For decades, we’ve been told a simple story: when women fall behind, it’s injustice. When men fall behind, it’s failure.

That may sound exaggerated. But new experimental research suggests it isn’t.

A recent large-scale study involving more than 35,000 Americans found something striking. When participants were presented with a situation in which a worker had fallen behind—earned less, performed worse, or ended up with nothing—people responded differently depending on whether that worker was male or female.

When the low performer was a man, significantly more participants chose to give him nothing. When the low performer was a woman, more participants redistributed support. Even more revealing, participants were more likely to believe that the man had fallen behind because he didn’t try hard enough.

The researchers call this “statistical fairness discrimination.” That is, people infer that disadvantaged men are less deserving because they assume their disadvantage reflects low effort.

The Effort Story

In the study, participants were asked to redistribute earnings between two workers. In some conditions, earnings were based on productivity. In others, earnings were assigned randomly.

Here’s the important part: even when outcomes were random—when effort had nothing to do with it—participants were still more likely to believe that the male who ended up behind had exerted less effort than the female who ended up behind. In other words, even in the absence of evidence, assumptions about effort were not neutral.

In plain language: when men fall behind, people are more likely to assume they did not try hard enough.

That is not data-driven reasoning. It reflects a prior belief. And prior beliefs shape compassion.

The Compassion Gap

The study didn’t just look at small redistribution decisions. It also asked participants about public policy: should the government provide support to people falling behind in education and the labor market?

Support dropped noticeably when the group described as falling behind was male rather than female.

In other words, sympathy is gendered. The willingness to intervene is gendered. The attribution of responsibility is gendered. Importantly, this was not confined to one political or demographic group. The pattern appeared broadly, suggesting that it reflects a shared cultural assumption rather than a narrow ideological position.

When women fall behind, we instinctively look for barriers. When men fall behind, we instinctively look for flaws.

What This Means

This pattern shows up in places many of us already sense it.

When boys fall behind in school, we talk about motivation and behavior. When girls fall behind, we talk about resources and environment. When men leave the workforce, we question work ethic. When women leave the workforce, we look for systemic obstacles. When fathers struggle financially after divorce, we assume irresponsibility. When mothers struggle, we assume hardship.

The study does not use the word gynocentrism, or make the obvious reference to moral typecasting. It stays within the language of behavioral economics and calls the phenomenon “fairness discrimination.” But the mechanism is clear: disadvantage is interpreted through a moral lens—and that lens is not symmetrical.

Women are more readily cast as vulnerable. Men are more readily cast as responsible. And responsibility without context easily becomes blame.

The Quiet Cost

This matters because perception drives policy.

If society believes that male disadvantage is primarily self-inflicted, there will be less urgency to address it. If people assume boys who fall behind simply didn’t try hard enough, we will design fewer interventions. If struggling men are viewed as less deserving, institutions will reflect that belief—often without conscious intent.

No one has to be malicious. All that is required is a background assumption that male failure signals character weakness. Once that belief takes hold, compassion narrows. And when compassion narrows, so does support.

A Hard Question

Here is the uncomfortable question: why are effort assumptions gendered in the first place?

Why do we instinctively read female disadvantage as circumstantial and male disadvantage as dispositional?

The study does not answer that. It simply shows that the pattern exists. But patterns rarely emerge from nowhere. They reflect cultural narratives about men as agents, providers, and actors—people who are expected to overcome adversity. When they do not, disappointment can harden into judgment.

Women, by contrast, are more often framed as relational beings whose setbacks invite protection. Protection invites support.
Men are more often expected to handle adversity on their own. And when they do not, expectation invites scrutiny.

When Men Fall Behind

We are living in a time when boys lag in reading proficiency, when young men withdraw from education, when male labor-force participation declines, and when male suicide rates far exceed those of women.

Yet when men fall behind, the cultural reflex is not alarm. It is evaluation. Did he try hard enough? Did he make better choices? Did he apply himself?

Sometimes those questions are valid. But when they are asked of only one sex, they reveal something deeper than fairness.

They reveal a compassion gap.

And that gap shapes everything—from classrooms to courtrooms to public policy.

When men fall behind, we don’t just measure their outcomes. We measure their worth.

Men Are Good, as are you.

https://academic.oup.com/jeea/article/23/6/2212/8112864
Cappelen, A. W., Falch, R., & Tungodden, B. (2025). Experimental evidence on the acceptance of males falling behind. Journal of the European Economic Association, 23(6), 2212–2240.

