or throw like a girl right then disdain other men who could be said to be feminine. By which I mean, gay and bisexual men um restrict the expression of feminine emotions, by which, I mean, you know, emotions that show vulnerability, like fear or sadness or loneliness or anything like that as well as emotions that express an attachment to another person. Because the most honorable way to be masculine is to never need anything from anyone and that's a self-reliant norm. Um so they should also be dominant and tough and very, I mean, obviously this is not true for young boys, but starts a teenage boy, they should be very interested in physical sex. So, those are the norms. Now, getting back to how these change one norm today, because I think people need to understand this. A lot of people think when I'm critiquing masculinity, I'm critiquing men and I'm making a distinction that you can be a man without masculinity, that masculinity is highly variable. So, one norm today is men should restrict being affectionate with other men verbally physically or any anyway, but in Abraham Lincoln's day. The exact opposite was the norm. Men were expected to kiss each other to write flowery poetry to each other and when they visited to sleep in each other's in the same bed. So obviously these norms are not built into the white chromosome because evolution doesn't happen that fast.

Andy: So, these are social norms. You know, one of the things I find so interesting about your observation run into two things. One, the interest in physical sex, for example, I think we have seen how the negative aspects of that traditional norms have played out in corporate America as they've run headlong into women's liberation and the “Me Too” movement with a woman saying I have been subjected to things in the workplace that have been unacceptable by men who subscribed to this traditional masculinity norm.

But I've also seen in a more nuanced way how that masculinity ideal can influence things like corporate strategy. Over the last decade, I've worked for some of the largest companies in the world, and I've seen what you described here as masculinity blanket everything from corporate culture to corporate strategy. For example, I once worked for a C level executive who positioned our corporate mantra as Yes. And now the dominance and strength he sought to project was to “give them hell” that you talked about in your book. It's no matter what, we're going to dominate the field. He was replaced subsequently by another C level executive, a female who could not have been the polar opposite, more the polar opposite. She said, okay, it's okay to sometimes say no. We need to flex our pricing power under the circumstances. And her change in strategy actually sent the corporate stock to record highs. So, there are very real consequences to the pervasiveness of some of these ideologies as you've defined them.

Deborah: Yeah, something else that struck me, Ron as you were speaking really is the focus on the self-reliance because in the corporate context, that's another place where I think the studies have really shown over time that collaboration is important. Getting buy in from your team members is important. And if we're in this place where it's self-reliance at all costs, then that really leads to an environment where I am the decision maker, and I don't need anyone else. And I am going to also just make the decisions without taking other thoughts into consideration. So, and again, the lessons we're learning is that's not a recipe for success.

The one thing I wanted to add to this conversation as a woman trying to have this conversation in a slightly difficult place coming from a slightly difficult position as a woman. Is that what I think a woman sometimes perceives is the assertion of privilege, right? And so, privilege obviously comes in here. And something that I thought was very nice or interesting that you said in your book was you said specifically there is privilege, but privilege comes at a steep price. That helps me have empathy for what that assertion of privilege looks like and what might be going on behind the scenes.

So, Ron to ask you another question here that I think really gets back to the foundation you were talking about. You've said that the central problem is that most boys and men are made to feel that they must act in ways consistent with their gender. Andy and I found your discussion as we were talking about it about how boys start out being more emotional than girls when they are babies really, really fascinating. Can you talk about those studies as well as some of the follow up that talks about how girls and boys play styles differ as these gender roles begin to come into come into play?

Ron: Sure, glad to. So, in developmental psychology there was a sub field of research called emotion socialization, which looked at how children were socialized largely by their parents to express or not express certain emotions. And so, I dove into that literature after some experiences where I you know, began to see how difficult it was for men to talk about their feelings. I got very curious and what I found in that literature was very interesting. So, boys start off life more emotionally expressive than girls. They cry more frequently and fuss more than girls. The difference holds up at studies conducted and by the way these studies that I'm reciting could never be done today. They were in home videotape studies of children interacting with their parents and then coded and analyzed. But anyway, these studies found that boys remained more emotionally expressive at six months and one year of age. Um and of course as the boys got older, they did more than cry and fuss. They would coo and giggle and you know and express a wider range of feelings.

