When I meet The Coven’s co-founder Bethany Iverson at her co-working agency’s sunny, art-filled space on St. Paul’s Western Avenue, her demeanor matches the vibrancy of the setting. After opening this space, the company’s second, in February 2020, on the precipice of an extremely uncertain time, The Coven is gaining momentum once again. It’s about to open its first franchised space, on East Lake Street in Minneapolis, and is in negotiations to roll out the first franchise outside of Minnesota this year.
But I’m here to talk to Iverson about another ambitious enterprise: The Coven is authoring three workplace studies, the first of which analyzes the state of men’s well-being in the workplace. The Coven sent 40 questions to 6,513 respondents nationwide, cutting across a range of demos, and screened that down to 2,000 meeting its criteria.
Iverson, who has a master’s in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication from the U of M and 15 years of experience doing strategy for brands and agencies, has authored a lot of consumer research studies in her career, but this one was unusual.
“Often, when we do these big, multi-thousand-person surveys, people just answer the questions and get through it,” she says. But here, in the spaces provided for open-ended responses, she received paragraph after paragraph. “It was obvious that, Oh, these dudes need someone to listen to them,” she says. “So many of their responses were, ‘I have feelings, too.’”
One thing your report finds is that men have returned to public life—they’re back at the gym, back at church; they’re re-engaging with society—and the majority report not being any less happy than they were before the pandemic. Which was shocking to me.
We’ve all read the headlines about this crisis of loneliness with men. So, were the results rosier than you anticipated? We had 2,000 people participate, all of them men and male-identifying. We drew from a pool of people who agreed that issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion matter, especially in the workplace. Because we didn’t want to just talk to dudes who were like, “I don’t care.” Because I think you know the answers you would get.
You didn’t talk to the incels playing Call of Duty in their mom’s basement. Yeah. And so, we already know that the men that we’re talking to care about these issues—maybe aren’t super active in them but think these issues matter. I was definitely surprised about how confident they were, and that overall, their happiness has not dipped. The fact that 83 percent of them report belonging to some kind of a community was really surprising to me. And I think there might be a correlation—men who care about issues of equity, justice, and inclusion may be more predisposed to wanting to have some kind of a community.
Still, despite all the positivity, there was a high percentage of men who said they are feeing attacked or judged. Are they actually being attacked, or are they just in their feelings about these new workplace protocols? That’s a great question: 48 percent have had some kind of in-person confrontation—someone telling them that they should sit down and be quiet or something that made them question whether or not they should contribute to a DEI conversation or activity.
Ah, so this isn’t just men seeing somebody say “White men suck” on Twitter. Forty-six percent of men have seen some online content like that. Slightly more people have had some kind of confrontation in person: 29 percent said that something happened at their workplace, and 29 percent said that something happened in their personal life.
Basically, men are being told to shut up or “This isn’t your place”? Or maybe sometimes men hear the former and they think the latter, or vice versa? Totally. We asked, “Have you ever had an in-person confrontation?” So, it could be a few words that were said in passing, or it could be something a little bit more confrontational. It’s really hard for us to say because we didn’t ask for that level of specificity. If you just looked at the percentages, 93 percent of these guys have participated in a DEI-related event or conversation in the last 12 months. They’re showing up. Seventy percent of them have attended or participated in a DEI-related event in the last month. They’re engaged. But then you read these paragraphs saying, “I feel like I just should be quiet.” One of the participants said, “I feel like I just have to sit back and take the beating.” It’s this very sort of solemn and shameful sense that you get in their verbatims that you don’t see reflected in the data. We asked them, “What do you wish people knew about men like you?” We heard over and over again—from men of all different races—words like “I’m not a scumbag,” “I’m not a criminal.”
Trifecta
Three things about Bethany Iverson
- Iverson and Andrew Sims—Doomtree rapper and a planning director at Carmichael Lynch—eloped to New Orleans in May.
- She loves vintage muscle cars—a love inspired by her grandma’s Shelby Mustang—but she’s yet to acquire one.
- She’s addicted to sneakers, particularly Jordan 1s, Jordan 4s, and Air Max 1s. “I wear a 5½ in boys’ size!”
Are men just not used to being critiqued? I think if we ask why it is so hard for men to hear critiques about themselves and their behavior, it’s because they’ve been taught that there’s no room for them to be vulnerable. And that is the conditioning of the patriarchy, right?
We’re supposed to be tough guys. Totally. So, if I tell you something about yourself, you don’t have the emotional tools to process that in a way that would be productive.
As a man, I’m either supposed to blow by it or to get pissed. What we’re seeing from the study is men are saying, “I’m trying to build this new skill set—I’m listening, I’m learning, but I can’t practice this stuff.” If you were in school, and over the course of the semester you were just expected to sit there and listen, and you didn’t feel like you could engage or you didn’t feel like there was dialogue with your classmates or with your professor, it would be really hard to keep doing it.
