Collection of Gender Empathy Gap Resources

Men face longer prison sentences for the exact same crime. They are more likely to be shot to death by police, to be homeless, to be murdered, and to be suicidal. Men work longer hours even when unpaid work is considered and are more likely to die on the job than women, and even though they earn more money, women are responsible for the majority of consumer spending decisions and reap more in tax benefits than do men. In some countries, men are forced into gender-based conscription. Boys get lower grades for doing the same exact work as girls, and young men enroll in college at a much lower rate than women. Men are also not protected from domestic violence, despite research showing that domestic violence directed at men is at least as, if not more common, than domestic violence directed at women. Boys are not protected from genital mutilation, and are more likely to be undernourished, worldwide. Despite the fact that men are raped and sexually assaulted at alarmingly high rates (mostly by women, contrary to popular belief), they are not adequately protected. Men are also vulnerable to false allegations of sexual violence, and they face discrimination in the rental housing market and in family courts. They have poorer health outcomes, a lower life satisfaction and a shorter life expectancy than women, and yet resources continue to be directed disproportionately toward women. Despite all these findings (and more), male problems do not appear to attract much attention. Why? Because, for evolutionary reasons, humans are less prone to respond with empathy to men and boys than to women and girls. In this post, I’ll present a substantial amount of evidence to demonstrate both the causes and implications of the gender empathy gap. Be aware that some of it is quite disturbing, so make sure you are in the right state of mind before you begin reading.

For an illustrated introduction to the subject, we recommend this video, which all-too-painfully demonstrates the existence of the empathy gap with tangible and shocking evidence: „Why Men Need Help And Why Feminism Won’t Help Them“ (Eccentrik Hat, ICMI20)

You may also find our interview of Dr. Warren Farrell on the lack of empathy towards men interesting, or his post The Gender Gap in Empathy — A path to ending the gender war?

Let us start by quoting some excerpts from The Male Gender Empathy Gap: Time for psychology to take action (Seager et al., 2016) because we think they made an excellent point:

Whether we like it or not, there are different patterns and expectations relating to the expression of distress in males and females. This means that male distress is often overlooked, or seen simply as bad behavior so that male distress is, in effect, invisible.

[The] archetypal “male gender script” […] has been described by Seager, Sullivan & Barry (2014a) as an evolutionary and universal pressure on men defining how they must live to be a successful male. This script consists of three main rules:

1. Be a fighter and a winner
2. Be a provider and a protector
3. Retain mastery and control over one’s feelings

Farrell and Gray (book in preparation) talk about this in terms of “social bribes”. According to this proposition, social groups across the human species have survived more effectively because males have evolved collectively to protect them. The success of all societies historically has therefore been built upon the blood, sweat and tears of men, sacrificing their lives in wars to preserve the freedom of all and risking their lives to build the infrastructure of civilization. Working class men in particular have been expected by virtue of their gender to die in tunnels, on tall buildings, down mines and on the high seas, supplying the buildings, transport, food supplies and security that create the comfort of a civilized life for all. Across the ages, men have been “socially bribed” into behaving this way by the honour and social approval of their tribe or society. In this way men (and some women) have been afforded the status of heroes because of their strength or courage. At the same time, men (but not usually women) have equally been “shamed” to the extent that they do not conform to this pattern. There is no greater illustration of this than the white feathers that were handed out as a symbol of cowardice to men in the UK who would not fight for their country. In our modern society, it may now be that the shame factor is growing greater for men as the opportunity to achieve heroic status is being reduced. It is for this reason that Farrell and Gray talk about the urgent need to help our boys in the future switch from ‘heroic intelligence’ to ‘health intelligence’ (see below). Equally, there is a need for all of us in society to tune in more to male emotional language. Rather than simply expecting men to talk differently we need to be listening differently to them. Men reflexively — perhaps instinctively — hide vulnerability even under changing social, economic and political circumstances that are arguably generating more distress. To reveal vulnerability or failure of any kind can be deeply shaming for a man. Because of such pressures we do not register male vulnerability and we all become less comfortable with the notion of males in need. This means that distressed men end up looking less like honourable victims and more like losers, criminals or even idiots.

[…]

So even when we do acknowledge publicly that men across the globe commit suicide at a much higher rate than women (nearly 4 times more in the UK), this still does not elicit our compassion. If anything, we switch off. In the same way we don’t really acknowledge or care that men account for a massive 97% of deaths at work in the UK InsideMan (2015) and 86% of people sleeping rough in England (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2016). When it comes to gender equality we only really think of women as beings legitimate victims and as having any cause for complaint. In the UK we still have a minister for ‘women and inequalities’ as if the two issues were intrinsically linked. Ironically, therefore, what looks like a serious attempt to challenge gender prejudice towards women has the unintended consequence of reinforcing gender prejudice towards men.

[…]

So there are deep rooted reasons why people don’t feel as much empathy for men as they do for women. Men have evolved to be disposable, being there to put their bodies on the line, to offer protection, not receive it. So a man in trouble evokes less sympathy than a woman or a child. This might help explain why men, when they are looking for sympathy from the judicial system, are six times more likely than a woman to get a conviction for an identical crime (Bradford, 2015). And rather than sympathise with men over a possible inequality, our immediate social perception is that men must be six times more troublesome or else six times less in need of protection from the prison system. Similarly, boys are more likely than girls to fail in school (Stoet & Geary, 2015), but rather than address this as a gender inequality, we are unsympathetic, often perceiving boys as disruptive and lazy. When couples who have children break up, fathers are still much less likely to get custody of children (Cancian et al, 2014), but rather than rush to address this as another possible inequality we assume that fathers don’t miss their children like mothers do, and that children need their mothers more than their fathers. The absent father is something that we have all been programmed to expect and tolerate. In fact we are tolerant of male suffering, or blind to it, in many other areas too, for example, violence by women against men is as widespread as violence by men against women (Straus, 2010) but violence against men attracts less attention.

[…]

As a profession that cares about human suffering, why are we [psychologists] not more alert to the signs all around us of the problems facing males, such as suicide? It seems quite likely that like the rest of society we are suffering from a type of blindness – male gender blindness (Seager et al, 2014b; Russ et al, 2015) – which makes it difficult for us to recognize the importance of this great elephant in the room of psychology. Similarly, we appear to be susceptible to the same collective ‘empathy gap’ as the rest of society when it comes to men’s issues. Simple psychological experiments can show hard evidence of significant differences in our attitudes to the male and female genders. For example, there are many vivid demonstrations in field experiments showing that members of the public immediately rush to help female victims of violence from a man, but turn a blind eye or even laugh when a man is the victim of the same level of force (e.g. ManKind Initiative, 2014 – see video link below). In social psychology, just about the only group identity that does not elicit in-group-favoritism is male identity (Rudman & Goodwin, 2004). As psychologists, it should be extremely interesting that we have such different responses to the two complementary halves of the human race. It is hard to imagine a more central concern for psychological science and investigation.

[…]

The world is forever turning, and future generations of psychologists will look back in wonder at how concern for the wellbeing of men and boys has remained in the doldrums for so long. Our challenge to you as readers is to be among the first of a new generation of psychologists to take action, and to make men’s issues – as part of the human condition – visible. […] Sometimes we need reminding that [mental health interventions for men, and recognising the problems facing boys] are linked e.g. when you pass a homeless man in the street, or see a man behaving badly, it’s easy to forget that he was once somebody’s little boy.

Quoting Dr. Warren Farrell from one of his video interviews:

We’ve historically trained boys and men to die so that all the rest of us could survive. And it’s harder to become psychologically attached to someone that you may soon lose, especially if your own survival is dependent on men’s willingness to die. […] Regarding a boy as a hero is a social bribe that we created; a social bribe for that boy to be disposable. […] Love is blind enough for him to never acknowledge that a woman who falls in love with the officer and a gentleman is attaching her love in part to his potential disposability. […] For parents raising a daughter meant caring about her safety but raising a boy meant being caught between a parental rock and a hard place. We wanted our son to be safe, for sure, but we also wanted to feel proud that he served his country in time of war. So whether as a soldier, a firefighter or another first responder we give social bribes for young men to die; why? So that his potential for death might increase our potential for life.

In one study that examined the trolley dilemma titled Moral Chivalry: Gender and Harm Sensitivity Predict Costly Altruism (FeldmanHall et al. 2016), „88% of participants reported that they would push [a] man off the footbridge instead [of a woman]“, that is 7 1/3 times as many people would rather sacrifice a man than a woman. The same study also found that „[p]articipants kept significantly less money when interacting with a female target than a male target“ to save them from harm. See specifically figure 1 which also confirms that women were more biased than men. Do not be confused by males‘ higher willingness of throwing off a female than a male bystander in this figure, as he is much less likely to throw her off in the first place, and the difference is small enough to constitute chance.

In The Moral Machine experiment (Awad et al., 2018) it was shown that both men and women were more inclined to save the lives of women over those of men.

In Drivers overtaking bicyclists: Objective data on the effects of riding position, helmet use, vehicle type and apparent gender (Walker, 2007), the authors found:

A naturalistic experiment used an instrumented bicycle to gather proximity data from overtaking motorists. […] when the (male) experimenter wore a long wig, so that he appeared female from behind, drivers left more space when passing. Overall, the results demonstrate that motorists exhibit behavioural sensitivity to aspects of a bicyclist’s appearance during an encounter [and this] tendency for drivers to alter their passing proximity based on this appearance probably has implications for accident probability.

