In breakout spaces, meeting pods and presentation suites around Britain, things are changing. More and more workplaces have – quietly, because they’re well aware of how it might look – started men’s groups. They’re places where guys can come and chat about whatever’s worrying them, whether in the office or outside of it, and get some support.
And on reading that, you might well have thought what these companies thought you might be thinking: there’s already a men’s group, you idiot – it’s called “the entirety of working life”.
But there’s a big difference between a men’s group and a boys’ club. “The key thing for us is that we’re not afraid to show vulnerabilities,” Jit Thaker, a Virgin Media O2 employee who helps run its men’s group, told Bloomberg. “And that gives other people the courage to speak up.” People from other work groups – whether for women, LGBTQ employees, ethnic minorities or others – are all welcome.
And really, this is absolutely what you might expect to be happening. It’s 2025. The Government has just launched its Men’s Health Strategy, with a big emphasis on improving men’s mental health. It is, you will have heard by now, OK not to be OK.
Yet still you suspect some people will roll their eyes. But my first thought on reading the Bloomberg piece was that this is exactly the sort of thing I could have done with earlier in my career.
My first job, at a small family firm up north, was pretty noxious. It was a decade ago now, but it’s still vivid. Bollockings were handed out in front of the whole open-plan office, the editor clomping over to hiss loudly enough in junior colleagues’ ears that everyone could tell what they’d done wrong. Salaries were low and workloads high. The owners’ dog took a dump under my desk.
I was always skint, I was always worried I was about to get sacked, and I was always mortified when my semi-regular balls-ups let my colleagues down. I’d crawl into bed at about 8.30pm, exhausted, then stare at the ceiling until 2am. Then I’d walk back to the office the next day, dry-heaving with nerves every few paces.
I ended up going on antidepressants and getting therapy on the NHS. But it was over the phone, and the only time I could get was on my lunch hour, so I ended up trying to talk through why work was making me miserable directly outside the workplace which was making me miserable, whispering in case anyone overheard me slagging them off.
After two years of this, I got out and got another job, this time at a magazine in London. Everything there was miles better, but I still felt deeply unqualified and uncertain. The dry heaves came back with a vengeance. This was everything that I’d wanted, and nobody was doing dumps under my desk anymore. So why was I freaking out? Again, there wasn’t really a place I could put those feelings.
Fortunately, I had friends who helped me through it. But nobody ever mentions how viscerally, physically painful it can be to drag that stuff out of yourself, even – in fact, especially – when you’re telling it to someone you love very much. Having a men’s group where I could be more anonymous might have got me where I wanted to be faster – and saved me a lot of furtive retching behind bushes.
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Yet, the fact that these companies hadn’t been keen to publicise the very obviously good work their groups were doing is desperately sad. As the Bloomberg piece notes, these groups are still rare in big business.
Lately, we’ve been worrying about the most poisonous parts of masculinity, and with good reason. A new report by the charity Equimondo found 50 per cent of men who did its survey agreed with misogynistic “red pill” rhetoric. But these issues – of men feeling lonely and of men who spit bile at whoever they can hurt – are not distinct. The Venn diagram, in fact, is almost a circle. In that same report, a third of men between 18 and 24 agreed with the statement “I will never find someone to share my life with,” and two-thirds of all men say they have to rely on themselves because nobody else has their back.
That emotional isolation – which I felt too – powers so much of the worst parts of modern masculinity. Men’s groups at work won’t fix everything. But get in early enough, and show these men enough empathy, and they will be less likely to throw their own pain at other people. This quiet revolution is something to start shouting about.
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