Is there hope for gender equality? A conversation with Richard V. Reeves and Gloria Steinem

Below you will find a conversation between AIBM President Richard V. Reeves and Gloria Steinem—author, activist, and leader of the women’s movement in the United States.

Together, they examine why progress on women’s rights and attention to boys’ and men’s issues are not in conflict.

For Richard’s reflections on the conversation, read his Substack.

 

Transcript

Richard Reeves: I’m about to talk to Gloria Steinem. I’m pretty excited about this. Honestly, she’s been a huge leader and inspiration to everyone working around issues of gender equality—including those of us who work on issues of boys and men—partly because we’re trying to do that in a way that helps everyone to rise: women and girls, boys and men rising together.

And that’s the spirit that I really wanted to dig in on, and figure out how she’s managed to pull that off. Gloria, I’m really excited to have this conversation. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks.

Gloria Steinem: Me too. Me too.

Richard Reeves: We met last year in your home—your beautiful home—so thank you for inviting us in here, too. And I really wanted to circle back to this conversation with you about where we are in terms of gender equality, and how we work on behalf of boys and men without in any way turning our backs on women and girls.

I think it’s particularly timely now. Honestly, I think the debate about gender has become quite polarized—quite a difficult war to navigate politically.

Gloria Steinem: Well, that’s interesting. Tell me how you think it has changed.

Richard Reeves: I feel like what’s happened is that the tone has become much more zero-sum. And actually, young people are more likely to believe that something is zero-sum than in previous generations.

Gloria Steinem: Really? I didn’t know that.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. Stephanie Stan Cheever’s work suggests a rise in zero-sum thinking. In other words: if one group rises, that must mean another group falls. So if you want women to do better, then it means you have to be indifferent to—or even celebrate—the struggles of men, because it’s like one or the other, right? And then the same the other way around.

And that’s not the spirit of the women’s movement that you’re the leader of.

Gloria Steinem: No, absolutely not.

Richard Reeves: Almost the opposite. I’ve always felt you’re very positive-sum.

Gloria Steinem: Yes. We each were missing some of the total human experience. Women were often confined to the home and to raising children, and men to professional activities or the military. And we were just trying to say that everybody has a choice of both.

There was a whole program here in New York called Oh Boy Babies—

Richard Reeves: Trying to break the gender stereotype.

Gloria Steinem: Yeah. It’s a childcare center that invited, once a week, boys from a boys’ school in. And the boys were fascinated with the babies, right?

Richard Reeves: Yeah.

Gloria Steinem: So it was called Oh Boy Babies.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. You wrote that we’ve spent a lot of time arguing that women can do anything men can do—

Gloria Steinem: And vice versa.

Richard Reeves: But we shouldn’t forget to also argue that men can do what women can do.

Gloria Steinem: Yes. Because otherwise women just have more work.

Richard Reeves: Right—you just expand women’s roles. But that’s the other thing I lean back to the women’s movement for: the movement around women in STEM, women into politics, women into business leadership. And I’m not suggesting for a moment that we’ve achieved all of the goals, but there has been progress. There’s been institutional support.

But getting men into what I call “heel professions”—health and education—there isn’t much support.

Gloria Steinem: Oh, that’s a good acronym. I didn’t know that.

Richard Reeves: Yeah. Thank you. Maybe this will help popularize it. But it’s interesting: most psychologists now are women—only 20% male. So we’ve seen a decline in the share of men in therapy, in social work, in K–12 education. In K–12 it’s 23% male now, down from 33%. So we’re seeing a huge decline in the share of men in these heel professions—these health and education professions—and not yet a real appetite to do anything about that.

I honestly want your advice on this because I struggle to persuade institutions that representation matters that way around as well. Are there lessons from the women-in-STEM movement that I can apply to the argument for getting more men into those professions?

Gloria Steinem: What we need are human examples. So it probably would be helpful—and not that expensive—to send exemplary men who can expand the boys’ ideas of what they can do.

Richard Reeves: It sounds like you would agree, then, that it is just as important to have men in education roles, in caring roles, as it is to have women in, say, engineering.

Gloria Steinem: Yes.

Richard Reeves: And we need to be doing both?

Gloria Steinem: We need to be doing both—and we need to be doing it multiracially at the same time.

Richard Reeves: Right. The other thing that I think the women’s movement did very well was institution-building, particularly in the 1970s. You saw a real flowering of different institutions—education, nonprofits, and so on. As a result, they’ve continued to raise awareness of certain issues.