According to this Guardian article Charlie Hebdo killings: ‘Don’t be afraid. I won’t kill you. You’re a woman’ (Sigolène Vinson, 2015):

„“He said ‘don’t be afraid, calm down. I won’t kill you. You’re a woman, we don’t kill women. But think about what you do, what you do is bad. I’m sparing you and because I’ve spared you, you will read the Qur’an’. […] “I nodded my head, to maintain some kind of contact. I didn’t want to lose eye contact because Jean-Luc [layout editor] was under the table … I fully understood that if this guy didn’t kill women, he killed men.”“

The authors of The Determinants of Punishment: Deterrence, Incapacitation and Vengeance (Glaeser & Sacerdote, 2000) found that „[a]mong vehicular homicides, drivers who kill women get 56 percent longer sentences [than drivers who kill men].“ In Sentencing in Homicide Cases and the Role of Vengeance (Glaeser & Sacerdote, 2003), the same authors replicate these findings and find this disparity to be even higher, namely that drivers who kill women get 59% longer sentences than drivers who kill men.

A study with the title Aggression as a function of the interaction of the sex of the aggressor and the sex of the victim (Taylor and Epstein 1967) showed that both men and women were less likely to administer electric shocks to women than men. A replication of the experiment with the title Would You Deliver an Electric Shock in 2015? Obedience in the Experimental Paradigm Developed by Stanley Milgram in the 50 Years Following the Original Studies (Doliński et al. 2017) also shows this, although their sample size was too small to have statistical significance.

In a study with the title Gender Differences in Empathic Sadness towards Persons of the Same- versus Other-sex during Adolescence (Stuijfzand et al. 2016), boys from the age of 12 showed more empathy for girls than they did for boys, and they continued to show more empathy for females throughout their lives. Both males and females showed less empathy for males than females. They also state that „the growing interest in and attraction to the other-sex in adolescence may enhance male adolescents’ empathic responses towards female adolescents (Tello et al. 2012), particularly given that co-operation and feelings of nurturance promote empathy (Batson et al. 2005; Lanzetta and Englis 1989)“ and that „masculine competitive environment may inhibit empathic responding to male competitors (Tello et al. 2012)“ as „competition among males may overrule the influence of characteristics such as similarity and familiarity (Ma et al. 2011), which normally promote empathy (Davis 1994; Preston and De Waal 2002)“.

In this YouTube video GUYS vs GIRLS Homeless Experiment | Who will you help? (channel: Karim Jovian), a man and a woman of comparable age and attractiveness pretend to be homeless. While the woman gets a ton of help, the man is not even noticed by bypassers and in those rare instances that he is, he gets told he is „lazy“ and to „find some work or die“.

In Man up and take it: Gender bias in moral typecasting (Reynolds et al. 2020) it is shown that people more readily assume female victims and male perpetrators, that people assume that women suffer more pain from their harm, even when women fall in the perpetrator role, see male suffering as more deserved, fair and moral, feel more inclined to punish men and would like to dole out harsher punishments to men, assume more suffering and have more pity for women even in those cases where the real-world discrepancies signal that men have it worse. Women show a greater bias in almost all of the studies conducted. Also see Dr. Tania Reynolds‘ YouTube video about this study and this other video in which she talks: „We did this one study where we manipulated whether a politician was talking about issues that afflict women versus issues that afflict men and all the issues were actually only true for men. Men were less likely to suffer from substance abuse, … we used all of these issues where actually the data supports that men have it worse. And what we found that when a politician talked about men’s issues they saw them as less moral and were less willing to vote for them and wanted to donate less to their political campaigns compared to when they were talking about women’s issues. Even though it wasn’t even true when they were talking about women’s issues. Participants even realized that. It suggests where we have this bias where we care more when women are in the victim role than when men are in the victim role.“

Quoting from Dr. Tania Reynolds‘ article on queermajority.com:

„Through the lens of evolution, such a tendency [to instinctively cast men in the role of perpetrator and women in the role of victim] can be associated with reproductive roles. Women set the upper limit on reproduction; all other factors being equal, a group of 10 women and 3 men can produce many more children than a group made up of the opposite gender ratio. With this in mind, it’s not unreasonable to assume that natural selection has favored psychological mechanisms that protect women from harm. If so, our modern minds may possess relics of these asymmetric impulses, attuning our thoughts and emotions to more readily insulate women, relative to men, against peril.“

In Gender, motivation and the accomplishment of street robbery in the United Kingdom (Brookman et al., 2007), the authors found that street robbers specifically target men, and feel extremely apologetic/ashamed if they ever did target a woman. Even in the case that a couple is robbed, the robbers usually focus their attention on the man. „[O]f the 40 incidents of robbery committed by males analysed here, only five involved female victims, with three being incidents in which a man or group of men had robbed a couple, or collection of couples.“ The robbers expressed feeling „heartbroken“, „terrible“ and „ashamed“ of themselves, and showed feeling empathy with a potential female victim, making statements such as „[y]ou must be thinking I have no morals […]. I would look for a bloke… It wouldn’t be right to be robbing women and little kids or anything like that.“ and „It’s just that if it was my mother or sister … it is all right to nick their bag, but not alright to hit [women].“ The paper mentions two more studies that replicate these UK findings in the U.S.

The author of Gender Roles and Helping Behavior (Bobbi Hupp-Wilds, 2014) found:

[O]verall, participants were most likely to help females in dangerous situations, followed by females in emotional situations, males in dangerous situations, and males in emotional situations. As shown in Table 1 males were most likely to help females in dangerous situations, followed by males in dangerous situations, females in emotional situations, and finally males in emotional situations. As shown in Table 1 females were most likely to help females in dangerous situations, followed by females in emotional situations, males in dangerous situations, and finally males in emotional situations. Both male and female participants showed similar helping preferences. Participants were more likely to help in dangerous situations than emotional situations, and more likely to help females than males.

In Gender and Helping Behavior: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Social Psychological Literature (Eagly & Crowley, 1986), the authors show that „in general men helped more than women and women received more help than men„. This difference of women receiving more help than men was due to men helping women being especially prevalent. Sex differences in helping behaviors such as picking up hitchhikers and helping strangers in subways are especially substantial.

In Cognitive Distortion in Thinking About Gender Issues: Gamma Bias and the Gender Distortion Matrix (Seager & Barry, 2019), the authors hypothesize about a „gender distortion matrix“. This matrix suggests a subconscious bias that magnifies gender differences when these differences propel us to respond favorably (alpha bias) and minimizes gender differences when these differences push us to respond disfavorably (beta bias) to women. Gamma bias, a tendency to magnify some gender differences while minimizing others, combines both alpha and beta bias, combines both alpha and beta bias, which is suggested to be a widespread distortion in modern Western culture whereby males doing harm is magnified („toxic masculinity“), females doing harm is minimized („it’s due to trauma“/“she was ill“), male victimhood is minimized (male domestic violence victims are overlooked, male suicide victims are overlooked, the fact that being male is the greatest risk factor of dying from COVID-19 after age is ignored, …), <strong“>female victimhood is magnified („295 Palestinians, including 42 women and 73 children, were killed by Israeli security forces“), the privilege of being male is magnified (men’s greater earnings is due to a sexist „wage gap“), the privilege of being female is minimized (it is unremarked that girls get better grades for the same work or that women go to university at a much higher frequency than men), males doing good things is minimized (most dirty and dangerous but essential jobs are done by men but this remains unremarked), and females doing good things is magnified (a huge number of UN days is reserved to celebrate women for their gender rather than their actions).

In Moral Dilemmas in Hospitals: Which Shooting Victim Should Be Saved? (Navarick & Moreno, 2022), the authors found that people were significantly more likely to choose a teenage girl over a teenage boy presenting to life-saving emergency care. People attributed about the same amount of moral deservingness to the teenage girl as the teenage boy (deservingness scale), but when it came to actually choosing who to save, they more often chose the teenage girl (choice scale). They try to play down this difference by stating that approximately 68% of their sample chose an equal rating on both scales, interpreting this to be consistent with their hypothesis that there would be no bias; at another point however, they state that that „contrary to Hypothesis 3, a “teenage girl you don’t know” (M = 3.38, SD = 1.44, N = 424) significantly exceeded ratings for a “teenage boy you don’t know” (M = 3.21, SD = 1.44, N = 424), t(423) = 3.077, p = 0.002, d = 0.19, implying gender bias, which contrasted with the absence of evidence for bias in the moral deservingness ratings“. It is also quite surprising how they came to make hypothesis 3 in the first place: despite citing two results that confirm a predisposition to give women higher priority when it comes to protecting them from harm, they use one study that indicated a minor leadership bias in favor of males to justify the hypothesis that males would be more likely to be saved than females. All in all, this study confirms previous results on the gender empathy gap.

The paper Delta bias in how we celebrate gendertypical traits and behaviours (Seager & Barry, 2020), builds on the theory of gamma bias by introducing a further concept, delta bias. According to the authors:

Delta bias may be defined as the simultaneous denigration or celebration – depending on the gender of the performer – of an archetypal masculine gender behaviour or characteristic. This is similar to the ‘celebration’ aspect of gamma bias, except that delta bias emphasises how celebration tends to occur where the behaviour is gender atypical.

Quoting Dr. Elizabeth Hobson from her speech against feminism (transcript, video):

Before I get stuck into the recorded history of feminism, I need to take a moment to illuminate the biological roots of the movement. Human beings are a gynocentric species – this means that we prioritize the needs and well-being of women over men. This is an evolved instinct that came about as a result of women being the limiting factor in reproduction – i.e. women have a much lower ceiling on how many offspring they can physically produce – and in small communities that are subsisting this makes them highly important because they potentially hold the key to whether or not the collective will survive at all. This is why we traditionally send only men to war, this is why we have the “women and children first” Birkenhead Drill, this is why people are more likely to put themselves at risk to save a woman in danger than a man – and it’s why we have feminism. Feminism has taken our gynocentrism and weaponized it.