By the age of two, the similar studies in this case it wasn't videotape, but similar studies found that girls were starting to overtake boys at the age of two in terms of their verbal expression of emotions, I feel sad, I feel heard, I feel angry, and boys were doing it less. And then the most interesting and dramatic change was between four and six years of age. And this was I think a very clever study in which 4-6 year old boys and girls were shown emotionally stimulating slides to stimulate a particular emotion and their mothers, the mother of that child watched the child's face in a tv monitor in an adjacent room and the question for the study was, could the mother accurately identify the slide shown to her children independent of gender? That is where they equally accurate with boys and girls? And it turns out that early on, mothers were equally accurate with their children, regardless of their gender. But as the children aged differences began to appear so that by the age of six mothers were significantly less accurate identifying the slides shown to their sons as compared to their daughters.

Now, you have to ask what's happening to boys between the ages of four and 6 other in preschool and elementary school, what's going on? They’re being socialized by their peers. Boys police other boys’ masculinity as early as preschool. “You talk like a girl”, and oh, you're crying, big boys don't cry. So, this goes on. And boys are starting to get the message that this isn't good. You know, this is not good. So that's really where it comes in. And this is where boys begin to feel that conforming to these masculine norms is obligatory. They're made to feel considerable shame when they violate these norms. And this has consequences for adult life.

Deborah: And Ron you actually, there's a quote from your book that was part of your background that let you into the studies, you said when you were working on overcoming your own sense of shame that you became increasingly aware of the role that shame plays in most men's lives locked into their heart by the harsh injunctions of the male code. So that line really, really stood out to me.

Ron: Many of the things that men are ashamed of and these again are established adult, even middle-aged men are violating masculine norms. When they were boys, I backed down from a fight in high school, I had a crush on another boy in middle school. I cried too often. I was too close to my mother. These are some of the things that men hold in their hearts with a great deal of shame and let me just give you kind of a brief on shame.

I mean, shame is different from guilt. You feel guilty if you did something bad, you know, um you know, I hurt your feelings and I feel guilty. I'm sorry I did that. Shame. You reject yourself, shame is a wholesale rejection of the self, is feeling the self is bad rather than I did something bad. So, it's a very powerful emotion and one that lasts a long time.

Andy: You know, these are you said that these are things that men hold onto for a long time. Why would we expect that when men become corporate leaders, they grow older that somehow those things they've held on to magically disappear. I don't think that they do. And I think that explains why uh, the restricted emotionality has created such a negative generalized view of management in male dominated companies and in corporate environments. Many of these environments can be unwelcoming because the human requirement for some measure of emotional engagement is lacking. I think, you know, the restricted emotionality plays a major role in why some of our employees resist returning to the office. So many of the challenges of leaders today, especially male leadership, is learning to level up in our emotional engagement, not just our emotional intelligence, but which is in some ways understanding and empathizing but the emotive investments that come from developing deeper, more meaningful relationships and then being able to talk and communicate about those feelings. That's how we get employees back into the office. That's how we turn some of these environments that are laced with things men have brought with them from years and years that's been developing. Uh, and we get rid of some of that and make it a more open place and inviting place for others.

Do you want to react to that?

Ron: Well, I did want to kind of just react to a couple things. One is, let's say some men because you know, we're really not talking about all men or men as a group. I think men vary a great deal. Our research has shown that men very a great deal and all sorts of dimensions and um uh so it's really some men rather than all men. I think we need to stay with that because I don't want us to come across like we're tarring all men with a brush. I mean this my research shows that adherence these norms varies a great deal from very strong adherence to very low, you know, the typical bell curve that we psychologists are famous for. Uh you know, showing a distribution of scores on a measure. I just wanted to make that correction. I'm sorry for interrupting.

Deborah: I'm so glad you made that point. Andy and I were talking a lot about the corporate structure, and I wanted to add one other element to that, which was your discussion of the ways in which girls and boys play differently. Because that too is something that I see reflected and I think you brought this point up to me actually originally, I see that reflected in the corporate structure. So, could you talk just a moment about different ways in which girls and boys play? And then I think we can talk about how we find that in our large companies today.

