Family Courts and Custody: The Soft Power of Assumptions

If institutional sexism exists anywhere in plain view, it is in the family courts.

Here, bias does not announce itself. It operates through procedure. Through precedent. Through “standard practice.” It hides inside the phrase best interest of the child while producing outcomes that are strikingly consistent.

When parents separate, the system does not start from a presumption of equal parenthood. It starts from a quieter premise: children remain with their mother unless a compelling reason forces another arrangement.

Fathers are not evaluated as co-equal parents. They are evaluated as exceptions.

In contested cases, fathers lose primary custody roughly 80% of the time. When joint custody is awarded, it often masks substantial imbalance in time and influence. These outcomes are rarely framed as bias. They are described as common sense.

The “tender years” doctrine may have been formally repealed, but its logic still animates decision-making. The vocabulary has evolved; the reflex has not.

Nurturing is interpreted through a feminine template. Emotional attunement is coded maternal. Stability provided by a father is treated as logistical rather than relational. His authority becomes “rigidity.” His expectations become “pressure.” His insistence on structure becomes “control.”

The system does not need overt hostility toward men to function this way. It simply needs assumptions that go unexamined.

And those assumptions carry teeth.

A father can enter court as a fully involved parent and leave as a visitor in his child’s life. He may be assigned alternating weekends and midweek dinners. He may be required to finance the household he no longer lives in. He may be ordered to pay support calculated by formula — without meaningful consideration of what he has just lost.

He has committed no crime. He has not been found unfit. Yet his relationship with his children has been administratively reduced.

Temporary orders — often based on allegations, not findings — can solidify into permanent arrangements. Incentives tilt subtly toward accusation because accusation reshapes leverage. Enforcement mechanisms operate asymmetrically. Financial noncompliance triggers swift penalties. Parenting-time violations often do not.

This is not accidental drift. It is structural gravity.

And the cultural message is unmistakable: fathers are replaceable. Fathers are secondary. Fathers are providers first and parents second.

Children absorb that message as well.

They grow up in a society that speaks endlessly about the importance of fathers — while administratively sidelining them. They learn, through lived experience, that a good man can be separated from his children not because he failed them, but because the system assumes he is less essential.

We are told this is neutral law.

We are told this is compassion.

But when one class of parent is routinely displaced without wrongdoing and required to subsidize the displacement, that is not neutrality. It is policy shaped by belief.

And when that belief systematically privileges mothers while diminishing fathers, embedded in courtrooms and codified in practice, it is not compassion.

It is institutional sexism.

Health and Mental Health: Compassion With a Gender

Nowhere is institutional sexism more visible — or more invisible — than in health policy. If you doubt that compassion can be gendered, look at the numbers.

Men die, on average, five to six years earlier than women. They are four times more likely to die by suicide, and far more likely to die from nearly every major cause except breast cancer. Yet when governments allocate research and prevention funding, women’s health dominates by orders of magnitude.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health, for instance, spends billions annually on female-specific conditions. Breast cancer alone receives more than double the research funding of prostate cancer, despite near-equal mortality rates. Cardiovascular disease — the leading killer of men — receives little attention compared to campaigns targeting women’s heart health.

When men die younger, it’s framed as lifestyle. When women die younger, it’s framed as injustice.

That’s the telltale mark of institutional bias: not in the data itself, but in the interpretation of the data.

The same pattern shows up in mental health.
Campaigns for depression and anxiety almost always depict female faces. Suicide prevention materials speak in the language of emotional sharing and help-seeking — the very things men are least likely to do. The implicit assumption is that men should adapt to a female model of healing, rather than systems adapting to how men process distress.

The result is a profession that misunderstands half its clientele. And that misunderstanding has consequences measured in lost lives.

Even at the level of public health administration, the asymmetry is startling. The United States has 10 Offices for Women’s Health — but no equivalent for men. Proposals to create one have repeatedly been dismissed as “unnecessary.” The same pattern exists across Western nations: male-specific health policy is the great unmentionable.

