In conversation with Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, and Sam Pressler, fellow at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and the Harvard Human Flourishing Program
Work is changing in ways both obvious and harder to see.
AI is reshaping jobs and skills, while expectations around where we work, how we build careers, and the roles gender plays continue to shift.
Much of the conversation about the future of work focuses on productivity, skills, and performance. But the choices leaders make about work also shape how people connect: whether they have time to build relationships, experience community, and find a sense of purpose in what they do.
And those experiences can be gendered, too.
For men today, the wider public conversation about connection often begins with "the male loneliness epidemic," a framing that has gained traction in media coverage like The Independent.
But is loneliness actually the right way to understand what’s happening?
Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, has been thinking about that question in a place that could hardly look more different from today’s corporate workplace: at the bottom of a slate mine in North Wales.
Seven generations of the men in his family worked there. Deep underground, workers spent their breaks together in small huts, eating, singing, talking politics, and arguing before going back to cut slate.
When Reeves visited the mine, now a museum, with his three sons, he found himself reflecting not on the difficult work itself, but on the relationships and community that formed around it: men working, talking, and spending time together.
“I’m not suggesting for a moment that I wanted to be a slate miner or wanted my sons to be slate miners... But I thought, wow, there was something about that. There was something about that space," Reeves said.
The mine gave those men more than a place to earn a living; it also gave them a place to connect.
What happens when workplaces and other institutions change, but the human need for connection remains?
The myth: A “male loneliness epidemic”
Loneliness is a real and growing public health concern (according to the WHO Commission on Social Connection and the U.S. Surgeon General). But describing it as a distinctly male epidemic may obscure more than it reveals.
When Reeves and his colleagues examined data from the American Institute for Boys and Men, they found loneliness to be more gender agnostic:
“The evidence for a huge gender gap in loneliness is actually not that strong... We see that there are higher rates of isolation or disconnectedness among men, which is not the same thing as being lonely. You can be disconnected without reporting loneliness.”
For Sam Pressler, a fellow at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy and the Harvard Human Flourishing Program, class is essential to understanding that distinction.
“I am very clear that there is no male loneliness crisis. There’s a crisis of men without degrees who’ve been left alone by the structures of society," Pressler said.
The distinction shifts the focus from loneliness itself to the structures that support connection: relationships, communities, networks, and workplaces where people can find belonging.
Work and social life are intertwined
For the men without college degrees Sam Pressler studies in his research Nobody to Call, changes in work can reach well beyond the workday. Predictable schedules and stable jobs can support relationships inside and outside work. Greater instability can make both harder to sustain.
“If you don’t have predictability around your schedule, if you don’t have stability in your work life, it makes it much harder to have predictability [and] stability in your relational life," he said.
His conclusion: “Our precarious work lives and our precarious social lives are deeply intertwined.”
For leaders, that reframes connection as more than a culture issue. Work design matters, too. Schedules, stability, and the conditions under which people work can affect their ability to sustain relationships both on and off the job.
The question, then, isn't simply whether employees feel connected at work. It's whether the way work is structured makes connection easier to sustain, or harder.
When work becomes more than work
Connection is only part of the story. For many men, work has historically been a powerful source of identity and purpose.
“The sense of identity and shoring up your identity, giving you a sense of securing your place in the world. That for men is more tied up with paid work,” Reeves said.
That can make changes or disruptions to work particularly consequential. For working-class men, Reeves says, losing work as a source of identity may be harder to make up for elsewhere: “A lot of men would previously have just gotten that from work.”
Pressler's research adds another dimension: dignity.
Most of the men Pressler interviewed were employed, yet few described work as a meaningful source of purpose. By contrast, he heard something different when they talked about fatherhood: “That experience of being needed by their families, being needed by their kids, was a true source of purpose," Pressler said.
That led Reeves to ask: “How do we spread the sense of indispensability?”
The challenge becomes sharper when work carries so much of a person’s identity while other sources of connection are weakening, too.
Pressler describes how our social lives once consisted of overlapping “webs of association”: work, family, neighborhoods, religious communities, unions, and other institutions. “If one thing broke, we had many other things to catch us.”