Ron: Studies have been done of nursery school and elementary school Children typically play in gender segregated groups. Girls play with girls. Boys play with boys, and they play differently. Girls typically play in smaller groups; they sit closer together and the play consists of conversation. So, the girls learn, you know, conversational skills. They learn, you know, how to reveal vulnerabilities. They learn how to express empathy. They learn how to express compassion. They learn how to resolve conflicts. Whereas boys play in larger groups, taking up larger spaces, typically in games involving lots of action and particularly competition and very often violence is part of the game. You know, I mean football, I was just watching the Browns game last night, it was terrible. But I can't imagine a more violent game than football. So now I don't know if I'm getting ahead of myself, but this has a lot of implications you were mentioning earlier, sort of the “Me Too” issues. Boys never play with girls. And they never get to know, I should say many boys. But some boys have sisters and what have you, but many boys never get to know girls as persons in the same way they know their male friends. They know, you know what their boys, what the boys they are friends with like to do what they don't like to do, what they're good at, what they're not good at, what they're interested in. Boys have none of that knowledge for the most part about girls.

And then along comes middle school and puberty and suddenly boys – heterosexual boys - are very interested in girls, but as sex objects. So, they skipped this whole phase of thinking of girls as persons. And this forms the basis I think for what I think is a fairly ubiquitous practice of objectification. Whereas many men attend to when they encounter a woman tend to evaluate her on sexual dimensions first as a matter of course, rather than, you know, who is this person, what is she interested in? How are we going to relate? So, I wanted to interject that because I think it's important to take that into account.

Andy: Well, I'm certainly not looking forward to the middle school years. Ron after what you just said for my daughter. But I do think there's a lot of truth to that. I'm not looking forward to adolescence and it's always brutal. Something to look forward to. Indeed, especially for men.

Deborah: Can you elaborate on what this paradigm is and what those negative consequences look like for men?

Ron: Well, I'm going to kind of lead to the 30,000 foot view to start off with. And in psychology the way gender was conceptualized from approximately 1930 to 1980 was that it was synonymous with sex. That basically, you know, boys and girls should show the stereotypical traits associated with their sex and if they didn't, that was a cause for concern. So, for example, when I taught group psychotherapy in one of the universities, I would show a film that was activity group therapy for a group of 14 boys. And this is a kind of group therapy for children where rather than sitting around talking, they do things, and the therapist intervenes and kind of reflects what they're doing. And of these 14 boys, 11 were referred. This was a child guidance clinic for effeminate behavior that basically boys violating gender norms was considered so serious that the child had to be taken to a child guidance clinic for therapy. Now obviously flash forward to today. What would 11 of those 14 boys be diagnosed? Whether it be A. D. H. D., right? But just given how our diagnostics have changed. But that's how serious these gender roles were taken back then. Um that, you know, it was a sign of, you know, dangerous psychopathology if children, particularly boys, deviated from their assigned gender roles. How many of you have been in a toy store recently. I mean it is the most segregated environment ever seen. You got the blues and the pinks, and never the twain shall meet. As a result of this, you know, we started talking about what are the norms and how they change.

One historian actually helped out a lot because he traced some of these masculinity norms back a few centuries using diaries and things of that nature, showing that these gender norms are essentially changeable with culture.

Andy: That's great. And you know, I was actually thinking, when you were talking about little boys and girls, and the toy store, I recently took my daughter to a birthday party for a little boy and he, the theme of the party was frozen, and his favorite color is pink. And my daughter told me as we were going home, she was like, hey, you know, Maxie and I have the same favorite color. And I said, yeah, you know, it's totally fine for him to like the color pink. She had already established a dichotomy in her mind from going to the toy store and seeing the pinks and the blues, that somehow there was a distinction, but the fact is there really isn't.

And it's all about how you socialize because the minute I said, hey, it's okay for him to like that color - It was like her eyes opened, and she was like, oh yeah, it is okay.

Andy: You know, this part of your analysis really had me looking inward like many boys, I grew up with a standard for what masculinity should look like and anything that diverged from that was viewed with suspicion and that's kind of putting it charitably. I think we carry these default biases with us into the workplace. I would say socialized biases with us into the workplace. We assign masculine and feminine ideas to things like work, workflow, and types of work. We do this sometimes unknowingly which demands, I think, that we systemically approach breaking these trends. I've heard it suggested that assignments for example, like taking notes in a meeting should be rotated between men and women or should be something that is more programmatic rather than at the whim of the leader, the person leading the meeting. These are things that are kind of controls that are necessary for some of these biases that we may not even think about. They just, they've just been hardwired through socialization.