 

Imagine reversing the numbers. Imagine women dying earlier, underrepresented in treatment studies, underserved in prevention, and told that an office for them was unnecessary. We would rightly call that institutional sexism.
So why don’t we call it that now?

Criminal Justice: The Gendered Face of Mercy

If compassion is the currency of justice, men are operating in a perpetual deficit.

The criminal-justice system treats male and female offenders as though they belong to different species. Study after study has found that, controlling for the same crime and criminal history, men receive sentences roughly 60% longer than women. Women are more likely to receive probation, diversion, or community service — often justified under the vague rationale that they are caretakers or victims of circumstance.

When men offend, they are agents; when women offend, they are explained.

Judges, prosecutors, and even juries participate in this bias, most without realizing it. Female defendants are perceived as less threatening, more remorseful, and more reformable. Male defendants are seen as dangerous until proven otherwise. That perception bleeds into bail decisions, plea bargains, and sentencing.

The result is staggering:

• Men make up 93% of the prison population.

• Boys are six times more likely to be suspended from school — often the first step in the pipeline that leads there.

• Male victims of violence, particularly domestic violence, are almost completely invisible in official data and services.

Consider domestic-violence policy. Nearly every Western nation has publicly funded women’s shelters. Almost none have equivalent shelters for men. In the United States, over 2,000 shelters serve women, while an estimated 2, or maybe 3 shelters exist that exclusively serve male victims.

When a man calls the police as a victim, he often risks being arrested himself. Officers have been trained, implicitly or explicitly, to see the man as the likely aggressor. That isn’t personal bias; it’s institutional training built on decades of ideology.

Even when men are the majority of homicide victims, policy still orbits around “violence against women.” The moral frame is so rigid that male suffering can be acknowledged only as a footnote — or as the by-product of “toxic masculinity.”

If that isn’t systemic sexism, what would be?

We’re told that men’s overrepresentation in prison reflects innate aggression or privilege turned sour. But the same system that pathologizes male behavior early on, denies fathers equal custody, and undervalues male mental health is also the one that produces these outcomes. It’s a closed circuit of neglect.

Institutional sexism doesn’t just punish men for misbehavior — it helps create the conditions for it.

Men Are Good.

Next post will address the reasons for these biases.

Institutional Sexism: The Bias We’re Not Allowed to See

For half a century, the term institutional sexism has been used as a club — a way to shame or reform male-dominated systems accused of disadvantaging women. Universities built entire departments around it. Governments shaped funding priorities by it. The media repeated it like a moral mantra: if women lag anywhere, it must be because the system is rigged against them.

But what if we’ve been looking in the wrong direction?

The deeper irony is that institutional sexism is real — just not the way we’ve been taught to see it. Across education, mental health, family courts, criminal justice, and even public health, there are consistent, measurable biases that disadvantage men and boys. Yet these are ignored or rationalized away under a powerful cultural assumption: that sexism only flows one way.

It’s a peculiar blindness, one that reveals how moral reflexes — not data — often shape our perception of fairness. The same academics and policymakers who tell us to “follow the evidence” become strangely incurious when the evidence points toward male disadvantage. The result is a quiet but pervasive structural bias, woven through the institutions that claim to serve us all.

We can see it most clearly in the places where boys and men come into early contact with those institutions: schools, courts, and the helping professions.

1. The Invention of “Institutional Sexism”

The phrase institutional sexism was born out of the same sociological moment that gave us institutional racism. In the late 1960s, civil rights thinkers like Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton argued that prejudice wasn’t just about individual bigots — it was about systems that favored one group over another, often invisibly.

Feminist theorists quickly applied that framework to gender. Books like The Female Eunuch and The Second Sex were reinterpreted through the new structural lens: patriarchy, male privilege, and institutional sexism were said to keep women in subordinate roles regardless of men’s intentions.

In principle, this was a useful insight. Systems do create patterns that individuals may not see. But in practice, the analysis hardened into dogma. “Institutional sexism” became a one-way accusation — never a tool for understanding the whole picture.