Now I think there’s a case for at least some institution-building to draw attention to the issues of boys and men as well—as long as it’s done in a way that isn’t pitted against women and girls. I’ve drawn an institutional lesson: this isn’t just an intellectual issue; it’s also an institutional issue.

Would you agree with that? Would you advise that?

Gloria Steinem: I agree with that. But as you were saying that, I was thinking: maybe we are in a place now where we can more often ignore gender and go for interests and occupation and talent, and who knows what. So if you’re going to direct a movie, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman. If you’re going to lead a fifth-grade class, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a man or a woman—or who is in the class. Humanity, I hope, is our goal.

Richard Reeves: So you’re hoping that we can start to down-weight gender in these issues rather than up-weight them?

Gloria Steinem: Well, it depends. It depends on the state of justice and compassion and empathy that’s already there. We may—what we’re doing is remedial, right?

Richard Reeves: Right. Let’s take a specific example. The coalition for Women in Higher Education: women significantly outnumber men in higher education now—certainly as students—and it’s 50/50 at faculty. Is there a point where an institution like that might say, “Job done; let’s stop thinking about gender”? Or should we also have one—which I’ve created—that also looks at men? I’m trying to think.

Gloria Steinem: I’m not sure I’m up enough on what’s happening on campus to know where it should go. I went to a women’s college myself. And I see now that Harvard is changing.

And Florence Kennedy—the great Florence Kennedy—once conducted a pee-in on the Harvard campus.

Richard Reeves: A pee-in?

Gloria Steinem: A pee-in. Because there were no restrooms for women. [laughs]

Richard Reeves: You weren’t involved in that yourself, though? A pee-in. And how many people took part?

Gloria Steinem: I don’t remember. I just—[laughs]

Richard Reeves: It’s interesting that we’re laughing about that. And I do think there’s something in the current debate about gender that is lacking: a degree of humor, a degree of joy, a degree of almost playfulness.

When I read you, listen to you, there’s a sense of positivity and joy. It’s not negatively framed; it’s not deficit-framed.

Gloria Steinem: It makes me remember that laughter is the only emotion you can’t compel. You can make somebody afraid. You can even make them think they’re in love if they’re dependent for long enough. But you can’t compel somebody to laugh. And as a result, in some Native American cultures there is a God of Laughter.

Maybe we need that.

Richard Reeves: I love that, because I think that’s missing from so much of the current debate. It always feels quite negative; we don’t presume the best of each other.

I love the pee-in story. There was also a great campaign in the UK about more father involvement: they put baby carriers on all the statues of men across London—Winston Churchill and Nelson and John Stuart Mill and whoever it was. Everyone woke up one morning—it was overnight—and suddenly all these statues had baby pouches. The police left them for a while because they weren’t doing any harm. They weren’t spray-painting them; they weren’t damaging them. It was funny. It was playful.

Gloria Steinem: Yes. Any examples are helpful. Gay male couples who have children and raise those children—that’s a very helpful vision. It may be made fun of by hyper-masculine men, but it’s still very important to see that men can love and raise children, can have custody of children. All human roles should be available to all humans.

Richard Reeves: I want to ask you about a couple of words that are probably quite dear to you: feminism and patriarchy.

If we start with feminism: recent polling suggests that fewer people are likely to describe themselves as a feminist—including women—than in the past. And it seems like that’s not because they’re not in favor of gender equality. If you ask them if they’re in favor of gender equality in every direction, they’ll say yes. But there’s something about the term feminism that isn’t attracting people in the same way.

What do you think has happened to the term feminism? Should we move beyond it? Reinvent it? I don’t quite know what to do with that word now.

Gloria Steinem: I’m not sure, because I’m not sure the source of the reaction you’re talking about—whether people think it sounds weak because it’s feminine.

Richard Reeves: Polling suggests that when you ask, “Are you a feminist?”, people don’t hear, “Are you in favor of full gender equality in all regards?” They think it’s now a movement defined in more negative terms—more anti-men—so they’re less likely to say they’re feminists.

Gloria Steinem: We could use humanist, which has its own problems because it tends to mean you don’t believe in God.

Richard Reeves: Right—it’s used as a synonym for secular. It troubles me because I think it used to be straightforward to be a feminist.

Gloria Steinem: There was always the alternative of saying women’s liberationist.

Richard Reeves: Yes.