Deborah: And so Ron, if I as a male and clearly, I don't fit that description, but if I was a male acting contrary to the expected gender norm, what is the condemnation? What is the pushback? What do I feel? What do I experience as someone who doesn't conform?

Ron: You might get beat up by another boy. Or you might be shunned by the boys. They don't want to play with you, you don't get picked for teams and things. Um you know, the uh these are all various uh these are all various ways that we enforce social norms on other people. And in terms of kind of the effect of this, I wanted to talk about a meme that was going around during the beginning stages of pandemic and on the internet. And it showed eight or nine or ten year old boys slumped in a stairwell in a building, apartment building that looked like, and he was kind of had his head in his hands and he was slumped and the caption wrote, if someone had approached this boy with empathy and compassion rather than made him feel ashamed of himself, there would be one less angry man in the world 10 years from now.

Andy: Yeah, that's very striking Ron. To connect that to another question, you discussed a lot about how stressful certain situations might be because you're crashing up against traditional gender norms. And I know you talk about studies that show men's reactions to be being put into situations that defy traditional gender norms. And one of your examples was the stress that would be associated with the situation of a man being outperformed at work by a woman. So if we take that as an example, how might that stress manifests itself in the workplace?

Ron: If there is shame with that type of situation. For example, you've talked about boys learning to transform their emotions into anger or aggression basically when the child has internalized those gender norms and believes that they must conform to them. And, therefore they hold themselves to account when they experience shame as a result of that.

Deborah: Back up for a minute, talk a little bit about gun violence, although that's not specifically in the workplace.

Ron: You know, we have a massive problem in the United States with gun violence with mass shooters and things of that nature. Greater than 90% of all the gun violence is committed by boys and men. Yet the vast majority of boys and men are not gun violence or even violent. And so the question is what predisposes a small minority of boys and men to commit violence? And the answer is this concept, discrepancy strain, being outperformed by a woman in the workplace. There is seen a little bit more clearly in some experimental studies where men are put in a situation where they have to perform a feminine task. So, for example, this particular study that I'm talking about would take, let's say 100 men and randomly assign them to an experimental and control group, that's what we psychologists do. And then the two groups are given different instructions. The experimental group of men is told to braid the hair on a mannequin and put pink ribbons in the control group. The other men are told to braid rope to make it stronger, so you got clearly feminine and masculine tasks. After the tasks are completed, the men are all given an opportunity to either sit quietly in a room or punch a punching bag. Who do you think is more likely to punch that punching bag? It’s the men who are made to perform a feminine task. They have to demonstrate, they have to get rid of this feminine sense and demonstrate their masculinity as powerfully as they can now. So this kind of an illustration of putting men in a situation which they do something that's discrepancy with their masculine ideals and what comes with that is a burst of aggression. Okay, um one of the things I found is that this particular result has been found not only in psychology and you know, social sciences tend to be very siloed. We tend to read only our own literature but I found it in sociology, criminology, cultural anthropology and social and social work. So this becomes a very powerful finding that putting men in a situation or in which they are made to feel that they violated masculine norms or asking them how they would feel if they violated masculine norms, yours by being outperformed by women at work, evokes violence.

Now, in psychology, we can't study violence directly. It would be unethical. You can't conceive of an experiment which results in violence. It never gets past the institutional review boards. But what I did find is three sources of data involving actual gun violence. One is a database of school shooters. The second was a qualitative study of murder suicides. And the third was a qualitative study of mass shooters. Now, obviously these categories overlap because Columbine was all three. But what I found in all of them is the perpetrator. When you look at the school shooters records, by the way they have in this database, they have health records, school records, court records, and the shooter's own writings in all of these cases, you find that these shooters felt they didn't measure up to their internalized ideals of being masculine and they had to get back. They had to prove it in this heinous way. I ask you shouldn't we be kind of trying to persuade parents, teachers, peers, makers of games and media to be very mindful of the messages they send young boys, shouldn't we be telling people not to tell boys that masculinity is obligatory. Look at these results anyway, that's my sermon for today.