For some of the men he studied, the reality today can look very different: “It's one web of association or nothing.”
At the same time, he sees deeper forms of membership being displaced by “thinner, transactional forms of membership.”
That doesn't mean employers should become someone's entire community. It means leaders need to recognize the weight the workplace may already be carrying, particularly for employees with fewer sources of connection outside it.
Pressler suggests thinking about workplaces as institutions embedded in communities, able to serve as connection points to relationships beyond work.
The goal isn't to make work someone's entire social world. It's to keep it from becoming their single point of failure.
Who gets to connect?
But efforts to strengthen connection raise a more difficult question: How do organizations create opportunities for men to build relationships with one another without recreating the exclusion of the past?
Reeves’s slate mine anecdote captures that tension. The relationships formed there existed within an overwhelmingly male workplace. Expanding opportunity means leaving that exclusion behind, not romanticizing it.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean leaving behind every opportunity for solidarity among men.
For Reeves, purpose matters: “Why are we forming this group? What’s the purpose of this group?”
That's an important distinction for leaders. The question isn't simply whether men should have spaces to connect, but what those spaces are designed to accomplish, who benefits from them, and whether they ultimately strengthen connection across difference.
Pressler adds another qualification: context and power matter. The experience of a man with little control over his work schedule who changes jobs frequently is different from that of a highly educated professional in an institution where men’s informal networks may historically have excluded women.
And Reeves is equally clear about what addressing men’s disconnection cannot become.
“If men are struggling to connect, that is not the fault of women. It is not the fault of the women’s movement. It is not the fault of feminism... This is not a finger-pointing exercise.”
Supporting men’s connection and advancing women’s inclusion do not have to be competing agendas.
From bonding to bridging
There may, in fact, be a relationship between the two.
Pressler draws a distinction between bonding, the connections people develop within a group, and bridging, the connections they build across difference.
“The only way you can do bridging effectively is by having a stable foundation of bonding social capital.”
That offers another way to think about gender partnership, an idea Catalyst explores in its recent book Men at Work.
Gender partnership means people of all genders sharing responsibility for advancing gender equity and inclusion. One of the behaviors Catalyst identifies for leaders (what we call the 5 Bs of gender partnership) is to Bridge gender gaps, which includes creating connection across gender rather than leaving the work of equity to one group.
A recent study by Catalyst involving nearly 5,000 employees across five countries found that just 29% of employees demonstrated everyday gender partnership behaviors, including 34% of women and 25% of men. Employees who engaged in gender partnership were also four times more likely to report high levels of connection with coworkers and four times more likely to experience inclusion at work.
That makes Pressler's distinction between bonding and bridging especially relevant. For leaders, gender partnership suggests that the answer isn't to choose between creating connection for men and advancing inclusion for women. It's to consider how the two can reinforce each other.
Connection can't become an excuse to retreat into gendered silos. But inclusion is harder to sustain if some employees don't see where they belong within it.
The harder possibility lies between those poles: having a stake both in our own belonging and in one another's ability to belong.
Is inclusion supposed to be easy?
That won’t necessarily be a comfortable conversation.
Reeves argues that discomfort may be part of doing it honestly:
“You have to create space to have real discomfort. Allow for the discomfort. And then work through the discomfort in a way that’s trusting," he said.
Questions about men’s connection can provoke legitimate concerns about power and exclusion. Conversations about gender equity can also raise difficult questions about where men fit and what role they have to play.
Avoiding either tension doesn't resolve it.
As organizations navigate new technologies, workforce expectations, and ways of working, leaders face a question that gets far less attention than productivity or skills:
How do we build workplaces where everyone can find connection and belonging?
Not every answer will come from the workplace. Nor should it. But the workplace is something leaders can shape: how work is structured, how people connect, and whether inclusion creates a meaningful role for everyone.
That may mean resisting simple narratives about a “male loneliness epidemic.” It may mean recognizing that men's connection and women's advancement don't have to be competing concerns. And it may mean designing workplaces where belonging isn't something one group gains at another's expense.
As Reeves poignantly asked at the end of our conversation: “Is inclusion always supposed to be easy?”
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