Gloria Steinem: And that may not be as frequent now, but I always liked it because it was more active.

Richard Reeves: I agree. It’s more positive as well. In a weird way there was a turn against “women’s lib” as a term in some people’s mouths, but it is more liberating—more positive—and it doesn’t frame it in a slightly zero-sum way.

The other term that’s come up quite a bit recently is patriarchy. We’re in your home and you have a “smash the patriarchy” sign up there—and I would expect nothing less.

But there was a think tank that recently advised Democrats not to use the term. Politically, it was a decision: “Don’t talk about the patriarchy.”

Gloria Steinem: Don’t talk about it negatively? Positively? Or both?

Richard Reeves: Just don’t use it because it turns people off. It’s associated with a particular mindset.

Gloria Steinem: Well, there’s also matriarchy, which does exist in a few cultures, right?

Richard Reeves: How do you define patriarchy when you say that word?

Gloria Steinem: It’s father superiority or male superiority. Women who are married take their husband’s name—not the other way around, or not using both hyphenated. What we want is egalitarian—human—compassionate—empathetic. And the more we can downplay—when it’s not relevant—gender, class, race, probably the better off we are.

Richard Reeves: Better to meet people where they actually are rather than pre-apply a label to it.

Gloria Steinem: Yeah. It’s useful, and I’m in favor of maintaining all words—I love reading and writing—but I think it’s overused.

Richard Reeves: It’s more culturally defined now than economically defined. One of the things you’re closely associated with is liberation requiring economic power.

Gloria Steinem: Yes, absolutely. But here we are in a democracy: we’ve never had a female president. How crazy is that? We’ve had very qualified women who ran for president.

Richard Reeves: I grew up in the UK. I’m a proud US citizen now. I was ten when Margaret Thatcher came to power, and she was there for the next eleven years. For my formative years, I didn’t actually realize you could really have male prime ministers because I’d only ever known a woman.

Gloria Steinem: What allowed that to happen, do you think?

Richard Reeves: She came from the right, of course. There’s an argument that if you’re going to break through a gender ceiling like that, it might be easier to do it from the conservative side. When she became prime minister, only 5% of members of Parliament were women. It’s now more than a third. All of the parties except the Conservative Party are majority female now. We’ve had two female prime ministers since—so three now.

At this point in the US case: would you celebrate if we had a female president, or would you just be relieved the embarrassment was over?

Gloria Steinem: It would depend who it was. But I hope I could celebrate.

Richard Reeves: Conditional on who it was.

Gloria Steinem: Yeah—because it’s about the substance, not just the form.

Richard Reeves: Another thing I associate you with is recognizing that while there are many more similarities between men and women than differences—and huge differences within each group—there are some average differences, and we can—

Gloria Steinem: The differences, when you come down to it, have to do mostly with procreation. Even height, weight, and muscles are not reliable.

Richard Reeves: What do you mean by that? Height is in the news right now.

Gloria Steinem: It’s not consistent. There’s overlap. There are very big, strong women; small, not-so-strong men.

Richard Reeves: I like the example of height because when you say men are taller than women, everybody knows what that means: an overlapping distribution—on average.

Gloria Steinem: Right. We do see couples where the woman is taller than the man. And vice versa.

Richard Reeves: I was rereading one of your pieces about men and women talking—an essay where you argued we shouldn’t force women to adopt stereotypically male ways of communicating in order to succeed.

Gloria Steinem: Right. Because there’s a kind of boardroom way of speaking that isn’t necessarily democratic and doesn’t invite people to make suggestions. Why not adopt what is often culturally a female way—everybody speaks in turn and you sit in a circle instead of in a hierarchy? We can take the good parts of gender and universalize them.

Richard Reeves: And perhaps sometimes the more male way of communicating is more effective—when you’re making fast decisions.

Gloria Steinem: If you’re in the fire department.

Richard Reeves: Exactly. What I liked about your argument is that it holds some difference in mind without stereotyping and without suggesting one is better.

Gloria Steinem: Also, it always seems to me that big gender differences are more concentrated in reproductive years than when we’re very young or very old. Gender probably still has more of a reproductive role than a totally human role. The cultures here before Europeans showed up seem to have understood that better.

In some Native American cultures—or at least in the Cherokee one—older women, grandmothers, chose the chief who was male. He was in charge of protecting the tribe, but they were in charge of governing the tribe.

Richard Reeves: And they decided who that was.

