- A new Utah task force aims to strengthen men and boys' health, career opportunities and sense of purpose.
- The goal is not male versus female performance, but rather for both genders to flourish.
- Findings could guide government policy and initiatives by religious communities, employers and nonprofits.
A Utah task force is studying ways to ensure that men and boys in the Beehive State thrive, targeting health, vocation and a sense of purpose. Although the work is in the early stages, the group is convinced that suicide rates, mental health, educational attainment, employment and other factors can all be improved if there’s a clear picture of where some males are struggling so they can be helped.
It’s not about pitting males and females against each other, according to task force co-chairs Aimee Winder Newton, who directs the governor’s Office of Families, and Nic Dunn, vice president of strategy and senior fellow at the Sutherland Institute, a conservative public policy think tank based in Utah.
Rather, it’s about acknowledging that women are faring better on some measures like college enrollment and ensuring that everyone can flourish.
“Ultimately our goal is to see everyone in our state thriving — both men and women. Since strong families are such an important part of our state, it’s critical that we have both strong mothers and strong fathers,” she said.
The issue has been important to Gov. Spencer Cox, Winder Newton said, noting Cox is concerned about data showing that nationally males have been struggling in K-12 education and with workforce participation, among other issues.
“The governor saw the importance of Utah addressing this issue and wanted to look into the Utah data to see what was happening here in the state,” Winder Newton told Deseret News.
About a year ago, Sutherland had recently published “The Utah Family Miracle,” a report looking at the state’s strengths that offered a handful of policy suggestions to “keep Utah families strong and stable.” One of them was the formation of a commission to address challenges facing men and boys.
“Since we were both looking at the issue, we decided to join forces,” Winder Newton said.
According to the task force mission statement, “The Task Force on the Well-being of Men and Boys exists to find policy and community solutions that help Utah’s men and boys lead flourishing lives. Through collaboration with community leaders and evaluation of research and evidence, the task force educates the public and recommends policy solutions to the governor and state legislature to improve the mental and physical health, enhance the vocational opportunities and strengthen the sense of purpose for Utah’s men and boys.”
Winder Newton said the focus on “purpose” is broad and includes contributions in family life, work and other societal impacts.
Studying trends both good and bad
Dunn said that Utah is hailed for many positives, including a strong economy, a strong work ethos, a strong education ethic, investment in public education, really strong families and strong faith engagement.
“Those things are all important pillars of a thriving, flourishing life,” he said, adding that faith, family, community and work are key ingredients that happiness expert Arthur Brooks says are elements of a happiness portfolio. Utah’s strength in those areas has made the state a “standout,” Dunn said.
But “within that context, there are data trends showing that a concerning number of men are, at times, drifting away from those anchors of a thriving life. In both the work of this task force and data trends, as well as a series of podcast conversations Sutherland has had on a weekly program called Defending Ideas that dives into each of these areas, we see evidence of kind of men pulling back in areas like higher education and labor force participation.”
The podcast has included conversations with national and local experts about mental health and community connection and suicide among men, among other topics.
Dunn said that men and women both need to be strong and connected and that the state needs strong families if it’s to continue to shine.
“This has been in a sort of information collection mode and still sort of in problem definition, problem articulation and scope. So there’s more to come,” Dunn said, adding more data will be released over time.
But some facts about how males are doing are already known. While the task force meetings are not open to the public, he said Sutherland and the Office of Families, both separately and within the task force, are hoping to jumpstart some serious conversations about what can be done to address issues so everyone does well.
He expects the task force to find recommendations not only for government action, but also things that religious communities and employers and nonprofits can do.
“It seems pretty clear to me that while public policy can and should play a role in helping to address many of these issues, public policy alone is insufficient to address all of them, because sometimes these are cultural or social issues. They are issues of purpose and meaning for these men who struggle, and that’s not always the kind of thing that the government public policy is well-suited to addressing,” Dunn said.
Not-so-good news
In June, Dunn on behalf of Sutherland, released a survey report showing that most men in the U.S. are doing OK, but that a not insignificant number are struggling. As Deseret News reported at the time:
- 36% of American men said they weren’t sure of their place in society.
- 3 in 10 didn’t have someone with whom they felt they could discuss their mental health challenges.
- 1 in 5 believed admitting to such challenges is a sign of weakness.
“That’s not most men, but it’s a large enough subset of American men who are struggling across key domains of life to be worrisome,” Dunn said at the time.
Among the data it has pored over, the task force has considered a late 2023 memorandum from the Utah System of Higher Education that looked at how education impacts other aspects of life — and what contributes to whether adults pursue more education.
The education group commissioned a study by the Cicero Group that found postsecondary education is “strongly correlated” with job security, lifetime earnings, civic engagement and personal health and happiness.
The report also noted barriers to pursuing higher education, including cost and lack of child care. A memorandum summarizing the findings said that financial concerns include “insufficient tuition aid, food and child care insecurity and doubts about being able to afford a degree.”
It also noted that physical and mental illness are “significant contributing factors” to why postsecondary students drop out.
An early task force report
A year ago, the task force received early findings from the Utah Department of Health and Human Services documenting some of the challenges males face.
The report found that between 2012 and 2022, the share of Utah males who experienced at least four adverse childhood experiences — often called ACEs — rose from 11.4% to 19.3%, based on data from the Utah Department of Health and Human Services Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System. The share was nearly 1 in 4 for Native American men.
Those ACEs include environmental and household challenges, parental separation and multiple forms of abuse, including physical, emotional and sexual.
The share of men who experienced mental illness during childhood rose from 17.3% in 2013 to 21.3% in 2022. The report said the share was even higher for women.
Meanwhile, in 2022, 26.9% of males had had parents separate or divorce during their childhood. That year, 18.3% said they’d been exposed to domestic violence while growing up and 1 in 12 had experienced sexual abuse as a child. For women, the latter number was at least double that.
The report noted protective factors — often related to each other — that drive better health, including educational attainment, income, having a job and marital status. “With the exception of obesity, married men fare better than their unmarried counterparts across all selected health outcomes,” the report said.
Among adolescents, sadness, social isolation, serious mental illness, self-harm and suicidal ideation or action all increased between 2015-2023, per the report. And among men, nearly 1 in 5 reported poor mental health.
The task force is still gathering data and will issue other reports, Dunn said. It continues to meet with national and local experts and will over time come up with policy recommendations to present to the governor and Utah Legislature in hopes of reaching the state’s goal of helping those men and boys who are struggling find more solid footing so they can thrive.
Dunn added, “What I want to start stressing to folks is that if we really care about the thriving of all of Utah residents, in this case, in particular the men who may be struggling, we need to adopt an all-hands-on-deck approach. … We all need to have a little bit of a sense of ownership to make sure that Utah is a place where all of our folks can thrive. “