Men’s role in this evolutionary sense is to act as a genetic filter – both to mitigate gene replication errors (ie. Preventing less successful combinations multiplying by barring many men from reproducing) and to produce and retain genetic recombinations that enhance the fitness of offspring. To these ends, male fitness is constantly policed to ensure that women’s standards are met before they gain sexual access – which is why far fewer men than women reproduce. Because the pay-off of carrying particularly successful genes is so much greater for men (women will likely have the opportunity to reproduce if their fitness is moderate, men may well not), evolution gambles with male genes. This results in very different bell curves for men and women in terms of IQ and physical and psychological health, with men being over-represented at either end of the distribution (particularly intelligent/healthy or unintelligent/unhealthy) and women clustering around the middle. Feminists focus on the apex of male achievement to prove that men enjoy greater success than women (whilst ignoring the biological reasons that catapult a minority of men to the stratosphere) and on the acts of the most malevolent minority of men to generalize their patterns of behavior as emblematic of masculinity (whilst ignoring the fact that the very demographics that preoccupy them show that what is emblematic of masculinity is actually variability).

So, human beings have always valued women more than men and been more critical of men than women. These were necessary instincts in tribal communities but they have been manipulated to privilege women to the point of dysfunction – and this began with the development of proto-feminism, which arose in the late Middle Ages. Queen consort of France and England, Eleanor of Acquitaine spearheaded a movement within her court to subvert the chivalric code (which had traditionally governed relations between knights and lords and the general public) to regulate the behavior of men towards women. These women initiated a system of romantic feudalism wherein noble men were under irresistible pressure to identify a lady as midons (my lord) and to submit to her will and delicately accept any scorn that his midons saw fit to extend to him. Eleanor established Courts of Love in which she and her noble women would administer “justice” in romantic disputes. Not only may many men in particular recognize this state of gender relations – but the modus operandi that Eleanor and co used to achieve their supremacy is entirely familiar: they generalised about all men based on the poor behaviour of a minority, asserting that women needed protection from men’s violations, and they pushed forward a narrative of women’s moral superiority, justifying female dictatorship. Within 200 years, Eleanors’ ideas had spread and saturated throughout Europe and throughout the class system. […]

According to this New York Times article A Hamas surprise: Women secure victory (Ian Fisher, 2006):

She is Mariam Farhat, the mother of three Hamas advocates killed by Israelis. She bade one son goodbye in a homemade videotape before he stormed an Israeli settlement, killing five people before he was killed. A comment she made later received wide publicity: She said that she wished she had 100 sons to sacrifice that way. Known as the „mother of martyrs,“ she is seen in a campaign video carrying a gun. […] Now she is one of the six women elected as Hamas legislators. The election rules included quotas for women for all parties. Farhat was surrounded recently at a Hamas victory rally at the women’s campus of the Islamic University by young, outspoken, educated women who see no contradiction between religious militancy and modernity. […] She said that women, and especially the wives of top Hamas leaders, had long played a central role in Hamas’s leadership, though she said that role had not been publicized to protect them. […] „It is not only sacrificing sons,“ she said after the rally. „There are different kinds of sacrifice – by money, by education. Everybody, according to their ability [and men’s ability, apparently, is to be disposable], should sacrifice.“ […] „Every decision that is taken by Hamas is passed to us, not after the decision is made but before,“ she said. But she also defended the decision of a young Nablus man to become a suicide bomber. […] „Why not ask the question from another angle?“ she said. „Why would he blow himself up if he was not subject to such great pressures? What leads you to do such a bitter thing? People do this from anger and injustice, to bring back life to their own people by sacrificing their lives.“

The study called Judgments About Male Victims of Sexual Assault by Women: A 35-Year Replication Study (PeConga et al., 2022) is a replication of a 1984 study of college students‘ judgments about male and female victims of sexual assault carried out by male or female assailants. While the male 2019 cohort was less likely to judge that the victim initiated or encouraged the incident and derived pleasure from it, the female cohort was more likely to attribute victim encouragement and pleasure to the male victim. The pattern was similar w.r.t. how stressful the event was judged to be for the male victim. The authors „emphasize the need for greater awareness and empirical attention to abuse that runs counter to preconceived notions about sexual victimization“.

In Impact of Physician and Patient Gender on Pain Management in the Emergency Department—A Multicenter Study (Safdar, 2009) it was shown that „[a]nalgesic administration rates [in the emergency department] were not significantly different for female and male patients (63% vs 57%, P = 0.08)“. However, „females presenting with severe pain (NRS ≥8) were more likely to receive analgesics (74% vs 64%, P = 0.02)“. They also state that this „was an interesting finding and can be compared with the findings published by Hostetler [33] who studied the administration of IV analgesics (for presumably more severe pain). Of 114,207 adults and 43,725 pediatric patients, females were 1.7 times more likely to receive parenteral analgesics (CI 1.4–2)“.

The authors of Gender and aggression I: Perceptions of aggression (Harris & Knight-Bohnhoff, 1996) show that people are particularly intolerant of male-to-female aggression:

Consistent with previous research on gender and aggression, both studies found that the aggressor, target, and respondent all affected perceptions of aggression and likelihood of aggressive behaviors. Aggression from a male and aggression directed towards a female were particularly likely to be evaluated negatively.

According to Police Perceptions of Rape as Function of Victim Gender and Sexuality (Davies, 2009), UK police responds more negatively toward hypothetical male rape victims than hypothetical female rape victims.

In Predicting rape empathy based on victim, perpetrator, and participant gender, and history of sexual aggression. (Osman, 2011), it is shown that people were more empathetic towards female than male rape victims, that they were also more empathetic towards female rapists than male rapists (particularly when their victim was male), and that people were more empathetic towards the perpetrator when the rape victim was male. Men without victimization experience were relatively non-empathic with a male victim.

The authors of Evaluations of sexual assault: perceptions of guilt and legal elements for male and female aggressors using various coercive strategies (Russell et al., 2011) show that college students who were provided with legal instructions of sexual assault and then asked to provide a verdict, degree of guilt, and legal components attribute less guilt to a female-on-male sexual aggressor than a male-on-female sexual aggressor.

In Attitudes of Dutch citizens towards male victims of sexual coercion by a female perpetrator (Huitema & Vanwesenbeeck, 2016) it was shown that male victims of sexual coercion are not taken as seriously as female victims of sexual coercion, especially among Dutch men. The authors argue that the findings highlight the importance of educational programmes to raise awareness and reduce stereotypical views on male sexual victimisation.

In Attitudes about victims of workplace sexual harassment based on sex (Cesario, 2020) the author finds that male sexual harassment victims are viewed as suffering less than female victims and that „[f]indings of this study have strong implications for workplace policy and practice“.

In The Reverse Double Standard in Perceptions of Student-Teacher Sexual Relationships: The Role of Gender, Initiation, and Power (Howell, 2011) it was found that „participants judged situations [of sexual relations between students and teachers] involving male teachers more harshly than they judged situations involving female teachers, but only when the sexual contact was teacher-initiated. Participants also believed that male students received more social benefits from the sexual contact than did female students“.

In National Baseline Study on Violence against Children (Philippines EXECUTIVE SUMMARY, 2016) it is shown that boys are at least as or more vulnerable than girls to all forms of violence. Particularly, when it comes to severe physical violence, boys are almost twice as likely to experience it (4.0% for boys vs 2.2% for girls). Perhaps most surprisingly, males were found to experience sexual violence more frequently than females overall (24.7% for boys vs 18.2% for females). It is also noteworthy that the lifetime-prevalence seems to underestimate the greater abuse suffered by boys, and it is thus preferable to look at the 12-month prevalence where available. You may find Recall Bias can be a Threat to Retrospective and Prospective Research Designs (Hassan, 2005) and Has ‘lifetime prevalence’ reached the end of its life? An examination of the concept (Streiner et al., 2009) useful towards this end.

See this YouTube video with the title Karen Straughan in The Red Pill on Boko Haram which illustrates our lack of empathy on a cultural level. Boko Haram kidnapped over 10,000 boys and made them into child soldiers compared to the 276 girls they kidnapped which created a public uproar with slogans like „Bring Back our Girls“. Not just that but they were even entering schools and outright killing the male students and keeping the female students alive. Yet, there was no news coverage for the same issue affecting boys. When everything is set up to make it look like women have it worse then obviously many people are going to believe that.

According to Sex Differences: A Study of the Ear of the Beholder (Condry et al., 1983), women respond quicker to a crying girl infant than a boy infant while men did not show such bias. Beliefs in sex-differential fragility cannot account for women’s faster response to a crying girl infant.

The authors of Is Self-Sacrificial Competitive Altruism Primarily a Male Activity? (McAndew & Perilloux, 2012) studied self-sacrificial prosocial behavior in small groups by letting them play a game „in which the monetary success of a three-person group depended upon one of its members volunteering to endure pain (a cold stressor test) and inconvenience (being soaked in a dunk tank)“. They also state that across groups, „the behavior of the altruist was judged to be more costly, challenging, and important and he/she was liked better, rewarded with more money, and preferred as a future experimental partner“ and finally, that „[g]roups containing two males showed more evidence of competition to become altruists than groups containing two females, and personality traits were more effective predictors of altruistic behavior in males than in females“. They conclude „that competition between males and “showing off” are key factors in triggering self-sacrificial altruistic behavior“.

Quoting William Collins from his book The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect:

The empirical evidence for an empathy gap against males, associated with a widespread gynocentric orientation, is overwhelmingly strong. It is remarkable that this remains imperceptible to the general public, and to feminists in particular. The reason is gynocentrism itself, which promotes its own invisibility. Key evolved traits are generally motivated in the individual by emotions. One does not consciously eat in order to fulfil the evolutionary function of remaining a viable organism until genetic transmittal has been accomplished. One eats because one is hungry. But, in truth, the latter is the trick that evolution plays upon one in order to accomplish the former objective. Hunger, and the pleasure of eating, are proximate causes of a behaviour whose distal origin is successful genetic promulgation. In the same way, there is a complex of emotions which promotes the pair bond.

