While economists have extensively studied gender norms affecting women, masculinity norms – the informal rules that guide and constrain the behaviours of boys and men – remain underexplored. This column reviews how such norms can shape economic outcomes in labour markets, health, education, households, and politics. Drawing on new survey data from 87,000 individuals across 70 countries, the authors show that adherence to masculinity norms strongly predicts men’s labour supply, risk-taking, health behaviours, and support for authoritarian leadership.
A rich economics literature examines how social norms guide and constrain women’s behaviours throughout their lifetime (Fernández 2007, Bertrand et al. 2015, Giuliano 2020, Bursztyn et al. 2020, 2023). Far fewer papers in our discipline have studied how social norms affect men. As Lundberg (2024) observes, “to economists, the default agent in an economic model is male, so that masculine characteristics or behaviour are seen as ‘human’ characteristics or behaviour“. This asymmetry mirrors a pattern previously observed in other social sciences, where masculinity remained understudied until approximately 40 years ago. We argue that economics now faces a similar juncture. As we discuss in a recent paper (Matavelli et al. 2025), masculinity norms play a pivotal role in shaping men’s economic choices and perpetuating gender disparities in many areas. This column presents some key examples.
Labour markets and organisations
Masculinity norms can create powerful labour market distortions. Men often refuse service sector jobs that conflict with masculine identity, preferring unemployment to doing ‘feminine’ work – a behaviour that is particularly salient following waves of technological progress and globalisation that disproportionately affected male employment (such as the ‘China shock’ in the US). This rigidity reflects how masculinity norms assign value to occupations based on their gender composition, systematically devaluing female-dominated sectors.
Within organisations, ‘masculinity contest cultures’ can promote intense competition according to masculine rules: displaying strength, showing no weakness, and valuing work above all else. These cultures normalise extreme working hours and create hostile, excessively competitive environments that undermine work-family balance. Such dynamics contribute to persistent gender gaps in the labour market – for example, child penalties for women and low paternity leave uptake among men.
Household dynamics
The household division of labour remains remarkably resistant to change despite significant advances in women’s career opportunities and earnings. Worldwide, women continue to spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men. This disparity extends to perhaps the most consequential domain of household production: parenting. The vast economics literature on parental investment has almost exclusively studied maternal contributions, yet the few studies measuring fathers’ time investment document substantially lower paternal engagement. This holds even among dual-earner households where both parents work full-time.
In many cultures, expectations of fatherhood remain anchored in traditional masculinity norms that prescribe men as breadwinners while limiting their emotional involvement with children. Adherence to norms emphasising emotional stoicism and self-reliance strongly predicts fathers’ level of engagement and discipline style with their children. Given the influence of parenting styles on cognitive and non-cognitive skills formation, the influence of masculinity norms on paternal investments can have profound economic consequences spanning generations.
Health
Globally, men die five years earlier than women on average and are three times more likely to die from ‘deaths of despair’ – suicide, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related mortality. Masculinity norms that stress self-reliance, toughness, and emotional control fundamentally conflict with help-seeking behaviours such as relying on others, admitting vulnerability, or recognising emotional problems. This creates a tension where seeking help threatens masculine identity.
Masculinity norms can also promote risky behaviours and unhealthy coping strategies. Research shows that men’s adherence to masculinity norms predicts higher depression scores, suicidal ideation, and health problems including alcoholism and drug abuse. When threatened economically – such as through job displacement – men often engage in compensatory behaviours including increased substance abuse and violence rather than seeking support.
Standard health measures may underestimate men’s mental health struggles. Despite being considerably more likely to die from suicide, men are less likely to be diagnosed with depression using conventional scales. This reflects masculinity norms emphasising emotional control: rather than internalising symptoms, depression in men often manifests through externalised behaviours like substance abuse that standard depression scales fail to capture.
Education
Masculinity norms can help explain boys’ systematic underperformance in domains beyond mathematics. During adolescence, when masculine identity formation becomes especially salient, concerns about social image can lead boys to underinvest in schooling. Academic effort and conscientiousness become stigmatised as feminine traits, leading boys to conceal effort rather than demonstrating engagement. This contributes to boys underperforming girls in reading and writing, investing less time in schoolwork, and expressing more negative attitudes toward school. While girls’ academic performance has improved over time, boys’ performance has stagnated in many parts of the world.