Years ago I read a book called The Death of White Sociology. It explored the rise of a Black sociological viewpoint and challenged the assumptions of what the authors called “White sociology.” What struck me most was not only the book’s critique of how Blacks had been studied and described, but the way it mapped the machinery by which a culture teaches itself to see a group as lesser.

It showed how prejudice does not survive by hatred alone. It survives through a system of reinforcement. Research, media, public opinion, everyday conversation, and institutional assumptions all work together until a distorted view begins to feel like simple common sense. The result is that the targeted group is not merely disliked. It is interpreted through a lens of defect.

As I read it, I kept having the same thought: there is something here that resembles what men face today.

Let me be clear. This is not an argument that men have endured the same history that Blacks endured. They have not. The suffering is not the same. The legal and social conditions are not the same. But the pattern by which a group is culturally misread, judged by hostile assumptions, and portrayed as inherently flawed can look strikingly similar.

That is the comparison worth making.

How a Culture Teaches Itself to See

The book described three powerful channels through which the myth of Black inferiority was spread: common knowledge, the media, and science. Together, they created a self-reinforcing system. Each one echoed the others until the message became nearly impossible to challenge.

Common knowledge is what people “just know” without thinking. In the period the book described, it was simply accepted that Blacks were inferior. That belief did not feel like prejudice to most people. It felt like reality.

Today, something similar operates in a different direction. It is widely assumed that men, as a class, are the problem—emotionally limited, morally suspect, prone to harm. Not some men. Men.

Once that assumption settles in, everything else begins to orbit around it.

The Media: Then and Now

Media plays a powerful role in teaching people how to see.

In earlier decades, Blacks were often portrayed as immature, unintelligent, and incapable of managing life without guidance. Characters like Stepin Fetchit or Amos and Andy reinforced an image of Blacks as confused, dependent, and lacking competence.

Today, it is difficult not to notice a similar pattern applied to men. The modern version is not as overt, but it is just as persistent. Think of characters like Homer Simpson and countless others—men portrayed as childish, incompetent, emotionally clueless, and in need of a woman to guide or correct them.

The message accumulates:
Men are not fully capable. Men need women to straighten them out.

Over time, that message begins to feel normal.

Science and the Framing of Defect

One of the most troubling aspects described in The Death of White Sociology was how research itself could be shaped by cultural assumptions.

In the early to mid-20th century, much psychological and sociological research was not designed to help Blacks. It was designed to explain what was wrong with them. It cataloged deficits. It emphasized pathology. It framed Blacks as needing to change in order to fit the dominant culture.

That pattern is not entirely gone. It has, in many ways, shifted.

Today, a great deal of research on men begins with a similar orientation. It is often less about understanding men and more about diagnosing them. Masculinity is framed as problematic. Male traits are frequently interpreted as risks rather than resources. The focus is not on how to support men, but on how men must change.

And just as importantly, what does not get highlighted matters.

In earlier times, when research produced findings that challenged the narrative of Black inferiority, those findings were often minimized or ignored. They did not fit the story, so they did not spread.

Today, we see a parallel dynamic. When data shows men as victims—whether in areas like domestic violence, educational decline, or mental health—it is often underreported or downplayed. When men do well, it is frequently reframed as evidence of advantage rather than strength. The result is a public picture that remains lopsided.

When only one side of the story is consistently told, it stops feeling like a story. It starts feeling like truth.

Difference Turned Into Deficiency

Another striking pattern from the earlier era was the assumption that Blacks needed proximity to Whites in order to become more “civilized” or mature. The closer one was to White influence, the better one was assumed to be.

That same structure appears today in a different form.

Men are often seen as needing to become more like women in order to be fully healthy or mature. Emotional styles, communication patterns, and ways of processing experience that are more typical of women are treated as the standard. When men do not match those patterns, they are seen as deficient rather than different.

The message, again subtle but persistent, is this:
Men are better when they resemble women.

Perpetrators, Not Victims

Perhaps the most powerful mechanism described in the book was this:

Blacks were defined as the creators of social problems, not the victims of them.

Once that framing takes hold, something important happens. The suffering of the group becomes harder to see. If a group is the problem, then its pain feels less deserving of attention.