No one asked whether those same systems might, in some areas, evolve to favor women. After all, institutions don’t have consciences; they reflect the moral winds of their time. As society began to view women as a protected class and men as a potential threat, those winds shifted. Institutions followed — first in tone, then in policy.

Today, half a century later, nearly every major Western institution — from education to healthcare to media — operates under an implicit assumption of female moral priority. And yet we still use the same 1970s vocabulary, as if men were the default oppressors.

If the sociologists of that era were alive today, they might recognize what has happened: the frame they built to expose bias has itself become biased.

2. Education: The First System to Tilt

If we want to see institutional sexism in action, we need look no further than our schools.

Over the past four decades, classrooms have quietly become ground zero for male disadvantage. The gender gap that once concerned feminists has flipped — and then some. Boys now lag behind girls in virtually every measure of educational success: reading proficiency, GPA, graduation rates, and college enrollment. Yet almost no one calls this an emergency.

The data are unambiguous. By fourth grade, boys are already behind in reading and writing. By high school, they make up two-thirds of the students at the bottom of the class. In college, women earn roughly 60% of degrees, a gap wider than the one that once favored men in the 1970s.

But what’s driving this? The answer lies partly in who’s teaching. Roughly three out of four teachers in primary and secondary education are women. Research by economists like Camille Terrier and David Card has found that female teachers are more likely than male teachers to grade boys lower than their standardized test scores predict — a clear sign of unconscious bias. The same studies show that this bias is strongest in language arts, where subjective grading plays a larger role.

A boy who scores well on a standardized exam might receive a lower classroom grade simply because his behavior or communication style doesn’t align with a teacher’s expectations — expectations shaped by feminine norms of cooperation, compliance, and verbal expression.

Add to this the way schools have restructured around emotional safety and verbal processing — sitting still, group sharing, and “feelings-based” pedagogy — and the institutional disadvantage deepens. We’ve built an educational environment that rewards traits more common in girls, then pathologizes boyish energy as “disorderly” or “defiant.”

A few years ago, psychologist Michael Thompson remarked that schools have become places where “boys’ physicality is seen as a problem to be managed.” He’s right. In many classrooms, a boy’s natural movement, competitiveness, or risk-taking is treated not as developmental difference but as moral failing.

And so the system disciplines rather than accommodates him. Boys are far more likely to be suspended, expelled, or diagnosed with behavioral disorders — outcomes that compound over time. Yet the institutional response is always the same: create more programs to “help girls.”

That’s not compassion. That’s ideology.

When researchers and journalists discuss these trends, they rarely use the language of institutional sexism. They speak instead of “engagement gaps” or “learning style differences.” The vocabulary of bias suddenly disappears the moment it might implicate institutions as anti-male.

But the logic is exactly the same as the one used to define systemic discrimination against women: when a group’s consistent disadvantage stems from the structure and norms of an institution, that’s systemic bias — whether it favors women or men.

By every honest standard, our education system fits that definition.

Men Are Good

Educators, journalists, and researchers say boys are becoming more aggressive. But when you look for the trend data, the evidence quietly disappears.

When “Concern” Replaces Evidence: A Look at Claims About Rising Aggressive Masculinity

Recently I read an article titled “Reading how to be male: Boys’ literature reflects the rise of aggressive masculinity.” The title alone makes a strong empirical claim: that aggressive masculinity is rising. Not perceived as rising. Not debated. Rising.

That’s a measurable claim. Which means it should be supported by measurable data.

Because I take these questions seriously — especially when they concern boys — I wrote to the author, who happened to be a Gender Studies professor, and asked a straightforward question:

What is the empirical evidence that masculine aggressiveness is increasing?

He kindly replied and sent two links — one a media report about educator concerns, and the other an article about a qualitative research project describing how some teachers perceive changes in boys’ attitudes and behavior.

But neither source provided what the title of the article clearly implies:
trend data showing that male aggressiveness is increasing over time.

In fact, the qualitative study he referenced was one my colleagues Janice Fiamengo, Hannah Spier, and I had previously examined in detail in a video discussion. We found it relied largely on interviews, interpretations, and ideological framing rather than measurable behavioral trends. The other link was simply journalism — anecdotes, opinions, and stories about educator worries.