Deborah: These are really powerful. These are really powerful points. And in some ways it's hard for me to go back to the discussion of the workplace because what you're really talking about is just so, so critical to the wellbeing of our society. But I'm going to go back for a second and try to make a link here to my own experience. As you know, if yeah, just bring it back for a moment. And that is so I might experience as a woman in the workplace and Cathy and I have talked about this before. I once got a letter in which I was called belligerent, bellicose and bombastic. All in the same letter, which I may or may not be. So, you know, you can decide for yourselves whether I really, you know, I am all three of those things or whether there was potentially another b word that somebody had in mind for me that wasn't articulated .But that, for example, I think would be how if you did outperform or potentially undermine your opponent's masculinity, that, at least in my mind is an example of how that might reflect back to me, is this huge, aggressive action to call me as many bad names as possible to reassert.

Ron: That would that would be an excellent extrapolation. Extrapolation of my research to the workplace. I think that's absolutely true. Again, I think I just have to issue a caveat. I'm not an industrial organizational psychologist, I've never studied the workplace, I'm a social and a clinical psychologist, but you know, we tend to read each other's stuff in psychology, so I know a little bit about it and I certainly think that there are, there are synergies between between the two, which is why we're tying this topic with the workplace because we see a lot of the things that you have described that generally relate to society play out in in the work environment.

Andy: And I was just chuckling as Deborah was recounting her experience with the letter because I cannot tell you the level of aggression that I have observed male litigators specifically in our profession, deploy against female opponents, but would withhold against male opponents. And, and I sit in kind of a unique circumstance, both having been a litigator and then having managed litigation in house and having seen both men and women litigate for me, and against me. And it's just so striking that it's almost like defcon five for some of the male litigators who when, when they're outmatched against female litigators.

And the unevenness is stark and striking. And so I think it's really important for men in the corporate environment to be sensitive to the subconscious ways that our our socialization may impact the way we see events in the workplace. Non conformance with gender roles can show up in very interesting ways. You can show up on evaluations. For example, when we see an oversight or challenge experienced by a woman differently than the same oversight, er challenge experienced by a man. Male managers who can who believe in traditional masculinity ideology, can create annual ratings and evaluations that don't really make sense. And I think we should provide a level of skill skepticism and apply rigor. Excuse me, rigorous empiricism when it comes to the male and female employees in the workplace. And evaluations, especially if a man is raised under the traditional masculinity ideology and they're raised to believe that a man shouldn't be beaten by a woman when that man becomes a manager, It can show up in how he manages and that's why as a prescription, it's important to deploy 360° evaluations throughout the year, to have panel calibrations so that there are diverse voices that are in the mix when you're discussing promotion and advancement, so that our peers are given the opportunity to overcome some of these things that have found their way insidiously into the work environment.

Your comments lead me to another question and that's, you've talked about the fact that gender roles are often contradictory in your book and that norms are violated all the time. If this is true, then why do we still have so many problems? And why is it that even when many men do not believe in these gender norms that we nevertheless conform as men?

Ron: Well, that's an excellent question. As a matter of fact, I've done studies that show that among established adult men and also among college students, that the majority, uh, that on average most men do not endorse traditional masculinity ideology or beliefs, these beliefs. And so why do they hold such power? Well, they hold such power because we learned them when we were children and they were attached to shame. You have so many prohibitions against crying or being vulnerable in any way. And because this is the point they've been socialized to turn these vulnerable feelings into aggression. They frequently asked act aggressively. Now, how does that occur? How do boys learn to transform sadness or shame into aggression? Well, picture, you know, an elementary school boy being pushed down on the playground by another boy. He knows that, I mean he might feel sad, you might feel afraid, he might feel betrayed because he thought this boy was his friend, but he knows he can't come back up from the from the floor with a face full of tears. Instead he has to take that emotional energy that he feels and transform it into aggression and come back with his fist flying. I mean, I as a boy, I grew up in a tough working class neighbor, I learned this skill, you know, as a young boy. Many boys do, and many men have retained that quality. I mean, how many of you have known a man who when his feelings are hurt erupts into rage, almost like touching a match to magnesium? Have you, have you known any men who do that?

Andy: So I may or may not have been guilty of that myself and in that sense.

Ron: You're no different than most of us. I mean, socialization monster, If I mean, I'm not going to stop working until I start to see some of these norms change and I'm going to be 80 years old soon. There's a lot of work for us to do.

Andy: For sure. Speaking of nonconformance, you've noted that there are cultural variations in masculinity ideology and for example, that it may be more acceptable for African American women to make more decisions at home and be employed outside of the home due to the separation of families historically. This makes me wonder how these cultural differences might clash in the socialization of boys and girls in our multicultural society.