Violence
Violence is closely linked to competition and dominance – central components of traditional masculinity. Men commit almost all homicides and account for most homicide victims, reflecting how violent tendencies typically emerge in contexts of intense competition over resources, status, and sexual partners. Unmarried men, facing the most intense mating competition, exhibit significantly higher rates of criminal behaviour including rape, murder, and assault.
Violence can also arise from cultures of honour, which develop as adaptations among populations whose livelihoods can easily be stolen and who live in regions with weak formal institutions. These patricentric cultures rely heavily on aggression and male honour, often involving violent punishment of women who escape male control.
Politics
Recent political developments highlight widening gender gaps in support for democratic values, particularly among younger generations. Men are significantly more likely to vote for populist leaders and show greater support for strongman leadership than women. According to cultural backlash theory, traditionally dominant groups perceive decades of progressive social change, including women’s empowerment and minority rights, as threats to their status. The connection between deindustrialisation and cultural reaction among ‘angry white men’ helps explain why especially economic crises disproportionately affecting traditional male employment have been linked to right-wing populism.
Masculinity norms around the world
To help quantify some of the above links between men’s adherence to masculinity norms and various socioeconomic outcomes, we collected new data from 87,000 individuals across 70 countries (De Haas et al. 2024). We measure masculinity norms using the Conformity to Masculine Norms Inventory-5 (CMNI-5). This well-validated psychological instrument measures adherence to five core masculinity norms: winning, emotional control, risk-taking, violence, and dominance (Mahalik et al. 2003).
Our analysis reveals patterns at both country and individual levels. At the country level, our data reveal a striking asymmetry in how gender norms and masculinity norms relate to economic development. Prior research has emphasised the negative feedback loop between restrictive gender role norms and development outcomes. Consistent with this, Figure 1 shows a strong negative correlation between GDP per capita (PPP-adjusted) and unequal gender role norms. In contrast, traditional masculinity norms display the opposite pattern, exhibiting a positive correlation with economic development.
Figure 1 Masculinity norms, gender-roles norms, and economic development
At the level of individual men, our findings reveal three key patterns:
- Economic behaviour. Men who adhere more strongly to traditional masculinity norms demonstrate significantly higher labour supply at the intensive margin: a one standard deviation increase in the CMNI-5 is associated with a 4% increase in the desire to work more hours. These men also show greater competitiveness (9% increase), but their occupational choices remain constrained to traditionally masculine sectors (agriculture, construction, manufacturing). While gender role norms also correlate with sector choice, masculinity norms remain a significant predictor even after controlling for traditional gender attitudes.
- Health outcomes. Dominance masculinity norms predict substantially worse health behaviours and outcomes: a one standard deviation increase in CMNI-5 correlates with a 0.10 standard deviation increase in risk-taking and a 0.15 standard deviation increase in depressive symptoms. Men with stronger masculinity norms are significantly less likely to seek mental health help – with ‘help avoidance’ and ‘primacy of violence’ emerging as the strongest predictors of depression. These patterns prove universal across all 70 countries and contrast sharply with gender role norms, which show no consistent relationship with health outcomes.
- Political preferences. Most strikingly, adherence to masculinity norms strongly predicts illiberal political attitudes: a one standard deviation increase in CMNI-5 is associated with a 2-3 percentage point decrease in support for democracy, a 6 percentage point decrease in support for market economy, and an 8 percentage point increase in support for strongman leadership and army rule. These patterns are even stronger in richer economies.
Conclusions
Masculinity norms help explain persistent economic puzzles: occupational segregation despite unemployment, resistance to family-friendly policies, and why economic shocks hit men’s mental health and political attitudes particularly hard. We believe that achieving true gender equality requires addressing not only barriers facing women but also the rigid norms constraining men. In terms of research, we see three avenues as holding most promise. First, more evidence on the causal role of masculinity norms in shaping outcomes is needed (Baranov et al. 2023). For example, experiments could manipulate participants’ perceptions of what other men do or should do, then measure how these altered beliefs influence economic choices and behaviours. Second, we need to better understand transmission mechanisms – how norms spread through peers, families, and organisations. Third, by integrating masculinity norms into economic analysis, our profession can help design policies that work with rather than against male identity, such as job retraining programs that address identity concerns and mental health services that engage men more effectively.
Source: VOXeu