Gloria Steinem: They decided who the chief would be, and they could depose the chief.

Richard Reeves: There’s a famous story about Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the Fabian movement in the UK. She was more formidable, and a journalist asked who makes the important decisions in the household. She said: “Sidney, as the man, makes all the important decisions.” Then she added: “But I decide which ones are important.”

There’s also a Hopi saying about fathers taking kids up the mountain to show them the world they’ll have to explore—a paternal role. I like it; it’s pro-fatherhood. But I can also imagine someone saying, “Why is it the dads taking the kids up?”

Gloria Steinem: Every once in a while maybe a woman does—the mother does. Much of the imagery in Native American cultures is female imagery. And as I was saying, grandmothers in some tribes picked the male leader and could depose him.

Sex is pretty permanent—though there may be a surgical exception, I’m not sure—but sex is pretty permanent. Gender is cultural: familial, literary. It’s creative. It’s human invention.

Richard Reeves: Performed in that sense. It can shift quite radically. I’m doing a lot of work on fatherhood now, and it’s interesting how the paternal role seems to change more across time and culture.

Gloria Steinem: Do you think male couples—homosexual couples—have helped that because two men play all the roles?

Richard Reeves: I do. There are more women same-sex couples raising children than men, but I think both types have done two things: broken down stereotypes, and also strengthened a debate that it’s useful for kids to have different kinds of people in their lives, including by sex. Many female same-sex couples with sons are intentional about involving uncles, brothers, and other men. They’re often the easiest to persuade that it’s not a good idea to raise children in a man-free world.

Gloria Steinem: Yeah. Our uniqueness—each of us—wherever we are, there’s never going to be another us.

Richard Reeves: That’s exactly right. You know intersectionality—the idea that identities overlap: gender, race, class, geography, nationality. Adam Gopnik had a great line: the node where all those identities intersect is called the person.

One reason I liked your discussion of talking is that you made it clear we must be careful not to treat women as defective men. You took aim at assertiveness training as denying the power of female communication styles. I love that, but I want to suggest it can go the other way, too.

Gloria Steinem: Yes, definitely. That’s the revolutionary nature of two men who are a couple and raise children—they take masculinity beyond its confines.

Richard Reeves: I’m thinking also about emotional openness—availability—even crying.

Gloria Steinem: Crying. Yes, absolutely.

Richard Reeves: Boys don’t cry, men aren’t allowed to cry—yet recently there’s quite a lot of crying among men. That’s been a real—

Gloria Steinem: I hope so. It’s a great stress reliever to be able to cry.

Richard Reeves: It’s also quite good to cry with laughter—that’s the ultimate.

But there’s sometimes a sense that the default is the male way of being and women must become like that to succeed—arguably patriarchy—but equally a world where you tell men the default is female and if you’re not like that you’re malfunctioning.

Gloria Steinem: I remember meeting a woman who headed some major business. When she got angry, she cried—so people thought she was sad. She always said: “I am not crying because I am sad. I am crying because I’m angry.”

We have to communicate what we’re really feeling and to listen. Listening is crucial to understanding.

Richard Reeves: I worry about honoring people in their fullness as individuals. If on average men are a bit different in communication style, propensity to cry, interests, reproductive role—that’s okay, as long as it’s not treated as better.

Gloria Steinem: It’s okay—except I wouldn’t generalize. I would say: if an individual man is contesting the usual masculine, that’s okay. And also for a woman.

Richard Reeves: Because the fear is that acknowledging differences hurts individuals: “Men don’t do that.”

Gloria Steinem: The generalization that’s obvious when it comes to race—or I hope is obvious—and class is also true of gender.

Richard Reeves: There’s more difference within groups.

Gloria Steinem: Right. And I’m glad we have English, which is not a very gendered language, unlike romance languages.

Richard Reeves: Economists call it statistical discrimination: because group A tends to be more like this doesn’t mean person A is. In my own life, my son is an elementary school teacher and my sister-in-law is an engineer. Even if there are average differences that lead to fewer men in elementary teaching than engineering, how dare you suggest there’s anything wrong with someone breaking stereotypes? I think that’s what you’ve historically tried to do.

Gloria Steinem: Social justice movements—the civil rights movement or the women’s movement—strive to remove restrictions that come from generalization: saying men, women, masculine, feminine, people of color, whatever. And look for and honor uniqueness and individuality. We may need to band together to remove restrictions, but what we’re trying to give birth to is individuality as part of a community.