Ron: Well, thank you for that question. Andy, actually, this idea comes from your field from a legal scholar Kimberly Crenshaw who put forward the construct of intersectionality. She first put forward to describe the marginalization of Black women and basically it's been applied in the last eight, nine years, to a range of other groups, you know, men of color, sexual minority men, differently abled men and the like. And basically, you know, it rests on the idea that our identities as people is not one dimensional. We are not a man and nothing else. I'm a jewish man, I'm a psychologist, I'm an athlete, I'm of this and I'm out of that and those kind of things. So we have a lot of aspects to our identity and each of those modify each other. So one of the areas that I've worked in extensively because of my students is African American masculinity. One of my students who recently completed his PhD developed a scale for African American masculinity ideology. And what's really interesting about this scale and probably no surprise is that there are some Afrocentric values built in like a commitment to community, loyalty, leadership, family values, but then there's also the scale that he came up with also reflects the fact that for African American men meeting the requirements of masculinity is often impeded by racism. You know, driving while Black, shopping while Black, you know, these kind of things. So there's an element in there of what he calls racist gender role strain. This is just one example in another of my books, I've gone through um several different ways of thinking of intersectionality.

And it makes me think about or just it makes me have an epiphany in some ways that we used to believe that men were de facto leaders in corporate environments because of traditional masculinity ideology and its associated, you know, socialization, it might actually be a liability as the workplace becomes more gender balanced and a multicultural place. That may have real impact on productivity and efficiency for organizations. We need to recognize how difficult it is for men socialized into this traditional ideology to effectively lead organizations with women from diverse backgrounds and men from diverse backgrounds because of the intersectionality that you just alluded to. It's not even something that we evaluate our leaders on today. And perhaps it's something that we should be thinking about as we build teams and we build level c levels of organizations. As someone who's been leading teams for a while now. I think it is important for us to catalog the experiences of employees in order to get a sense for the leaders that are being effective and are able to overcome some of the socialization and we do some of that at meta it's uh something that I've never experienced in any other company every year annually. And they take comments from the employee base over instances of microaggressions or biases. They're cataloged by our HR department, they're anonymized and then they're shared with management across the organization and our responsibility is to take those experiences and to talk about them with teams with our teams and work through them actively throughout the year so that we are able to identify and deal with them when new experiences like that come up.

Perhaps as part of this, we need to also think about some training associated with that solution, I don't know. Deborah, have you experienced any of that in your your law firm's training for leaders that for men specifically on how to deal with and how to lead a multi-cultural or multi-gender team?

Deborah: Yes. So Andy, as you were speaking, I was sort of thinking the same thing you were which is that our training I think is lacking in a really fundamental way because and Cathy and I have spoken a little bit about this as well, which is the training is centered on how to help women and other represented groups within the corporate organization fit in right, we're supposed to learn how to fit in and what you know my epiphany if you will based on what you're saying Ron is that all of this is a construct and it doesn't have to be what it is now and masculinity if it means different things in different cultures and you could say the same, I'm sure about you know, femininity, whatever that is then it can be whatever we want it to be and we can sort of start from scratch and think about what is the environment in which human beings can best thrive.

So those were my thoughts Ron as you were speaking and then Andy with your really important follow ups, that I was taking notes on by the way, so for what we can all do in in the future. I think this takes us to related point because on the Parity Podcast we've talked about Zenger and Folkman who have looked at leaders and leadership competencies and how women and men compare on those competencies scales and what they found was that women on average rate higher than men on about 17 out of 19 of the core competencies that are associated with leadership. And this data by the way, it wasn't just five people, it was generated from surveys of 60,000 people who work in organizations of all sizes. Now, for a lot of these competencies, women and men were we were pretty close. But there was a 3-7% advantage for women when it came to such competencies as taking initiative, resilience, and inspiring and developing others. And those are just a few that really have stuck out to me.

So women talk a lot about bringing their full selves to work. But if we're seeing that these competencies are higher in women than in men, it makes me wonder if men are lagging behind in bringing their full selves to work. What do you think Ron about that point?

Ron: I think you're right when I was actually for a time about 10 years in nearly full time clinical practice. And I was on the faculty at Harvard Medical School in one of the teaching hospitals at Cambridge Hospital. And what I did to start my practices, I asked all my colleagues to send me the men that their women clients complained about.