Evolved matricentrism is enacted by those same emotions which drive the pair bond. This includes, for example, the key element of the ceding of moral authority to mothers, and by extension to women in general. One of the associated correlates of this moral authority is men’s discomfort at female disapproval. The veil which has obscured this matricentrism is the traditional patriarchy which the feminists are so intent on smashing. The societal respect which patriarchy embodied hid, and hence made tolerable to men, the underlying matricentric subservience. As matricentrism has intensified into feminist gynocentrism, and the veil of respect for men has been withdrawn, another mechanism of obscuration has become necessary. This is the doctrine of female oppression and poisonous masculinity. For most people now, this new perspective on the sexes serves very effectively to hide gynocentrism. But it is a step too far. One cannot sweeten the pill by making it more bitter still. Some people are now rejecting a pill so bitter that it requires service to those who will continue to despise you. Matricentrism was never truly invisible to the inquiring mind, more of an invisibility of convenience. And gynocentrism can be, and is being, perceived and resisted by many people, of both sexes. For women, resisting gynocentric tendencies may be equated with the responsible use of their power, motivated by the recognition of feminism’s corrosive effects. […]

According to Wikipedia — Women-are-wonderful effect:

The women-are-wonderful effect is the phenomenon found in psychological and sociological research which suggests that people associate more positive attributes with women compared to men. This bias reflects an emotional bias toward women as a general case. The phrase was coined by Alice Eagly and Antonio Mladinic in 1994 after finding that both male and female participants tend to assign positive traits to women, with female participants showing a far more pronounced bias. Positive traits were assigned to men by participants of both genders, but to a far lesser degree. […] One study found that the effect is mediated by increased gender equality. The mediation comes not from differences in attitudes towards women, but in attitudes towards men. In more egalitarian societies, people have more positive attitudes towards men than in less egalitarian societies. […] Some authors have claimed the „Women are wonderful“ effect is applicable when women follow traditional gender roles such as child nurturing and stay-at-home housewife. However, other authors have cited studies indicating that the women-are-wonderful effect is still applicable even when women are in nontraditional gender roles, and the original Eagly, Mladinic & Otto (1991) study discovering the women-are-wonderful effect found no such ambivalence.

Nursery Rhyme — What Are Little Boys Made Of?

What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
  Snakes, snails
  And puppy-dogs' tails
That's what little boys are made of

What are little girls made of?
What are little girls made of?
  Sugar and spice
  And all things nice
That's what little girls are made of

In Are Women Evaluated More Favorably Than Men?: An Analysis of Attitudes, Beliefs, and Emotions (Eagly et al., 1991) the authors state:

In an experiment in which male and female respondents evaluated the social category of women or men on several types of measures, analysis of respondents‘ attitudes toward the sexes and of the evaluative content of their beliefs established that they evaluated women more favorably than men. In addition, analysis of respondents‘ emotional reactions toward women and men did not yield evidence of negativity toward women at the emotional level. Nor did it appear that respondents‘ very positive evaluations of women masked ambivalence toward them. This research, therefore, provides strong evidence that women are evaluated quite favorably—in fact, more favorably than men.

In People Judge Discrimination Against Women More Harshly Than Discrimination Against Men – Does Statistical Fairness Discrimination Explain Why? (Feess et al. 2021) the authors find that people judge hiring discrimination against women more harshly than discrimination against men even when they were told that the man and the woman have worked equally hard in their career, that they would suffer equally badly from not getting the job and that the job is an industry without gender discrimination. There was also an ordering effect, i.e. respondents judge the behavior of the manager in both scenarios more morally wrong if they first saw the scenario with the discriminated woman, suggesting that the participants had a desire to treat each gender fairly, yet reacted more strongly in the scenario that the woman was discriminated against first. They also find that this can only partially be explained by statistical fairness discrimination, a process in which people use the gender of the victim to draw inferences about other characteristics which matter for their fairness judgments.

The authors of Gender Stereotypes after Thirty Years: A Replication of Rosenkrantz, et al. (1968) (Nesbitt & Penn, 2000) found that:

In contrast to the participants in the original study, current participants judged the traits they associated with women to be significantly more socially desirable, in general, than the traits they associated with men.

In Misogyny has no scientific basis of any kind: the evidence is of philogyny – and misandry (Moxon, 2018) the author argues:

No published science paper demonstrates misogyny exists. Data on both implicit and explicit gender attitudes shows males substantially favouring females — philogyny — or, at worst, gender neutrality. This is hidden by elision with the wider notion of sexism; but there’s no evidence for hostile sexism, and hypothesised benevolent sexism is fatally flawed in operational definition. The mode whereby sexism supposedly causes harm — stereotyping (stereotype threat) — has been debunked; likewise inter-sexual dominance, removing any theoretical basis. Possible male harm by control is belied in women being found the controlling party. Misogyny / sexism in being defined circularly is unfalsifiable, therefore non-scientific conceptualisation: ideology itself actually hostile sexism(misandry, which is shown to be real but unseen).

According to Lay misperceptions of the relationship between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism (Yeung, 2012), there is a positive association between hostile and benevolent sexism, even though people perceive an illusory negative one. Males low in benevolent sexism are judged similarly to males high in hostile sexism as being „less supportive of female professionals, less good of father and husband, and more likely to perpetrate domestic violence“. In Chivalry is far from dead: Misperceiving the link between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism (Yeung, 2018) the same author states:

Although prejudice has traditionally been conceptualized as a univalent antipathy towards a social group, sexist prejudice represents a more nuanced ambivalent attitude that mixes both hostile and benevolent elements. Theory and research on ambivalent sexism indicates that hostile and benevolent sexist attitudes towards women reinforce one another and function together to perpetuate women’s disadvantaged social status [personal note: I disagree with the study author that women have a disadvantaged social status]. Indeed, at both the individual and population level, endorsement of benevolent sexism tends to be positively correlated with endorsement of hostile sexism. However, because benevolent sexism has a positive veneer people may fail to recognize that a person who is high in benevolent sexism is likely to also be high in hostile sexism whereas a person who is low in benevolent sexism is likely to be low in hostile sexism. In particular, I hypothesized that because benevolent sexism is the dominant cultural model for how men should express their respect for women, a man who rejects benevolent sexism may be at risk of being misperceived as a hostile sexist who disrespects women rather than recognizing that such a man may reject benevolent sexism because he promotes women’s independence and equality with men. By contrast, people may more readily understand that a woman may reject benevolent sexism for such egalitarian reasons. To test these hypotheses I conducted a series of studies in which I experimentally manipulated a target individual’s gender and then varied whether this individual endorsed or rejected either benevolent sexist beliefs or hostile sexist beliefs. After participants viewed this target’s profile they were asked to estimate the target’s levels of the other variety of sexism, their support for female professionals, their qualities as a spouse and parent, and their likelihood of committing domestic abuse (Studies 1-3). In addition to these perceptions of the target’s sexism-related attitudes and behaviours I also measured participants’ perceptions of the target’s more general warmth and agreeableness, relationship qualities, and moral values (Study 3). Results showed that a male target who rejected benevolent sexism (BS) was perceived to be more hostilely sexist, less supportive of female professionals, less good as a parent and spouse, and more likely to perpetrate domestic violence compared to a male target who endorsed BS and also compared to a female target who rejected BS (Studies 1 and 2). This result suggests that people indeed perceive an illusory negative relationship between men’s BS and HS, whereas for women they recognize that low BS can go along with low HS. The results of Study 2 replicated the results of Study 1 and addressed some issues with how endorsement versus rejection was operationalized. Study 3 demonstrated that people’s misunderstanding of the relationship between BS and HS in men leads them to evaluate a man who rejects BS more negatively on warmth, agreeableness, interpersonal qualities, and morality. Finally, Study 4 examined the accuracy of participants’ judgments of the low BS male target from Studies 1-3 by comparing participants’ predictions to the scores of real-life participants whose BS scores matched those of the target. Despite the relative rarity of univalent sexists in real life, participants were much more likely to assume that low BS men were univalent hostile sexists rather than recognizing that it is actually more likely that men who reject BS also reject HS. Cumulatively these results indicate that people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a man’s endorsement versus rejection of benevolent sexism indicates about his gender-related attitudes and behaviour as well as his broader character. The bias to assume that a man’s rejection of benevolent sexism indicates disrespect for women provides insights into the social psychological processes that help to perpetuate benevolent sexist ideology. The societal implications of these misperceptions and directions, possible moderators and cross-cultural variations, and directions for future research are discussed.

Men tend to be more frightening and anger-producing than were females in [the] same situations and females tend to be more frightened towards males, as shown in Gender differences in anger and fear as a function of situational context (Brody et al., 1995).

The authors of Sex Differences in the Ultimatum Game: An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective (Saad & Gill, 2001) found that males are more likely to be altruistic to females than to males, while females made equal offers independently of the sex of the recipient. They also state that the reason „male allocators are altruistic towards female recipients and competitive with male recipients is construed as a manifestation of social rules, which evolve from the male pre-disposition to use resources for attracting mates“.