We’re communal animals. We don’t generate—what is it—oxytocin, I think—

Richard Reeves: The love hormone.

Gloria Steinem: Unless we’re together.

Richard Reeves: That’s right. I was delighted to learn recently from Sarah Blackforther’s book: mothers get an oxytocin spike from breastfeeding and close physical contact. Fathers get some from that too, but typically they get a spike from a different activity. What do you think that is?

Gloria Steinem: I suppose cuddling, holding? No—what is it?

Richard Reeves: Throwing the kid in the air and catching them—rough-and-tumble play.

Gloria Steinem: I don’t know about that. That sounds dangerous.

Richard Reeves: You have to catch them—that’s the key thing.

I find that a beautiful finding because, as a dad, there’s a danger that because you don’t necessarily have the same biological connection and hormonal reactions, you think something’s wrong with you. Many dads don’t feel the same way about their babies—in those early months—as the mom does.

Gloria Steinem: Maybe that has to do with breastfeeding and nothing else, because two men raising a baby as parents, I’m sure—

Richard Reeves: You can change it. That’s right.

As you know, I’ve spent the last few years working on issues of boys and men because I think there are real challenges facing a lot of boys and men now—especially those from working-class backgrounds, Black boys and men especially—and they are not getting enough attention from the right kind of people: policy people, solutions, positive-sum people.

For example, the suicide rate among young men has risen by a third since 2010.

Gloria Steinem: That’s awful.

Richard Reeves: We’re losing 40,000 men a year to suicide. That rise since 2010 is in young men.

Gloria Steinem: This is too big a question, but how would you describe the cause?

Richard Reeves: We don’t know. Before 2010, it was more middle-aged men, and there did seem to be a stronger link—particularly for working-class men—to the economy. There was talk—

Gloria Steinem: Because they can no longer play a masculine role—support their family.

Richard Reeves: It seems like it. It went along with alcohol use too. There was “deaths of despair”—Case and Angus Deaton.

Gloria Steinem: I live across the street from a very expensive boys’ school, and I see these little boys in ties and blazers coming— I just want to tell them: take off your ties and blazers if you want to. It’s still going on. And if this is any measure, this is a very expensive school—more in the upper classes.

Richard Reeves: We don’t know the causes of that rise, but we also see—an Ecommundo survey finds that two-thirds of young men say no one really knows them very well. Many think no one will want to date them. There’s a sense of loss and difficulty.

But I’m also very attentive to the fact there’s still so much more to do for women and girls, and trying to hold those two things together. What we want is to lower barriers to flourishing for everybody.

If there’s a specifically gendered issue—like the pay gap for women, or suicide rates for men, or boys struggling in education—we want a response to that that doesn’t then—

Gloria Steinem: Did you think we should try to have more groups directed toward suicide without gender, or directed toward parenthood without gender?

Richard Reeves: I think we should recognize when an issue is strongly gendered and formulate messaging and policy appropriately.

For example, a state we’re working with went through their suicide prevention literature to look at who was shown. They have advertisements for their suicide hotline. In that state, 80% of suicides are male, but they discovered 80% of the people in the images were women. Men were less likely to call—even though they’re four times more likely to die by suicide—so they’re now changing.

Gloria Steinem: And who was answering the suicide hotline?

Richard Reeves: That’s a great question. I don’t know, but that’s exactly the right kind of question. If we think it skews in a gendered direction, we should be aware of that.

We should reduce suicide generally, but if it’s highly gendered, we should work on that—just like in the labor market, if mothers are disproportionately penalized, we respond in a gendered way. So: gendered policy without gender politics.

Gloria Steinem: And there are still things that are way too universal: when a male–female couple marries, she takes his name—though there was and still is hyphenation.

Richard Reeves: And that kicks it one generation down the line. There’s been an interesting move: I think women are starting to take their husbands’ name again a bit more now. Some people say that’s a sign of success: now that women have more economic power, the symbol doesn’t matter as much.

Gloria Steinem: You should be able to choose—and take a third name. Why not?

For years in the New York Times, I was “Miss” Steinem—M-I-S-S—of Ms. magazine.

Richard Reeves: So they had double Ms.

Gloria Steinem: Yeah. They just refused.

Richard Reeves: The UN has a program I’ve participated in called HeForShe—an allyship movement—and I think that’s great. Getting more men supportive of women’s liberation.