Deborah: And I think we both have lists for you just so you know.

[laughter]

Ron: But anyway, I digress. I had a practice full of men, many of whom could not put their emotions into words. I would ask, how do you feel? They answered, well, I think he shouldn't have done that or I'm going to talk to him. But noHow di. d you feel? And they look at me blankly. So I experimented and ultimately developed a manualized treatment that's kind of what we do in psychotherapy, as we try to standardize the treatment and then we try to measure an empirically based field. We try to measure the effects and making sure we have that the inputs that we're putting in our standards so we can reliably say what it is. And so I developed this this method and by the way, this is extremely important for psychotherapy. His all forms of psychotherapy, even the most strictly behavioral require that the client be able to engage emotionally. For example, exposure therapy, which is the most behavioral therapy exposes people to frightening things and ask them to discern subtle differences in their fear level. If you can't even tell if you're afraid, how are you going to say, Well, I'm a little bit more afraid when you show me that and a little less afraid when you show me that, it just doesn't compute. So, um it was basically consisted of, I kind of, some people kidded me.

It's just like you're teaching them emotional kindergarten and it kind of is so we start off with vocabulary. Many men do not have a good vocabulary of words to describe emotions. They'll mention a lot of words for derivatives of anger, irritated, irritated, upset, mad, you know, and so on. And they'll have a lot of words that really aren't emotions but reflect being stressed out. Like I'm zapped, I'm burned out. I'm overloaded, but they won't have words about fear or sadness or attachment or fondness or loneliness or any of these vulnerable or attachment emotions. So I first asked him to kind of develop a vocabulary list And I, you know, I sometimes did this in groups, but I would always take advantage of men's competitive nature. And I'd say the guy that was here last, last hour got 30 words. So the next guy, that guy I'm talking to is going to come up with 31 words, just kind of how it works. So I get them to, you know, increase their emotional vocabulary. I get them to try to read the emotions in other people. And I would teach them about facial expressions. There's a big area going back to Darwin. Darwin wrote an excellent book in the 1800s called the expression of emotion in man and animals is one of the first persons to study nonverbal communication. So, you know, certain facial expressions reflect certain emotions, tone of voice, body language, para linguistic phenomena like size cries and gas. So I teach them, you know, like all right, these are all the things when you're talking to someone or even more easily when you're watching a television program, focus on a person and watch them closely and try to figure out what they are feeling. So I get them to apply that list of emotion words, you know, to another person and identify their emotions.

Then the hardest part is to identify emotions in themselves and believe me, I had men who just, you know, how are you feeling? I don't know, it feels like a tight band across my chest, that's how they're feeling. Or I feel like I have butterflies in my stomach, you know? So what I would do in this next stages, I had asked him to keep what I called an emotional response log. It could be like three by five cards, you stick in your shirt pocket or something like that, and the next time you feel and a lot of these guys only felt a bodily sensation that you think might be emotion, write it down, what was the sensation and then ask yourself the question, who is doing what to whom, and how did that affect me, and then go back to your vocabulary list and make the connections, what words would link up with what that bodily sensation was and what was happening. So, an example might be I was expecting feedback on my proposal at noon, but I haven't heard, it's now 1:30. The initial sensation might be butterflies in my stomach and that was the social context. Okay, so go back to your words, see what you find. I think I'm apprehensive that maybe I'm not getting the feedback I want. So that was kind of how it worked and you know, I think if you're going to prepare men to bring more of themselves to the workplace, the thing that probably more men than not don't bring is emotional self-awareness and emotional intelligence. And you can't expect them just to have it if it's been socialized out of them as boys, if they've been made to feel ashamed of it as boys. So you have to teach them. And that becomes, brings in another important point when you're working with men like this, you have to inoculate them against the shame that they will feel because this will bring up shame. So you have to say, I understand as a boy, you're made to feel that boys don't cry and boys don't do this, but you're a lawyer now, you're working in this firm and it's really important, you really do need to do this and you need to brave the shame, push it away. So that was then this is now. I'm a big man, now I can take it, I can deal with this, I can open up my heart, I can feel my feelings, I can express them. So this is the kind of thing, I think you need to affect this change in the workplace. Yeah.