Neither constitutes longitudinal evidence of an actual increase.

Concern Is Not Trend Data

We are living in an era of heightened cultural anxiety about boys and men. Teachers report concern. Journalists report concern. Researchers report concern. Administrators report concern.

But concern is not the same as longitudinal behavioral evidence.

If we are going to say aggression is rising, we should expect to see:

• multi-year behavioral datasets

• crime trend comparisons

• school violence trend data

• disciplinary pattern shifts

• cross-regional replication

Instead, what we often see are:

• perception reports

• educator interviews

• interpretive frameworks

• ideological lenses applied to selected cases

Those can be useful — but they are not trend measurement.

When perception is presented as trajectory, readers are misled.

The Framing Problem

Notice how the framing works in pieces like this:

Step 1 — Start with a cultural fear
Step 2 — Gather qualitative impressions consistent with that fear
Step 3 — Interpret those impressions through a gender-ideological lens
Step 4 — Present the conclusion as a social pattern

No explicit falsification test appears anywhere in the process.

It’s not that the researchers are fabricating observations. It’s that the interpretive frame is doing most of the work.

When boys are already positioned culturally as a risk category, almost any troubling behavior becomes evidence of a broader male pattern — while contradictory evidence gets treated as an exception.

That’s not science. That’s narrative selection.

What Would Real Evidence Look Like?

If aggressive masculinity were truly rising, we would expect at least some of the following indicators to be trending upward:

• male youth violent crime rates

• school assault rates by sex

• disciplinary removals for violent behavior

• male-perpetrated injury incidents

• cross-decade behavioral comparisons

But in many regions, long-term violent crime trends among youth have actually declined from historical peaks — not risen.

So if the claim is increase, the burden of proof belongs with the claimant.

Not with the skeptic.

Why This Matters for Boys

When cultural institutions repeatedly publish claims that boys are becoming more dangerous, more misogynistic, more aggressive — without strong trend evidence — boys absorb that message.

Teachers absorb it.
Parents absorb it.
Clinicians absorb it.
Policy absorbs it.

And boys are treated accordingly.

Suspicion becomes the baseline.
Interpretation becomes gendered.
Normal roughness becomes pathology.
Developmental conflict becomes ideology.

I have worked with boys and men for decades. They are not becoming monsters. They are becoming confused — and often very discouraged — under a steady stream of moral suspicion.

That distinction is critical.

My Exchange With the Author

To his credit, the author responded politely to my inquiry and shared his sources. I wrote back and clarified that my question was specifically about measured increase over time, since the article’s title clearly implies that trajectory.

I never heard back after that follow-up.

That silence doesn’t prove bad faith — but it does highlight something important:
The evidentiary foundation under these claims is often thinner than the confidence of the headlines.

A Better Standard

If we care about boys — truly care — we should insist on a higher evidentiary standard before declaring them socially dangerous.

We should:

• separate perception from measurement

• separate ideology from data

• separate anxiety from trend

• separate narrative from proof

And most importantly:

Assess harm by power and leverage, not gender.

Because when gender becomes the shortcut explanation, truth is usually the casualty.

And this is exactly where conversations like this often go wrong. Part of the disconnect may simply be methodological. The author comes from Gender Studies, a discipline that leans heavily on narrative interpretation, interviews, and thematic impressions rather than longitudinal behavioral measurement. Those tools can tell us how people feel about boys. They cannot tell us whether boys are actually becoming more aggressive over time. That requires hard trend data.

When interpretive methods are presented as empirical proof, perception quietly substitutes for evidence and ideology slips in wearing the costume of science. We’ve seen this pattern before — in inflated domestic violence narratives and other feminist boondoggles where worst-case anecdotes are treated as trends and fear is treated as fact. At that point, we’re no longer measuring reality; we’re constructing a story.

And once that story takes hold, boys aren’t studied — they’re blamed, regulated, and pathologized to solve a crisis the numbers never actually showed.

Men Are Good.