That dynamic is deeply relevant today.

Men are routinely framed as the source of social pathology—violence, war, exploitation, dysfunction. And while individual men certainly do harmful things, the broader cultural narrative often treats men as a class as the problem itself.

As a result, male suffering becomes less visible.

Male loneliness.
Male suicide.
Male educational struggles.
Male victimization.

These are real, measurable issues. But they rarely sit at the center of public concern in the same way that other forms of suffering do.

Selective empathy becomes the norm.

The Psychological Cost

When a culture repeatedly tells a group that it is the problem, that message does not remain external. It gets absorbed.

In the years prior to the 1960s, many Black activists faced a heartbreaking reality. Some Blacks had been so worn down by years of judgment and cultural dismissal that their spirits were deeply damaged. The constant message of inferiority had taken its toll.

The civil rights movement did something powerful in response. It did not only change laws. It worked to restore identity and dignity. Phrases like “Black is Beautiful” were not slogans in the shallow sense. They were acts of psychological repair. They challenged a culture-wide narrative and helped rebuild a sense of worth.

 

That kind of shift matters.

Today, we should at least be willing to ask whether something similar is needed for men and boys.

If boys grow up hearing that masculinity is toxic, that men are the problem, that their instincts are suspect, it is not hard to imagine the impact. Shame takes root quietly. Identity becomes confused. Confidence erodes.

At some point, a counter-message becomes necessary—not one that diminishes others, but one that restores balance.

A simple one might be enough to start:

Men are good.

Not the Same History—But a Recognizable Pattern

The point of this comparison is not to collapse different histories into one.

It is to recognize a pattern.

A culture can:

• create a narrative about a group

• reinforce it through media, research, and conversation

• filter all new information through that lens

• and slowly make that narrative feel like reality

When that happens, the group is no longer seen clearly.

It is seen symbolically—as a problem.

We have seen this before.

The people living through it then often could not see it clearly.
It felt normal.
It felt justified.
It felt like truth.

That may be the most unsettling part.

Because if a culture can do that once, it can do it again.

Not the same history.
Not the same wounds.

But a pattern familiar enough that we would be wise—very wise—to recognize it.

Men Are Good, as are you.

The Death of White Sociology https://amzn.to/4dToojz

I recently read a study titled “Women Who Hate Men: A Comparative Analysis Across Extremist Reddit Communities.” It caught my attention for an obvious reason: it attempts to examine something that is rarely acknowledged in mainstream research—the existence of hostility toward men. That alone makes it worth looking at.

To its credit, the study does arrive at an important conclusion. It finds that gender-based hostility online is not confined to one direction. Both misogynistic and misandric communities show similar patterns of negativity, and in some cases, the levels of expressed “hate” are comparable—or even higher—in feminist spaces. In fact, one of the more striking findings was that the mainstream Feminism subreddit, not the more radical GenderCritical group, showed the highest “hate” levels in the study’s user-level emotional analysis, while the incel group skewed more toward sadness. That’s not a small finding. For years, the dominant narrative has been that hostility flows primarily from men toward women, while negative attitudes toward men are either minimal, reactive, or insignificant. This study quietly challenges that assumption.

But as I read through the paper, I found myself struck by something else. The conclusion may be balanced, but the path getting there is not.

The Framing Is Not Neutral

One of the first things that stood out was how much time the paper spends describing the dangers women face from misogyny. There are detailed references to harassment, violence, abuse of female public figures, and the broader cultural impact of anti-female hostility.

But there is no parallel effort to explore the harms faced by men. There is little discussion of male victimization, little acknowledgment of anti-male stereotypes, and almost no examination of how cultural narratives might shape hostility toward men and boys. So even in a study that claims to look at both sides, the starting point is not neutral. It begins from a familiar position: misogyny is the established problem. Misandry is something newer, something less understood, something that needs to be “added” to the conversation. That framing matters because it subtly positions one form of hostility as primary and the other as secondary.

The “Manosphere” Problem

Another moment gave me pause. The paper describes the “manosphere” as:

“a network of websites and social media groups that promote misogynistic beliefs.”

That’s not a finding. That’s a definition, and definitions matter. If you begin by defining a category as misogynistic, then study that category, you are not really testing whether it is misogynistic. You have already assumed the answer.