So, what’s the main takeaway from their answers? Three years ago, dudes thought DEI issues were not their problem. And today, we’re seeing, no, they do think it matters, but they are hesitating because they’re afraid—to say the wrong thing, of getting cancelled, of offending someone. It seems like we are in a precarious spot: We’ve finally gotten a lot of men to care about these issues, but we are very close to them either burning out or just disengaging because they don’t feel like they have a place in these conversations.
The Coven’s main directive is to make safe workspaces for women. So, what was the impetus for this study in the first place? While The Coven certainly opened its doors as a space centered on the experiences of women, nonbinary, and trans people—and we still are—I think the reality is that the change that we seek doesn’t happen unless we all do it together. We’re not DEI experts. That’s not what we do. There are a lot of really great people who are trained to do that work. We know how to create community and belonging, and it has become very apparent to us that there’s a group of people who are standing outside of the circle.
Are we coming to a crisis where men will eventually give in to their feelings of alienation? It could go a couple different ways. And I would say, more so than having a critique about how DEI is done, I think the red flag from this study is that people are feeling like they don’t belong in this conversation. And I would expect that DEI practitioners are trying to create a sense of belonging with everyone that they’re working with. So, it’s not so much a critique about the way that DEI is done in workplaces, but rather to say some people are not feeling like they’re standing in the circle with us, and that’s an issue. So, how can we solve for that?
Are you worried that you’re going to be cancelled for platforming the thoughts and feelings of 2,000 men? I mean, I hope not! I don’t feel nervous. I think it’s really important that we create a future where everybody gets to be a part of the work and everybody gets to have a sense of belonging and everybody gets to have a sense of community. Historically, men and white men have been a big part of the problems and oppression in the world—and we need them and there are a lot of great men who want to be a part of the solution. Both of those things are true. We need to center the stories of people of color and women and the disabled, and we need to uplift voices that have historically not had much of a say. And we have to do it in partnership with all of us together, or it just doesn’t work. So, I’m not nervous in that sense, because I’m sort of a messenger here.
It was obvious that, Oh these dudes need someone to listen to them. So many of their responses were, ‘I have feelings, too.’” —Bethany Iverson
Does it seem like men are hearing critiques of these big systems as an implicit critique of themselves as individuals? I think you’re spot-on. And I think a lot of these men, they’re identifying as anti-racist, as feminists. So, they understand, systemically, there are issues that we need to solve, and we all have a role in solving them. But when you get to the personal exchanges that they may be having in some of these sessions or in the workplace or with their friends, they’re hearing, “You’re the problem.”
What are some of your prescriptions to fix that paradox? When I look at the heartbreaking answers that a lot of these men are giving, it’s clear that they don’t feel a sense of belonging. And without that, we’re just going to stall out where we are. I think the answers actually lie within these ancient technologies of connection, belonging, and community. Again, we’re not DEI experts at The Coven, but we are community builders. And I think when you look at what creates a really healthy community, it’s people who feel like they are known and seen and they know and see others. They feel like they can take off their armor that they have on to move through the rest of the world with. This research says we haven’t been able to translate that into a lot of the DEI work that’s happening in workplaces. So, how do we infuse some of these really hard conversations with compassion, with margin for error—the same things that we would prioritize in our friendships? We all have to develop different muscles to do that with new people who maybe, like, historically, we haven’t thought it was important to do those things with.
So, we have to treat coworkers with the same kind of love and compassion with which we treat family or friends? In order for us to achieve this bigger thing, we have to be in different relationships with each other than we have been in the past. We asked people, “Who do you talk about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion with?” And “my partner or spouse” or “close friends” were the highest. And “my coworkers” or “acquaintances” were much less.
Isn’t it difficult for men to be honest about what we think about these issues because, in the social media era, there’s this idea that if you say something in public—and make a mistake—it’s going to last forever? I think so. I mean, even The Coven—it’s sort of a weird idea that The Coven is doing a study about men. Some people might not like that.
Would it be offensive to you if a man wrote a study about women in the workplace? Not if the methodology was strong. This is a large quantitative study, so this isn’t about my voice and what I think about this issue; this is about what 2,000 men told us, what they’re experiencing. So, I’m reporting the news—here’s what we heard from all of these men. And based on what I know how to do as a part of my work with The Coven, I can say, “Here are a few ideas about what we could do differently, because there are some concerning findings from this particular study.”
But doesn’t the idea that identity should be the lens through which we view the world come from feminism? The idea that the patriarchy is harmful to everybody, to men, to women, comes from feminism. Feminism helps everybody, or it should help everybody. So, I think you have to look at these ideas not as “Men are the patriarchy, so men are the problem” but rather “Men have been hurt by this too.” And you see that so clearly in these open-ended responses. And you think, Well, let’s get them into this circle, then, so we can all find our way to a different future together.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.