About
Proposal for a White House Council on Boys and Men
Welcome.
The proposal for a White House Council on Boys and Men was originally inspired by a discussion initiated by the White House Boards and Commissions Director Joanna Martin to Dr. Warren Farrell, inquiring of his interest in advising the White House Council on Women and Girls, given his background with the National Organization for Women. Shortly after, Dr. Farrell created a multi-partisan Commission of thirty-four prominent authors, educators, researchers and practitioners to accomplish three goals: investigate the status of boys and their journey into manhood; identify both surface and underlying problems confronting boys and men; create a blueprint toward solutions. This proposal is the result.
Below you will find a basic outline of the site’s content and related information. Links to the proposal can always be found on the right sidebar.
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Who and What. A multi-partisan Commission of thirty-four nationally-known scholars and practitioners request that President Obama create a White House Council on Boys to Men.
Why. A nationwide crisis of boys and men already exists. The Commission identifies five components:
- Education. Boys are behind girls in almost every subject, especially reading and writing. Yet boy-friendly programs (e.g., recess and vocational education) are being curtailed.
- Jobs. Our sons are not being prepared for jobs where the jobs will be. Yet women rarely marry men in unemployment lines.
- Fatherlessness. A third of boys are raised in father-absent homes; yet boys and girls with significant father involvement do better in more than 25 areas.
- Physical health. Life expectancy has gone from one to five years less for males than for females, yet federal offices of boys and men’s health are non-existent.
- Emotional health. Boys’ suicide rate goes from equal to girls to five times girls’ between ages 13 and 20, as boys feel the pressures of the male role.
Each of the five crisis components is potentially handled by a different department of the government; therefore coordination and prioritization is best handled at the White House level.
Short-Term Investment. One million dollars.
Long-Term Savings. Many billions of dollars. (For example, boys who are cared for become men who care for–men who pay taxes for schools rather than drain taxes for prisons.)
Quality-of-Life Savings. Priceless.
Timing. The mere presidential announcement of a White House Council on Boys to Men makes visible an invisible crisis. A White House Conference on Boys to Men to present “best practices” within one year after the Council is created.
Contact
Contact WHCBM Steering Committee:
Coalition Chair: Dr. Warren Farrell - warren@warrenfarrell.com
Please Donate!
Your donations to the work of the Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men through PayPal and Network for Good are processed by our parent 501(c)(3) non-profit association, the Global Initiative for Boys and Men.
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A silent crisis in men’s health gets worse
Across the life span -- from infancy to the teen years, midlife and old age -- boys and men are more likely to die than girls and women
The Washington Post, April 17, 2023
A silent crisis in men’s health is shortening the life spans of fathers, husbands, brothers and sons.
For years, the conventional wisdom has been that a lack of sex-specific health research mainly hurts women and gender minorities. While those concerns are real, a closer look at longevity data tells a more complicated story.
Across the life span — from infancy to the teen years, midlife and old age — the risk of death at every age is higher for boys and men than for girls and women.
The result is a growing longevity gap between men and women. In the United States, life expectancy in 2021 was 79.1 years for women and 73.2 years for men. That 5.9-year difference is the largest gap in a quarter-century. (The data aren’t parsed to include differences among nonbinary and trans people.)
The longevity gap between men and women is a global phenomenon, although sex differences and data on the ages of greatest risk vary around the world and are influenced by cultural norms, record keeping and geopolitical factors such as war, climate change and poverty.