There are also growing numbers of women—Melinda French Gates, who’s funded our work, and others; the first partner of California; Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan—becoming outspoken on behalf of boys’ and men’s issues. Almost a “she-for-he” movement. Would you welcome that?

Gloria Steinem: As you speak, I’m wondering—I went to a women’s college.

Richard Reeves: Did you go to Wellesley?

Gloria Steinem: No, Smith. But same thing. And maybe there shouldn’t be single-sex colleges.

Richard Reeves: Why do you say that?

Gloria Steinem: Because it’s perpetuating division. It’s not for me to dictate—people get to choose—but at the time it seemed good because women participated equally in classes. They weren’t afraid to raise their hands.

But maybe we’ve passed that.

Richard Reeves: We see strong outperformance by girls and women in education now. There was a recent study suggesting girls feel they’ll get a lot of social support if they say they’re going to go into politics. I feel like you’ve won that battle culturally, Gloria. But we still haven’t broken some ceilings. And I worry we’ll go back because of the tone of politics and the culture of politics.

Gloria Steinem: Yeah, well—Trump is just a bad person, regardless of gender.

Richard Reeves: You’re not going to make it about gender, are you?

Gloria Steinem: No.

Richard Reeves: So it sounds like you’d be at least nominally “she-for-he” in the sense that you want all of us to rise—you want us to rise together.

Gloria Steinem: Oh yes. Absolutely.

Richard Reeves: Something else I wanted to ask you about is a phrase you popularized from Irena Dunne. I wonder if you’d find it as useful a phrase today as you did then. You discovered it in Australia: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”

Gloria Steinem: Yes. I was traveling in Australia, and apparently somebody had written that on a ladies’ room wall. It caught on—people had it on their shirts.

Richard Reeves: High-grade graffiti for sure.

Gloria Steinem: I still think it has purposeful humor because the need is attached to social convention, salary, all kinds of things—which shouldn’t be true.

Richard Reeves: I’ve always interpreted it as an economic dependency argument, in the spirit of liberation: women should not be economically dependent on men. You also said marriage should always be a choice, not a necessity.

Gloria Steinem: Yes. Absolutely.

Richard Reeves: But now, some people hear it as dismissive of men: “I don’t need you anymore.”

Gloria Steinem: It was meant as a joke.

Richard Reeves: And that’s important, because it takes us back to tone—lighthearted. It’s not a statement about whether society needs men.

Gloria Steinem: Humor is still something of a problem. There are still more stand-up male comics than stand-up female comics. And the age of women in public life on television is probably still less than the age of men in public life.

Richard Reeves: There’s still further to go. And that’s part of the challenge: if I’m advocating for more attention to boys’ and men’s issues, I always encounter the legitimate response that there’s still so much we need to do for women and girls.

Gloria Steinem: Yes, but it’s not a choice. It’s not either/or. You’re doing both. We’re sitting here talking to each other—we’re not categorizing each other, right?

Richard Reeves: No. But the radicalism of doing both is something you may be underestimating. I want to underline the positive radicalism of what you just said: doing both—which is hard.

Gloria Steinem: There is a question: things can have a role even if not for the majority. Maybe single-sex education is still necessary for some. But there should always be a choice.

Richard Reeves: The best evaluations of single-sex education seem to be for Black boys, for example—especially from low-income areas—where you can structure curriculum, get the right teachers, and get great outcomes.

Gloria Steinem: And also they’re in the unfortunate position of seeing fewer people in authority who look like them, probably.

Richard Reeves: Correct. Role modeling is hugely important.

So this is my last question: what gives you hope right now about making progress around gender?

Gloria Steinem: First of all, I’m a hope-aholic. You should know that.

Richard Reeves: Your career attests to that.

Gloria Steinem: Hope is a form of planning. If you don’t hope for it, you don’t envision it. And if you don’t envision it, it becomes way less possible. So hope is definitely a good thing.

Richard Reeves: And you remain hopeful for the women’s movement, for gender equality?

Gloria Steinem: Yeah. Absolutely. Otherwise I would be giving up. Hello. I’m not going to do that.

Richard Reeves: It doesn’t seem like you’re going to do that any time soon.

I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Gloria Steinem as much as I did. And I hope you’ll consider supporting her work through Gloria’s foundation, as well as following the work of the American Institute for Boys and Men, very much in the spirit of “We Rise Together.”

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Specials thanks to Next Millennium Productions for helping with this project.