The paper The effects of a recipient’s gender in a modified dictator game(Saad & Gill, 2001) found that in total in a modified dictator game, females received 75% more from males, while they received 36% more from other females. On average, females receive roughly 52% more money than do males in the two-person dictator game. The full results are here:

According to the quillette.com article The Myth of Pervasive Misogyny (Clark & Winegard, 2020):

Ironically, these pro-female preferences may explain why mainstream narratives focus so assiduously on the possibility of anti-female biases: society cares more about the wellbeing of women than men and is thus less tolerant of disparities that disfavor them. […] The mainstream view is that we live in a sexist patriarchy that is persistently unfair toward women and privileges men in nearly all ways. And any claims to the contrary are treated as the protestations of benighted conservatives or other masculinist cranks. A Google Scholar search for misogyny yielded 114,000 results, whereas a search for misandry yielded only 2,340. We suspect this difference in interest in misogyny over misandry reflects not the relative prevalence of each type of prejudice, but rather greater concern for the wellbeing of women than men. All of the arguments, anecdotes, and data forwarded to support the narrative that we live in an implacably misogynistic society, in fact, may be evidence of precisely the opposite.

In The most human bot: Female gendering increases humanness perceptions of bots and acceptance of AI (Borau et al., 2021) the authors find people favor female over male bots because female bots are judged as warmer and more likely to experience emotions. Female chatbots are seen as more human than male ones.

A study titled Reactions to male-favouring versus female-favouring sex differences: A pre-registered experiment and Southeast Asian replication (Stewart-Williams et al. 2020) found that after participants where presented with fictional popular-science articles showing eithe male- or female-favoring sex differences (e.g. men/women are better at drawing or men/women lie less often) „[b]oth sexes reacted less positively to the male‐favouring differences, judging the findings to be less important, less credible, and more offensive, harmful, […] upsetting [and more inherently sexist] [after viewing a fictional popular‐science article describing either a male‐favouring or a female‐favouring sex difference]“, concluding that their „results are consistent with the idea that both sexes are more protective of women than men“. This pro-female bias was observed among both male and female participants. On the other hand, if the findings favored women, participants evaluated them as more important, more plausible, and more well-conducted. This was shown in both a sample of Western participants and with Southeast Asian participants.

According to Do people care if men don’t care about caring? The asymmetry in support for changing gender roles (Block et al., 2019), people support more social action to correct female underrepresentation in male-dominated professions than male underrepresentation in female-dominated professions. This asyemmtrical support for change is predicted by gender distribution, not salary.

The authors of Discovering and Categorising Language Biases in Reddit (Ferrer et al., 2021) measured different kinds of biases on http://www.reddit.com/ and among that gender bias for which they used data from r/TheRedPill and r/dating_advice. Unsurprisingly, they found a larger gender bias on r/TheRedPill. Do not make the mistake of comparing these two results, as r/TheRedPill is not an ordinary dating subreddit like r/dating_advice which is supposed to be neutral. A better comparison would have been r/TheRedPill and r/FemaleDatingStrategy. Regarding r/dating_advice, the authors state:

Based on the distribution of biases (following the method in Section 3.1) [in r/datingadvice], we selected the top 200 most biased adjectives towards the ‘female’ and ’male’ target sets and clustered them using k-means (r = 0.15), leaving 30 clusters for each target set of words. The most biased clusters towards women, such as (okcupid, bumble), and (exotic), are not clearly negatively biased (though we might ask questions about the implied exoticism in the latter term). The biased clusters towards men look more conspicuous: (poor), (irresponsible, erratic, unreliable, impulsive) or (pathetic, stupid, pedantic, sanctimonious, gross, weak, nonsensical, foolish) are found among the most biased clusters. On top of that, (abusive), (narcissistic, misogynistic, egotistical, arrogant), and (miserable, depressed)_ are among the most sentiment negative clusters. These terms indicate a significant negative bias towards men, evaluating them in terms of unreliability, pettiness and self-importance.

The authors of Gender bias in clinicians’ pathologization of atypical sexuality: a randomized controlled trial with mental health professionals (Fuss et al., 2018) state:

The psychiatric classifcation of “normal” versus disordered sexual behavior has been a subject of some dispute. Although atypical sexual interests have been viewed traditionally as typically male, epidemiological data indicate its presence in both genders. We examined how gender and sexual orientation infuence whether or not atypical sexual behavior is classifed as a mental disorder. Mental health professionals (N=546) were presented with five case vignettes where subjects exhibit paraphilic behaviors; one case with psychotic symptoms served as the control condition. For each vignette we randomly changed the described subject’s gender (male/female), sexual orientation (homosexual/heterosexual), and presented diagnostic criteria (fulflled/ambiguous). Female subjects were signifcantly less pathologized and overall less stigmatized in terms of exhibitionistic, frotteuristic, sexual sadistic and pedophilic behavior. On the other hand, female sexual behavior that fulflled diagnostic criteria for masochistic disorder was more pathologized. Our results demonstrate that nosologically irrelevant factors, which may be related to diferent sexual norms for men and women, afect clinicians’ decisions regarding atypical sexuality.

In Gendered White Lies: Women Are Given Inflated Performance Feedback Compared With Men (Zayas & Jampol, 2020) the authors show that people are more likely to assume that manager’s feedback towards women is less accurate and upwardly distorted, that participants adjust their essay ratings upwards when giving feedback to females, and that women do not prefer this ’nicer‘ but less accurate performance rating. The reason for this might be that because people have more compassion for women, it increases their likelihood of lying. In Lying because we care: Compassion increases prosocial lying (Lupoli & Jampol, 2017) it is shown that the emotion of compassion causally increases and positively predicts prosocial lying, and that this was partially motivated by an enhanced importance placed on preventing emotional harm.

In „Do Ideologically Driven Scientific Agendas Impede the Understanding and Acceptance of Evolutionary Principles in Social Psychology?“, chapter 2 of „The Politics of Social Psychology“ (Hippel & Buss) a survey was emailed to a sample of psychologists, asking them about their attitudes concerning a range of evolutionary psychology claims and discoveries. The psychologists polled were more inclined to support pro-female results than pro-male ones; specifically, they were more likely to believe that women could have evolved to be more linguistically talented than males could have developed to be more mathematically talented than women.

In No laughing matter: Why humor mistakes are more damaging for men than women (Reich et al., 2021) the authors find „evidence for a process model by which women (versus men) who [make humor mistakes] are still seen as more attentive, causing their mistakes to seem less substantial and bolstering downstream evaluations of them“.

The authors of Bad for Men, Better for Women: The Impact of Stereotypes During Negative Campaigns (Fridkin et al., 2008) found that „negative commercials are less effective at depressing evaluations of woman [political] candidates, compared to male [political] candidates“.

The research article Stereotypes have changed over time and now more people think women are superior to men than the other way around. (Eagly et al., 2019) is a meta-analysis of 16 national U.S. opinion polls on gender stereotypes (N = 30,093 adults) extending from 1946 to 2018. Traits measured were communion (e.g., affectionate, emotional), agency (e.g., ambitious, courageous), and competence (e.g., intelligent, creative). Respondents indicated whether each trait is more true of women or men, or equally true of both. The authors found that „respondents now ascribe competence in general and intelligence more often to women than men, regardless of college education and birth cohort“. Women were also thought of as more communal. The only trait in which men were perceived to be higher than women was agency. „Contemporary gender stereotypes thus convey substantial female advantage in communion and a smaller male advantage in agency but also gender equality in competence along with some female advantage.“, on PsychologyToday or the same post on genderempathygap.de.

According to Equalitarianism: A Source of Liberal Bias (Winegard et al., 2018) people who see groups as oppressed and privileged cannot make fair judgments on groups they consider privileged, even if they believe they should. People evaluate science that suggests that women score higher on IQ tests than men more favorably than science that suggests the opposite.

In this preprint with the title A Cross-cultural Analysis of Censorship on Campuses (Clark et al., 2020), the authors find that people would rather censor a book in which it is claimed that men evolved to be better leaders than women than a book in which the opposite is claimed.

According to Accuracy and Bias in Stereotypes about the Social and Political Attitudes of Women and Men (Diekman et al., 2002), „participants consistently underestimated men’s support for female-stereotypic positions on issues“ and that analysis yielded that „these data suggested that this error rose from perceptions that men would oppose policies that favored women’s interests“. People underestimated men’s support for women.

According to Reactions to affirmative action policies in hiring: Effects of framing and beneficiary gender (Sinclair & Carlsson, 2021) people do not like affirmative action, but even less when the beneficiaries are male.

According to this Master’s thesis called Double Standards and Perceptions of Double Standards in Attitudes Toward the Roles of Men and Women (Fortune, 2016), both men and women endorse double standards that favor women, but not men. The author states:

Female participants endorsed pro-female double standards in five domains; male participants endorsed pro-female double standards in three domains, and no double standards in two domains. Participants believed that overall, the „typical female“ endorsed pro-female double standards and the „typical male“ endorsed pro-male double standards‘.

In National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track (Williams & Ceci, 2015) the authors found:

Contrary to prevailing assumptions, men and women faculty members from all four fields [(biology, engineering, economics, and psychology)] preferred female applicants 2:1 over identically qualified males with matching lifestyles (single, married, divorced), with the exception of male economists, who showed no gender preference.

Unfortunately, the authors do not take issues with this result but instead seem to celebrate it. They note:

We hope the discovery of an overall 2:1 preference for hiring women over otherwise identical men will help counter self-handicapping and opting-out by talented women at the point of entry to the STEM professoriate, and suggest that female underrepresentation can be addressed in part by increasing the number of women applying for tenure-track positions.

In a follow up study Women have substantial advantage in STEM faculty hiring, except when competing against more-accomplished men (Ceci & Williams, 2015), the same authors repeat the study but instead of comparing identical candidates, they compare slightly better to slightly worse candidates. In this condition, the slightly better candidate is preferred over the worse candidate irrespective to the genders involved almost every time, suggesting that the pro-female bias detected in the previous study only takes effect in the case that both candidates have identical qualifications.

The authors of Gender Discrimination in Hiring: Evidence from a Cross-National Harmonized Field Experiment (Birkelund et al., 2021) state:

Our findings suggest that although employers operate in quite different institutional contexts, they regard female applicants as more suitable for jobs in female-dominated occupations, [all other things being equal], while we find no evidence that they regard male applicants as more suitable anywhere.