Now, to be fair, some spaces within what is often called the “manosphere” are openly hostile. Anyone who has spent time online knows that. But the term itself is broad. It includes a wide range of spaces—some focused on anger, yes, but others focused on fatherhood, men’s mental health, legal concerns, relationships, or simply trying to make sense of a changing world. To define all of that as inherently misogynistic collapses important distinctions. It turns a complex landscape into a single, pre-labeled category, and once that happens, the analysis begins to feel circular.

Reaction or Expression?

As I continued reading, I noticed something more subtle. Feminist spaces in the study are often framed—implicitly—as reacting to misogyny. The idea seems to be that negative attitudes toward men are, at least in part, a response to harm. That may sometimes be true, but it is not something the study actually tests.

Interestingly, the data itself complicates that assumption. When the researchers looked at emotional patterns—particularly expressions of “hate”—the feminist subreddit showed some of the highest levels at the user level. That’s a striking finding, because it suggests that hostility toward men is not always merely reactive. It can be active. It can be sustained. And in some cases, it may be as intense as the hostility it is presumed to respond to. The study reports this, but it does not fully grapple with what it means.

The Problem with Measuring “Hate”

The paper relies heavily on computational tools to measure toxicity and emotion. That’s understandable. Large datasets require some kind of automated analysis. But these tools have limits. They tend to detect what we might call explicit hostility—insults, threats, and dehumanizing language.

What they struggle to capture is something more subtle: generalized suspicion, moral framing, one-sided narratives about harm, and the steady pathologizing of a group. Hatred does not always announce itself clearly, and it does not always use harsh words. Sometimes it sounds like concern. Sometimes it sounds like analysis. Sometimes it even sounds like virtue. And that kind of hostility can be harder to measure—but no less real.

The Charts That Don’t Quite Clarify

I’ll admit something simple as well: the charts didn’t help much. There were clusters of colors, distributions, and visual patterns—but very few clear numbers that would allow a reader to easily compare groups. How much more hate? How much less? It was difficult to say.

The visuals looked scientific, but they didn’t always make the findings clearer. They gave an impression of precision without always delivering clarity.

An Important Step—But Not the Whole Picture

So where does that leave us? I do not think this is a bad study. In some ways, it is an important one. It takes a step that many researchers have been unwilling to take. It acknowledges that hostility toward men exists, that it can be measured, and that it should not be ignored. That matters.

At the same time, the study reflects the broader environment in which it was produced—an environment that still tends to treat men as the default source of harm, and women’s hostility as something more contextual, more explainable, or more justified. Because of that, the analysis feels uneven. The conclusion points toward balance, but the framing leans away from it.

And that, to me, is the most revealing part of all. The study is valuable not only for what it finds, but for what it unintentionally exposes about the culture surrounding the research itself.

The Deeper Issue

In the end, what struck me most is this: we are beginning to see evidence that hostility toward men is real and measurable, but we are still not willing to face it directly—not with the same seriousness, the same clarity, the same moral urgency, or the same willingness to question the stories we have been telling ourselves for decades.

If researchers truly want to understand gendered hostility, they cannot stop with fringe Reddit communities. They need to look at the media, the schools, the therapeutic world, public health messaging, and other major cultural institutions and ask a very simple question: Who is being portrayed as dangerous? Who is being treated as defective? Who is being blamed, pathologized, mocked, feared, or morally downgraded? Men or women?

That would be a far more revealing study. Because the most powerful forms of hatred are not always loud, crude, or obvious, and they are not always found in anonymous online forums. Sometimes they are found in respectable institutions. Sometimes they are taught in classrooms, repeated in headlines, embedded in therapy language, or smuggled into public discourse under the cover of compassion and progress.

And that is precisely what makes them so powerful. When contempt for men is framed as insight, when suspicion of men is framed as wisdom, and when the steady belittling of men is framed as moral sophistication, it becomes very difficult even to name what is happening.

Until we are willing to examine that honestly, we will keep misunderstanding the problem. We will keep measuring only the crudest forms of hate while ignoring the more polished and socially approved forms. We will keep pretending that hostility toward men is mostly reactive, incidental, or harmless, when in many settings it has become normalized.

And when a culture cannot honestly recognize the contempt it directs at half the human race, it does not become more just. It becomes more blind.

Men Are Good, as are you.

Coppolillo, Erica In: Scientific reports, 2025 Apr 22, volume 15, issue 1, page 13952

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-81567-9