Andy: Ron, you know, the two things are clear to me one, there's a lot of rehabilitative work needed in corporate America today and we need more women in leadership until we deal with socialization. As you have suggested, we're going to continue to see these statistically significant differences between men and women on the Zenger Folkman list. Right? The numbers just don't lie. This somewhat relates to my prior realization as we were talking that there needs to be training in some ways we need to equipment in leadership and for leadership in ways that don't rely on traditional socialization uh in this new work environment that we have today.

Deborah: For sure. Andy I can only agree with what you said in terms of just the last point which is we really need to think more carefully about how we are training and preparing people for leadership roles and to be good colleagues, right? Even more generally than that. You've given us a lot to think about. We usually have lots of solutions to focus here on the Parity Podcast but I'm afraid today we're going to have to spend our time and we have spent our time talking a lot about the issues because they're just not easy for sure.

Ron: I'm currently working on two books, one of which is called assessing and treating emotionally inexpressive men. It's written for clinicians, psychologists, social workers and the like, but it could probably be adapted to the workplace. I mean, um you know, um I put together essentially what I've learned over 40 years of helping men be able to reclaim their emotional lives.

Deborah: So I think now what you've described as a collaborative project that we're going to have to talk about after this podcast and match you up with someone or digging in ourselves.

Andy: There's so much discussion these days about, you know, what is, “toxic masculinity”? Well, it's hard to have that conversation if you don't really have a baseline about what is traditional masculinity and what is it not. So I think that kind of training would be useful for everyone, even those men who have rejected traditional masculinity ideology. You know, I think there's no question that as a society we are carrying socialization traditions forward, that may be damaging to our ability to advance together. And the parity prescription in my views is one that many companies would do well to adopt because it is so universally beneficial to both men and women in the workplace. And so I'm really excited about the work that you're doing Deborah. And I'm glad that we had the opportunity to talk to Ron to hear you comments on it, and I hope more people listen to this podcast and encourage some of these organizations to pick it up and to carry it forward.

Deborah: Thank you, Andy, I appreciate that so much. And we're certainly really grateful for your participation to help us get the word out. You know, as I was thinking about just sort of one of the themes that came out of our conversation today, it strikes me that really we've just missed our opportunity to think about these issues because we've taken sort of the male norm and the white male norm as what the workplace is. And again, we've been trying to fit women into that norm without ever questioning the norm itself. And so we just really haven't looked at the way that powerful structure could be harming us all, in ways small and large. I think you also pointed this out Ron in in your book, that, you know, women at least have had the benefit of feminism and questioning who they are and what gender means, and meanwhile, we haven't gone through that same process for men.

So, again, we're just missing, it just seems to me at least one lesson that I take away from everything you've said Ron is that we're just we're missing the mark here, we're missing the ball, because we're not focusing on what masculinity means and the way in which that has affected our society and different levels obviously across the world. Not to get myself too broadly focused, because we really are talking about the workplace, but again, we just missed the ball. So I appreciate so much you being with us today.

Ron: Well, thank you. I would just say, you know, one of the things that women did in the second wave feminist movement that began in the late 60s was to overcome the effects of their general socialization by forming assertiveness training groups that taught women to stand up for themselves. Because one aspect of female feminine socialization is to be passive and dependent. And so, I think we're at a point in history where we have to have similar experiences for men to overcome the restrictive effects of their general socialization, particularly in their emotional self-awareness and empathy and compassion.

Deborah: Yes and also not necessarily elevate traditional masculine norms as what we should all strive to. So that strikes me as another thing we need to address at the same time. So, listeners, if you'd like to learn more about amsculinity and Dr. Levant’s work, you can find his details in the show notes, as well as the titles of some of his books, including The Tough Standard, which I know Andy and I both recommend highly. You can also find a link to Andy Cooper's LinkedIn profile, where you can find his frequent postings and comments and you can join his many followers in hanging on every one of his posts. Please know that we are here to help you tune in while you're running errands, raking leaves or cleaning up after dinner. As a reminder, we now have time-stamped show notes for you to follow along. You can also find links on the resources that we mentioned in today's episode and links to find us on social media and our web page. Thank you so much for supporting the Parity Podcast. And if you enjoyed this episode, please rate and review us on Apple podcasts or Spotify and give us a shout out on social media and with your friends and with your help, we are building the perfect community for these ongoing discussions. Reach out to us any time - we hope to connect with you again soon so that we can make progress with the Parity Prescription.