[W]e need to update our knowledge of gender discrimination and the belief that women are always the disadvantaged group. This belief might have been correct earlier, but today, at least for the occupations we examined [(cook, receptionist, store assistant, payroll clerk, software developer and sales representative)], we found no evidence of hiring discrimination against female job applicants in any of the six countries included. Rather, we observed hiring discrimination against males in female-dominated jobs, whereas female applicants were favoured in female-dominated occupations and not discriminated in the other occupations we included.

They also explain why this is not at odds with previous findings:

However surprising, the presented evidence is not at odds with previous research on hiring discrimination. The key to explaining divergent results likely lies in the occupations studied. For balanced studies, including both female- and male-dominated occupations, and gender-neutral occupations, the aggregate outcome would be close to zero gender discrimination in hiring. For more unbalanced studies, like the GEMM study, which includes two clearly female-typed occupations, and only one strongly male-dominated occupation, we might expect an aggregated pattern showing hiring discrimination against men. In principle, the same logic should apply for unbalanced studies including a higher proportion of male dominated occupations, but then we would expect an aggregated pattern of hiring discrimination of females. Yet the findings regarding the male-dominated occupation we included cast doubts on the symmetrical nature of hiring discrimination by gender. Interestingly, when scholars plan to study gender differences in hiring discrimination, we tend to think about discrimination of women, not men, yet previous experiments seem to include more female- than male-dominated occupations. More research including more occupations is needed.

Similar results can be found in Gender discrimination in hiring: An experimental reexamination of the Swedish case (Ahmed et al., 2021):

Male applicants were about half as likely as female applicants to receive a positive employer response in female-dominated occupations. For male-dominated and mixed occupations we found no significant differences in positive employer responses between male and female applicants.

In the Pew Research article WOMEN AND LEADERSHIP 2018 — 2. Views on leadership traits and competencies and how they intersect with genders (Horowitz et al., 2018), the authors show that „majority of adults say male and female leaders have different leadership styles, relatively few think one gender has a better overall approach than the other“ even though „those who do see a difference between male and female leaders across a range of leadership traits and behaviors perceive women to be stronger in most areas, both in politics and business“. Specifically, „[f]emale leaders seen as more compassionate, empathetic than men“ and „[i]n politics, women are much more likely than men to be viewed as better role models; in business more see them as better able to create a safe and respectful workplace“.

The authors of In-group gender bias in hiring: Real-world evidence (Carlsson & Eriksson, 2019) state:

We investigate in-group gender bias in real-world hiring decisions by combining administrative data with data from a large-scale field experiment on hiring in which fictitious resumes with randomly assigned information about gender were sent to Swedish employers. Our results suggest that women (female recruiters or firms with a high share of female employees) favor women in the recruitment process. In contrast, we do not find much evidence that men (male recruiters or firms with a high share of male employees) favor men.

Quoting William Collins from 1.3.2.3 Lack of Male In-Group Preference — The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect:

Many people may be surprised at the claim that men have little or no in-group preference. The presumption of traditional cultural dominance by men might suggest to some people that men must enjoy considerable in-group preference. This is a key ingredient of patriarchy theory. But a little reflection reveals that this assumption runs counter to what we know about typical male behaviour: men tend to be competitive and hierarchical. If you are competitive, you are more likely to succeed — but it’s not because you have been assisted by those against whom you compete. What tends to be forgotten is that, in a competitive environment, there are more losers than winners. Once again we have fallen victim to the identity-group fallacy: perceiving „men“ as an undifferentiated class. ‘What is regarded as „cultural dominance of men“ is actually cultural dominance of a few men, those who have been successful in life’s competition. These are not typically the men who are the educational failures, the imprisoned, the homeless, the prematurely dead or those most likely to have been fatherless. Yet even the men who are ultimately disadvantaged tend to be competitive; they merely fail. Roy Baumeister has argued that this competitive and hierarchical social style of men is key to the formation of very large scale human social structures (Baumeister, 2010). The more cooperative, intimate social style favoured by women works well in small groups, but is not conducive to large scale societal cohesion – so Baumeister argues. He is not alone. Vigil for example, concludes: ‚Divergent social styles may reflect trade-offs between behaviors selected to maintain large, functional coalitions in men and intimate, secure relationships in women‘, (Vigil, 2007). Men’s strong sexual desire is also their weakness and provides another barrier to men forming sex-specific coalitions to promote their interests (and you will note the evolutionary relationship between the formation of male hierarchies and the sex drive). Quoting Dench (1996) again, „The more powerful men’s sexual impulses are, the stronger the bargaining position of women, and the smaller men’s chances of coming together in a mutually regulatory system at the expense of women.“ In this we see the reason for women tending to be against porn and prostitution. It is because alternative outlets for the male sex drive diminish female power. It is also the reason why priests in many religions are required to be celibate. It is to avoid them having two masters: God and wife. Hence, it is reasonable to argue that male hierarchies mitigate against strong in-group preference among men. Having in-group preference themselves, women naturally assume that the same must be true of men. This is a serious misunderstanding of men. It causes women to assume, for example, that the greater number of male than female MPs must mean that men’s issues are disproportionately represented in Parliament. But this rests upon the presumption that men will preferentially represent men’s issues. In fact, the operation of gynocentrism and the absence of male in-group preference ensures that this is not so. Men tend not to give preference to other men. There is approbation to be had in preferencing women and girls; there is only disapprobation to be had for any politician so brave — or so foolhardy — as to dare to claim equality for men or boys. Hence, it is de rigueur to support explicitly sexist policies such as those relating to violence against women and girls, but there is no political will to do anything about boys‘ increasingly serious educational failure. Thanks to the operation of gynocentrism, male disposability and lack of male in-group preference, „equality for males“ is interpreted as reprehensibly reactionary. In truth it is radical and far more progressive than those who style themselves as progressive whilst clinging to their ancient gendered psychology. But it is too radical for men in power, who steadfastly turn away from addressing the issues of ‘men and boys, with only a very few honourable exceptions.

Automatic / implicit biases have been shown to predict discriminatory behavior such as negative speech and body language, despite the fact that explicit cognition has no effect on them. When an individual is exposed to the entities he or she is implicitly biased against, implicit biases are triggered automatically and instantaneously. In some cases, implicit attitudes can guide spontaneous acts and split-second decisions (e.g., police shooter bias). „Just about the only group identity that does not elicit in-group-favoritism is male identity“ (Seager et al., 2016). In Gender Differences in Automatic In-Group Bias: Why Do Women Like Women More Than Men Like Men? (Rudman & Goodwin, 2004) the authors show that women have strong automatic in-group preferences, i.e. favoring their own sex, whereas men lack such a mechanism and instead also favor women. Women were 4.5 times as likely to show an automatic preference for their own gender than men were to show such favoritism for their own gender. Both male and female participants associated positive words such as ‚good‘, ‚happy‘ and ’sunshine‘ more often with women than with men, both men and women implicitly favored their mothers, and men showed low pro-male gender attitudes. Only women but not men showed cognitive balance among in-group bias, identity, and self-esteem, revealing that men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic preference for their own gender. See also this APA article about the same paper.

In The development of implicit gender attitudes (Dunham et al., 2015) the „development course of implicit and explicit gender attitudes between the ages of 5 and adulthood is investigated“. The authors state:

Findings demonstrate that implicit and explicit own-gender preferences emerge early in both boys and girls, but implicit own-gender preferences are stronger in young girls than boys. In addition, female participants‘ attitudes remain largely stable over development, whereas male participants‘ implicit and explicit attitudes show an age-related shift towards increasing female positivity. Gender attitudes are an anomaly in that social evaluations dissociate from social status, with both male and female participants tending to evaluate female more positively than male.

According to Subliminal Gender Stereotypes: Who Can Resist? (Breen et al., 2020), „subliminal exposure to [gender] stereotypes (vs. counter-stereotypes) led women who identify relatively strongly with feminists, but less strongly with women, to (a) persist in a math task, (b) show increased willingness to sacrifice men in a Moral Choice Dilemma task, and (c) show implicit in-group bias on an evaluative priming task“.

According to Math and language gender stereotypes: Age and gender differences in implicit biases and explicit beliefs (Vuletich et al., 2020):

Across all ages, boys showed neither math nor language implicit gender biases, whereas girls implicitly favored girls in both domains. These findings are counter to cultural stereotypes, which favor boys in math. On the explicit measure, both boys’ and girls’ primary tendency was to favor girls in math and language ability, with the exception of elementary school boys, who rated genders equally.

In Empathic Responses for Pain in Facial Muscles Are Modulated by Actor’s Attractiveness and Gender, and Perspective Taken by Observer (Jankowiak-Siuda et al., 2019) it is shown that people show more empathic responses towards females and less attractive faces expressing pain. Specifically, it was „investigated whether the sex and attractiveness of persons experiencing pain affected muscle activity associated with empathy for pain, the corrugator supercili (CS) and orbicularis oculi (OO) muscles, in male and female participants in two conditions: adopting a perspective of “the other” or “the self.”“ The gender effect was larger than the attractiveness (or rather: lack thereof) effect. The greater responses towards less attractive faces could be explained by the association between lack of low attractiveness to „poor health, lower immunity, and fewer resources to cope with pain“, which could increase (A) negative affect or (B) increase empathy for the pain of such people. The greater responses towards female faces were attributed to women being seen as more „sensitive to pain, fragile, and requiring more care and support“.

The authors of The Confounded Nature of Angry Men and Happy Women (Becker et al., 2007) found:

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually driven ones. Results from additional studies in which neutrally expressive faces were used suggested that the connections between masculine features and angry expressions and between feminine features and happy expressions might be a property of the sexual dimorphism of the face itself and not merely a result of gender stereotypes biasing the perception.

