Researchers have created a list of indicators of toxic masculinity.Credit: Getty
How rife is the problem of ‘toxic masculinity’ in Western societies? A research study run in New Zealand has found that only a small percentage of men surveyed fell into the worst category of hostile toxicity — and that a desire to feel ‘manly’ wasn’t necessarily indicative that a person held socially damaging views.
The term toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s, and expresses the idea that some of the traits that many societies consider stereotypically ‘masculine’, such as dominance and aggression, can have damaging social impacts. Today, the phrase is often used to describe all manner of behaviours, from sexual violence to a disinclination to help with chores around the home.
The concept has proved helpful in many ways — highlighting how gender-based expectations can contribute to depression in men, for example, and encouraging men to see value in being open about their emotions. But it can also be problematic, researchers say. Casual use of the term might falsely imply, for example, that all societies think of manliness in the same way, that all masculine traits are negative, or that all men are toxic.
Researchers have delved into similar concepts, including hegemonic or patriarchal masculinity, which examines how a dominant, culturally idealized view of manhood upholds the patriarchy. But the term toxic masculinity hasn’t had as much academic attention. “Nobody measures it,” says psychology researcher Steven Sanders at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Some psychologists are now trying to pick apart and quantify its aspects.
In 2024, Sanders and his colleagues published a ‘toxic masculinity scale’, identifying 28 questions that assessed the degree of toxicity expressed by white male university students in the United States1. Psychology doctoral candidate Deborah Hill Cone at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and her colleagues have now added to this with a more all-encompassing view of toxicity and a larger, broader sample of men in a study published in Psychology of Men & Masculinities2.
‘Entitled rich tech bro’
Hill Cone and her colleagues identified eight indicators of toxic masculinity in heterosexual adult men in Western societies. These included prejudice against people’s sexual identities and ‘gender identity centrality’, which quantifies how important someone’s gender is to their sense of self.
The authors looked at both hostile sexism — for example, the belief that women seek to gain power by getting control over men — and benevolent sexism, such as the view that men ought to protect and cherish women. They also looked at whether men are opposed to domestic-violence prevention, and whether men think that societies generally contain some groups that are more deserving than others.
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The team dug into the results of the 2018–19 New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a broad survey with responses from nearly 50,000 people. More than 15,000 of the participants identified as heterosexual males and had answered relevant questions such as “being a woman/man is an important part of how I see myself” and “inferior groups should stay in their place”.
In a statistical analysis, the respondents fell into five groups. The good news is that only the smallest group (3.2% of the men) was characterized by the researchers as ‘hostile toxic’, whereas the largest group was ‘atoxic’ (35.4%). That’s not surprising, says Stevens. “On average, men aren’t monsters.” Between these groups, Hill Cone and her colleagues found two moderate groups split between those who were more- or less-tolerant of people from sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQ+) , and a ‘benevolent toxic’ group, whose members got relatively high scores in measures of sexism but not in hostility.
The odds of men in the sample having the hostile toxic profile were higher for those who were older, single, unemployed, religious or an ethnic minority, as well as those high on scales of political conservatism, economic deprivation or emotional dysregulation, or who had a low level of education.
“The entitled rich tech bro or frat boy didn’t really appear” in the hostile toxic group, says Hill Cone. Instead, the hostile toxic group was made up mainly of marginalized, disadvantaged men. “These are men without many resources, not men driving around in Lamborghinis.”
