What Gareth Southgate gets wrong about masculinity and the future of work.
Ecofeminism and ecological economics, not liberal feminism and neoliberal economics
I agree with former England football manager Gareth Southgate that there is a crisis of masculinity, and that it is tied to economics and work. What he gets wrong is the solution.
His solutions are rooted in a fundamentally limited vision of gender and economics, that fails to grasp the true depth of the problem.
Three Horses
First, I have three horses in this race:
1) I have a young son. I am concerned about his future.
2) I am a researcher with particular interests in the future of work and sustainability, heavily influenced by ecofeminism and working within ecological economics.
3) I work at a university. I have a material self-interest in academic study, but also daily experience teaching a wide range of students.
The Limits of Neoliberalism: Training Doesn’t Create Jobs.
Southgate’s economic analysis draws from a very common, neoliberal, narrative that frames work as a microeconomic phenomenon. The idea that young people—and boys in particular—don’t find work because they lack vocational training or work experience is fundamentally flawed.
The provision of work is a macroeconomic phenomenon. An economy is the way we take resources and use them to meet human needs. Jobs are the roles people play in that process. A lack of jobs isn’t about an individual lacking the right skills; it’s about the structure of our economy.
Additional vocational experience might make Kid A more employable than Kid B. It won’t magically create a new job.
The Deeper Cultural Issue: What We Value
Southgate draws from a very liberal idea of gender equality—focusing on equal opportunities for girls and boys. Fine. But this is disconnected from the structural realities of how our ideas of masculinity developed alongside capitalism.
One of the most important insights from ecofeminism and Marxist varieties of feminism is that our economies fundamentally devalue “feminine” work (like care work).
As Silvia Federici powerfully argues, the siphoning of “valuable” (read: money-making) industrial work to men—and the exclusion of women—was an intentional historic act designed to tie the male sense of self-worth directly to capitalism.
The result was the fetishisation of industrial work, and the devaluing of care.
When industrial work disappears and women enter the paid workforce, the traditional cultural narrative for men crumbles. In this capitalist narrative, unemployability equals worthlessness.
The Solution
The answer is not a withdrawal from academia or a return to manual vocational work for men. (I have nothing against vocational work, but it isn’t a silver bullet). The solution is to embrace a broader view of masculinity.
The ultimate lesson from feminism is that gender roles are not fixed. There are many ways to be a man, and men are just as valuable in the domestic and care spheres as they are in manual labour.
We have to take this seriously in economic policy and in culture. This means stopping relying on the private sector as the main decison maker for how respources get used. Private sector actors have an inherent bias towards reducing labour - its expensive. Instead we need coherent industrial strategy that recognises that work is valuable whether or not it turns a profit. The task is to map human needs first, then direct state policy to create jobs that meet those needs. This can and should include an analysis of how much care work - for people or for nature - is needed.
There are major co-benefits here. Ecological economics shows how a structural shift towards care-based, labour-intensive work—combined with reduced working hours—can distribute meaningful jobs equitably while driving a transition to a truly sustainable economy.
Southgate is sparking an important debate with his interviews and his film. But if we want to fix the crisis, we have to stop treating a structural economic failure as an individual skill deficiency. And we have to make connections between deep seated ideas of what masculinity is, how this relates to the destructive practices of capitalism and ties these together in a coherent state strategy for a more sustainable economy.
Postscript
These are all ideas i’m currently working with in various projects on including for WISE Horizons, and in a forthcoming book. I’ll be developing some of these for a talk at the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures in July, details here.
It's an unusually good day on LinkedIn when I come across an analysis like this. We need to offer boys and young men more paths forward, not fewer. More acceptable formats of what it means to be a man and to contribute meaningfully to society. Men should be welcome in care work, early education, service work and at home, without stigma. For what it's worth, I think we should also change the way we value those roles, both monetarily and in terms of esteem. Part of the reason why they are so unilaterally undervalued is because they tend to attract women.
It's in a vacuum of such ideas that dominance-focused views and the Andrew Tates of the world start to emerge.
I do think we also need to expand and redefine the options for girls and young women, and those routes may overlap in some places, but that work is already underway as you've alluded to.