The author of The influence of perceived suffering and vulnerability on the experience of pity (Dijker, 2001) showed that „participants‘ pity reactions to photographs of persons expressing pain were influenced by age-related, sex-related, and postural vulnerability cues“, that increased musculature evokes lower levels of pity from others and that „females received higher ratings on [protective tendency], pity and its perceptual correlates than males“.

In Facial resemblance to emotions: Group differences, impression effects, and race stereotypes. (Zebrowitz et al., 2010) the authors demonstrate that „neutral expression male faces objectively resemble angry expressions more than female faces do [because female faces retain more neotenous characteristics than do male faces], female faces objectively resemble surprise expressions more than male faces do [again because female faces retain more neotenous characteristics than do male faces], White faces objectively resemble angry expressions more than Black or Korean faces do, and Black faces objectively resemble happy and surprise expressions more than White faces do“. Furthermore, they say that while „both cultural stereotypes and structural commonalities could provide viable explanations for previous studies showing that sex and race moderated the recognition of angry, surprise, and happy emotion expressions and vice versa“, the authors demonstrated that there are „similarities between emotion expressions and faces from various demographic categories that are due purely to structure“. This sexual dimorphism w.r.t. anger was found to be smaller in Asian faces, but not the sexual dimorphism w.r.t. surprise.

The authors of Self-protective biases in group categorization: Threat cues shape the psychological boundary between “us” and “them”. (Miller et al., 2010) showed that the „presence of masculine cues biased people toward greater outgroup categorization“. Specifically, masculine voices voices were categorized as black by white study participants, as were computer-generated point-light displays of human walkers with varying signs of masculinity. This effect increased when the walker was shown approaching the participants as opposed to side-walking, as a „target moving toward the perceiver connotes a potential source of imminent danger“. Angry male faces also biased people toward greater outgroup categorization. Fear arousal resulted in a higher identification of threatening (i.e. angry), racially ambiguous male faces as Black, but only among White individuals who believed they were highly vulnerable to interpersonal danger.

According to Face gender and emotion expression: Are angry women more like men? (Hess et al., 2009) people identify androgynous angry faces as more likely to be a man than a woman and are slower to classify an angry woman as a woman than an angry man as a man. Happiness and fear expressions bias sex perception toward the female, whereas anger expressions bias sex perception toward the male.

The authors of Emotion in the neutral face: A mechanism for impression formation? (Adams Jr. et al., 2011) „found that neutral female versus neutral male faces were rated as more submissive, affiliative, naïve, honest, cooperative, babyish, fearful, happy, and less angry than neutral male faces“.

In Gender and the Communication of Emotion Via Touch (Hertenstein & Keltner, 2010) it was found:

In the current reanalysis, we found that anger was communicated at greater-than-chance levels only when a male comprised at least one member of a communicating dyad. Sympathy was communicated at greater-than-chance levels only when a female comprised at least one member of the dyad. Finally, happiness was communicated only if females comprised the entire dyad.

The authors of Human Tears Contain a Chemosignal (Gelstein et al., 2011) found that „merely sniffing negative-emotion–related odorless tears obtained from women donors induced reductions in sexual appeal attributed by men to pictures of women’s faces. Moreover, after sniffing such tears, men experienced reduced self-rated sexual arousal, reduced physiological measures of arousal, and reduced levels of testosterone. Finally, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that sniffing women’s tears selectively reduced activity in brain substrates of sexual arousal in men“.

In Caring or daring? Exploring the impact of facial masculinity/femininity and gender category information on first impressions (Walker & Wänke, 2017) masculine-looking persons were shown to be seen as colder and more competent than feminine-looking persons, and this effect was not only also found for atypical (masculine-looking women and feminine-looking men) category members but was even more pronounced. According to the authors, „very subtle facial cues to masculinity/femininity strongly guide first impressions and may have more impact than the gender category“.

In Sex Related Factors in the Perception of Threatening Facial Expressions (Goos & Silverman, 2002) the authors showed that anger posed by males could be more accurately read from their faces than anger posed by females. A second hypothesis, namely that female-posed anger would be more accurately perceived by women than by men, received only partial support. Anger and disgust generated a lot of false alarms when reading male but not female faces, while fear and sadness generated more false alarms when reading female than male faces. People were significantly more sensitive to men’s anger and women’s fear and sadness.

According to The social face of emotion recognition: Evaluations versus stereotypes (Bijlstra et al., 2010), anger is more readily perceived on male faces, while sadness is more readily perceived on female faces.

The authors of Model Gender Interacts With Expressed Emotion to Enhance Startle: Angry Male and Happy Female Faces Produce the Greatest Potentiation (Åsli & Øvervoll, 2020) write:

The present experiment investigated startle EMG responses to a startle probe while viewing pictures of neutral, happy, angry, fearful, and sad facial expressions presented by female and male models. Participants were divided into female and male groups. Results showed that emotional facial expressions interact with model gender to produce startle potentiation to a probe: greater responses were found while viewing angry expressions by male models, and while viewing happy faces by female models.

In the pre-registered study EmoSex: Emotion prevails over sex in implicit judgments of faces and voices (Korb et al., 2022), the authors found clear evidence that facial emotion and vocalization influence the perception of sex cues and vice versa, such that „the associations of maleness-anger and femaleness-happiness exist across sensory modalities“. For a pop science article about the same study, see Women Seen as Happy and Men as Angry Despite Real Emotions – Neuroscience News.

In the UK, 3/4 to 5/6 male prisoners would not be in prison if they were treated as leniently as women.

In Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases (Starr, 2012) it was found that women were twice as likely to avoid incarceration entirely and that men got 63% longer sentences for the exact same crimes. Discrimination against men was found to be over 6 times as high as discrimination against minorities found using the same methodology and the same author in Racial Disparity in Federal Criminal Charging and Its Sentencing Consequences (Rehavi & Starr, 2012).

In Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Disparities in Sentencing: Evidence from the U.S. Federal Courts (Mustard, 2001) it was shown that after controlling for numerous characteristics, male offenders receive substantially longer sentences. These disparities were primarily generated by departures from guidelines (70%), rather than differential sentencing within the guidelines (30%). Women were also more likely to get no prison term at all, more likely to be given downard departures (judges giving less than the minimum prison sentence) and less likely to be given upward adjustments (judges giving more than the maximum prison sentence). All in all, this means that judges specifically go out of their way to help women.

The authors of Demographic Differences in Sentencing: An Update to the 2012 Booker Report (Pryor et al., 2017) found:

Female offenders of all races received shorter sentences than White male offenders during the Post-Report period, as they had for the prior four periods. […] White female offenders received sentences that were 28.9 percent shorter than those of White male offenders in the Post-Report period, compared to 31.1 percent shorter during the Gall period. Black female offenders and Other Race female offenders also received shorter sentences than White male offenders during the Post-Report period, at 29.7 percent and 35.4 percent shorter respectively. In the Gall period these differences were 33.1 percent and 34.6 percent, respectively. Hispanic female offenders received sentences that were 16.8 percent shorter than those of White male offenders during the Post-Report period, compared to 18.2 percent shorter in the Gall period.

In Spouse Murder Defendants in Large Urban Counties, U.S. Department of Justice, 1995 it is shown:

Wives [who murdered their husbands] received shorter prison sentences than husbands [who murdered their wives] (a 10-year difference, on average) even when the comparison is restricted to defendants who were alike in terms of whether or not they were provoked — The average prison sentence for unprovoked wife defendants was 7 years, or 10 years shorter than the average 17 years for unprovoked husband defendants.

The authors of „Sentencing Disparity and Discrimination: A Focus on Gender“, chapter 4 of „How Do Judges Decide? The Search for Fairness and Justice in Punishment“ (Daly & Tonry, 1997) note that „offenders convicted of crimes against women were more than two-and-a-half times more likely to be sentenced to death“.

In Does Victim Gender Increase Sentence Severity? Further Explorations of Gender Dynamics and Sentencing Outcomes (Curry et al., 2004) the following was shown:

Using data for offenders convicted of three violent crimes in the seven largest metro counties in Texas in 1991, the authors find evidence that offenders who victimized females received substantially longer sentences than offenders who victimized males. Results also show that victim gender effects on sentence length are conditioned by offender gender, such that male offenders who victimize females received the longest sentence of any other victim gender/offender gender combination.

The authors of Chivalry is Not Dead: Murder, Gender, and the Death Penalty (Shatz & Shatz, 2011) state:

Women guilty of capital murder are far less likely than men to be sentenced to death, and defendants who kill women are far more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants who kill men. We argue that all of these findings are consistent with chivalric norms, and we conclude that, in the prosecutors‘ decisions to seek death and juries‘ decisions to impose it, chivalry appears to be alive and well.

The authors of Justice Needs a Blindfold: Effects of Gender and Attractiveness on Prison Sentences and Attributions of Personal Characteristics in a Judicial Process (Ahola et al., 2009) found:

This study examined the effect of gender and facial characteristics of criminal offenders on attributions of crime-relevant traits. The stimulus pictures portrayed women and men of varying attractiveness. Participants were presented with pictures of these female or male faces along with accompanying crime accounts. The crime account described the individual in the picture as a person who had committed one of the following crimes: theft, fraud, drug crime, child molestation, child abuse, or homicide. After reading one case account the participants were asked to evaluate the credibility and other crime-relevant personality traits of the offender. Results showed that female defendants were rated more favourably than were male defendants. Gender worked to the advantage of the female perpetrator. There were also slight tendencies towards more lenient appraisal of the more attractive women.

