Towards a sensible approach to measuring masculinity

From deficit-based to strength-based methodology, courtesy of Movember

I hate being asked to define “positive” or “healthy” masculinity. Partly because I don’t want to be prescriptive. There is no more one way of being a good man than there is of being a good woman. The closest I tend to come is to point out that in almost every society, manhood is defined in terms of producing surplus value; of giving more than you get.

Given that for most people gender is an important aspect of their identity, and given that there are plenty of folks willing to offer prescriptions for masculinity that are retrograde, the question cannot be avoided.

As Robert Bly writes in his 1990 book Iron John: “I say we have to be a little gentle here, and allow the word masculine and the word feminine to be spoken and not be afraid some moral carpenter will make boxes of those words and imprison us in them. We are all afraid of boxes, and rightly so.”

But another reason for my reluctance is that there just isn’t much good research on this front. Definitions and measures of masculinity vary wildly, are often deeply influenced by ideological priors, and are out of touch with the lived experience of most men.

I’m delighted then to see some important new work from the Movember Institute of Men’s Health, which represents a big step forward in this field. A paper just published in Men and Masculinities and authored by Peter Fisher and colleagues (including AIBM Advisory Board member Zac Seidler) examines 65 masculinity scales developed over the last 50 years. Every scale you’ve heard of is in there, from the Bem Sex Role Inventory to the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory, along with dozens you haven’t.

It is an excellent piece of scholarly work: balanced, rigorous, and forward-looking.

The measures are bad

Their main finding is that the vast majority (78%) of these measures have been “deficit based”, focusing on potentially negative attributes of male identity and experience. As they write:

The field has been far more attentive to the risks and harms associated with masculine norms than to positive alternatives.

Indeed it has. And the 78% is an underestimate of the overall bias in the field, since the Movember team effectively defined any scale with any positive aspects in it as on the “strengths” side of the ledger.

The Movember team are careful not to be too critical of the work that has been done in the deficit frame, describing it as “a well-founded tradition that has generated critical insights about men's health”.

I’d put it differently, and less charitably: these measures are mostly garbage.

The great philosopher Bernard Williams warned about people who “smuggle their answers into their questions”, and I fear that this has been true for most of the work on masculinity. As the Movember team point out in an accompanying substack (and do subscribe btw):

The dominant approach in masculinity research works roughly like this: present survey respondents with statements reflecting traditional or restrictive masculine norms, measure how strongly they agree, and then test whether higher agreement predicts worse outcomes. This is called a “deficit-based” or “problematized” approach because the underlying hypothesis is that stronger adherence to these norms is associated with deficits - more harmful results.

The trouble is that the scholars themselves decide what count as “traditional” or “restrictive” or “negative” norms with regard to masculinity, and then impose their views on the study.

To make matters worse, the samples are usually wildly unrepresentative, often consisting of white U.S. undergraduates. The Movember study shows that of the 65 scales studied, fewer than one in ten (9%) showed strong external validity i.e. would be applicable outside the particular sample used in the study.

Also, the field is woefully out of date, especially given the rapid changes in culture in recent years. The paper shows that masculinity scales published before 2000 make up 31% of the sample but 77% of all citations.

Oh, and another thing. Most of the masculinity scales fail to distinguish between the views of the respondent themselves from their opinion on general social norms. A typical item asks respondents to agree or disagree with a statement like "a real man never shows emotion."

But what does it mean to agree? The Movember paper quotes researchers Thompson and Bennett on this point:

Researchers could interpret respondents' scores on the same masculinity ideology measure as evidence of people's agreement that the cultural norms exist, as evidence that the norms are desirable, and/or as evidence that the norms are personal values.

In other words, the same score could mean "I believe this," "society believes this," or "I've noticed other men believe this", three very different men giving identical answers.

The Movember authors correctly observe that this amounts to "a foundational challenge to the empirical validity of masculinities research," leaving the field "vulnerable to critique or dismissal."

Yup. And it matters that this poor-quality, deficit-based work accounts for the vast majority of the work on masculinity (or “masculinities”), because it doesn’t stay corralled in academic journals and seminar rooms. As they write:

This matters well beyond academia. If the only well-developed language for talking about masculinity and health is organized around risk and harm, that’s also the only language available for public campaigns, clinical work, and policy.

A better way forward

The Movember team are building a "Healthy Manhood Index". This is in development across four countries and grounded in what men themselves say healthy manhood means.

As they conclude:

We’ve spent fifty years measuring the costs of rigid masculinity. It’s time to get equally serious about measuring what thriving actually looks like.

This is such important work. The decades of deficit-framing around masculinity in the academy has spilled out into the broader culture. It has fueled the idea that if men have problems it is their fault for adhering to what scholars have decided are “toxic” or “restrictive” ideas about masculinity.

Even the strengths-based metrics are a bit of a muddle, as the authors point out, with some of them centered on “reconstructing” masculinity (i.e. seeing strength as a positive) and other on “deconstructing” masculinity (defining strenght

It is truly heartening to see a good faith, constructive effort to move to a better place. It’s easy to critique, harder to construct. So hats off to Movember on this one. Go get em, guys.