According to a report titled Do You Receive a Lighter Prison Sentence Because You Are a Woman? An Economic Analysis of Federal Criminal Sentencing Guidelines (Sarnikar et al., 2007) which examined US criminal sentencing data, if women were treated like men in the end stage of the criminal justice system they would on average serve 9.5 months longer, and since according to the same report women serve on average 17 months they would receive a 56% sentencing length increase if they were sentenced like men. Since this report only took into account the end stage of the criminal justice system as that is all the data permitted, this gap is even larger in practice. They also state that „most of the gender gap arises from convictions via guilty pleas“.

According to Police Brutality a Leading Cause of Death Among Young Men. DiversityInc. (2019), police violence against men is incomparably more prevalent than it is against minorities, although it is particularly prevalent towards African American males. In this image which is taken from Risk of police-involved death by race/ethnicity and place, United States, 2012–2018 (Edwards et al., 2018), African American females and White males are circled for emphasis. Police brutality is a male problem first, a race problem second.

Female prisoners are treated better in prison, see e.g. It’s not fair on men that women prisoners don’t have to wear uniforms. Tony MP. (Stone, 2015). Yet, there are calls to abolish prison for women, see e.g. Opinion: 8% of prisoners are women. That’s about 8% too many, Women will only be jailed for serious crimes, Justice Secretary reveals and What happens to mums and women who walk free from court.

In The Effects of Physical Attractiveness, Race, Socioeconomic Status, and Gender of Defendants and Victims on Judgments of Mock Jurors: A Meta-Analysis (Mazzella & Feingold, 1994) the authors show that women are punished less than men for the same crime and that defendants were at a disadvantage when their victim was female.

The authors of Perceived Masculinity Predicts U.S. Supreme Court Outcomes (Chen et al., 2016) state:

Previous studies suggest a significant role of language in the court room, yet none has identified a definitive correlation between vocal characteristics and court outcomes. This paper demonstrates that voice-based snap judgments based solely on the introductory sentence of lawyers arguing in front of the Supreme Court of the United States predict outcomes in the Court. In this study, participants rated the opening statement of male advocates arguing before the Supreme Court between 1998 and 2012 in terms of masculinity, attractiveness, confidence, intelligence, trustworthiness, and aggressiveness. We found significant correlation between vocal characteristics and court outcomes and the correlation is specific to perceived masculinity even when judgment of masculinity is based only on less than three seconds of exposure to a lawyer’s speech sample. Specifically, male advocates are more likely to win when they are perceived as less masculine. No other personality dimension predicts court outcomes. While this study does not aim to establish any causal connection, our findings suggest that vocal characteristics may be relevant in even as solemn a setting as the Supreme Court of the United States.

As the authors stated, this study does not aim to establish a causal connection. It could very well be that lawyers who felt they had bad cases lowered their voices and spoke in a more aggressive tone to compensate.

In Gender, the Perception of Aggression, and the Overestimation of Gender Bias (Stewart-Williams, 2002), participants were presented hypothetical situations with male and female aggressors. Data did not support the hypothesis that because of gender stereotypes, people would perceive more aggression in men’s than women’s aggression; instead, women’s aggression was rated as more acceptable than men’s aggression.

The authors of I Don’t Like the Cut of your Jib: Perceived Facial Masculinity as a Cue to Criminality (Estrada-Reynolds et al., 2017) stated:

Suspect masculinity and type of crime were manipulated to determine whether the degree of masculinity influenced whether participants believed they had committed the crime. Results showed that participants consistently associated masculinity with committing violent crime and showed some evidence for the general criminality hypothesis on secondary measures. These findings have important implications regarding law enforcement, eyewitness and juror bias, and legal decisions.

In ‘Lucky Boy!’; Public Perceptions of Child Sexual Offending Committed by Women (Bradbury & Martellozzo, 2021) the authors studied „1,651 comments made by the general public to nine Daily Mail online newspaper articles published from 2018 to 2019, reporting the sentencing decisions of female sex offenders, who have been charged and found guilty with the offense of sexual activity with a child“. This study, unlike previous ones, „cross-examine[d] public responses to different typologies of offending behavior [such as] teachers, mothers, same sex offenders, co-offenders and finally those who offended for financial gain“. The authors conclude:

[W]hile people demand equal sentencing decisions between male and female child sex offenders, this is limited by public perception when the abuser is an attractive female and, as a result, perceived as less harmful to the child, who is not seen no longer as a victim but as a ‘Lucky Boy’. Such preconceptions fuel shame, social stigma and stereotyping towards sexual exposure and prevents victims to disclose their abuse and achieve closure and justice.

According to The Gender Gap in Sex Offender Punishment (Shields & Cochran, 2019), women who commit sexual offenses are treated more leniently than their male counterparts. Male sex offenders were more substantially more likely to be sentenced to prison (47% vs 33%) and given longer terms than female sex offenders (on average more than 20 months longer), and these findings are similar across offense severity and whether or not the victim was a minor. Male sex offenders, all else equal, were perceived as more dangerous and culpable than female sex offenders. Unfortunately, the same study makes excuses for female offenders, speculating that male offenders cannot be treated outside of prison and female offenders cannot be treated inside prison.

The author of „Off with His __“: Analyzing the Sex Disparity in Chemical Castration Sentences (Oswald, 2013) argues that „the punishment of chemical castration is, in effect, reserved exclusively for use against male offenders“ and that „systemic problems plague the chemical castration sentencing regime“. First and foremost, while chemical castration induces sterility in both male and female sex offenders, it is mostly only effective against male offenders to reduce recidivism (although this too „depends on the attributes of the particular convict“). The author explains that the belief that punishing heinous criminal offenders in an effective and appropriate manner through chemical castration was a laudable purpose, this was not based on rational policy considerations but instead are a result of „the general public becoming enthralled with the idea that modern medicine could provide a ‚magic cure'“ and that these laws „coincided trend toward more severe sentencing [which] is probably influenced by the media’s method of reporting“ as well as by the call for law and order that has underlined the campaign rhetoric of some candidates for political office“. He goes on to lay out the problems with this. The first reason is the biased „statutes themselves and judicial interpretation of legislative intent [through which the] legislative branch’s actions have created a nearly complete statutory bar against women being sentenced to chemical castration, even when they engage in the exact same conduct as men. He laments that „[m]ost shocking of all, perhaps, is the sheer number of examples of such discriminatory statutes, both facially and as applied“. Second, men are sentenced more to crimes in general; this is partially because men do in fact commit more crimes, but as the author goes on to explain, „it may also be due, in part, to ‚possible discrimination in the police officer’s decision to arrest“ and third, „[e]ven [women] do commit a sex crime [they] receive more lenient treatment [so that] if a woman committed a specified crime that made her eligible for chemical castration, she would have a much better chance of having her case dismissed or not being convicted than would her male counterpart“. Fourth, he states that „vast judicial discretion in the chemical castration sentencing system provides a breeding ground for discrimination“. And fifth, Depo-Provera (the drug used to achieve chemical castration which was originally created as a form of female birth control), is only effective at reducing recidivism in men. He concludes that „these actions make the likelihood of a woman being subjected to chemical castration virtually nonexistent“, and that „[this] result cannot stand in a society that finds it inherently unjust to sentence offenders differently because of their sex“. He proposes (A) to declare chemical castration statutes unconstitutional, (B) to encourage sentencing judges to refrain from sentencing any convict to chemical castration and (C) gives suggestions for reducing the sex disparity in the current castration sentencing regime. Additionally, the paper summarizes the status of chemical castration as a form of punishment in the U.S. and worldwide; I have copied the relevant passages here:

Chemical castration laws in the United States Chemical castration has gained increasing popularity within the United States. Although surgical castration has been performed on prisoners in the United States as early as 1899, California was the first state to enact chemical castration legislation, almost one hundred years later, on September 17, 1996. Now, several states, including California, Montana,“‚ Florida, Louisiana, Iowa, and Wisconsin „allow a judge to force a sex offender to undergo chemical castration.“ Although Georgia and Oregon once allowed chemical castration, these laws have since been repealed. Uniquely, Texas „gives the offender the decision to undergo voluntary surgical castration as a condition of release [but] does not [make the same] offer [for] chemical castration.“ Chemical castration legislation has been proposed but not yet adopted in Pennsylvania (1997), Oklahoma (2002),‘ Minnesota (2005), Vermont (2008), Alabama (2009), and Virginia (2011). This amounts to a total of at least sixteen states that have either proposed or adopted some type of chemical castration statute.

Chemical castration laws around the world The increasing popularity of chemical castration legislation around the world is likely to normalize these sentences in the United States, despite the sentencing regime’s flaws. Although many European countries, including Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, and Sweden, have only enacted castration laws as treatment or punishment of sex offenders, Poland was the first country in the European Union to impose chemical castration as a form of punishment, in 2010. However, support for chemical castration is not limited to Europe. For example, the Australian Minister for Police and Emergency Services has advocated for compulsory chemical castration of child molesters and rapists. Similar legislation has been proposed in New Zealand. Russia also recently enacted a law authorizing the use of chemical castration on child sex offenders. Likewise, chemical castration laws have been enacted or proposed in non-Western societies (as recently as this year) in countries such as Taiwan and Turkey. Furthermore, an Indian judge recently „caused a storm . . . when she suggested castration as the most appropriate punishment for pedophiles and serial sex offenders.“

In The Effects of Suspect Characteristics on Arrest: A Meta-Analysis (Lytle, 2014) it was found that „black individuals were about 1.4 times more likely to be arrested, males were about 1.6 times more likely to be arrested, and Hispanic individuals were about 1.25 times more likely to be arrested“ and that „men are being treated more harshly now than they were in the 1960’s through the 1980’s“. This held true „regardless of whether or not a study accounts for the seriousness of the offense, the amount of evidence, whether a suspect was under the influence of drugs or alcohol, whether the suspect used a weapon, the demeanor of the suspect, and/or whether the suspect committed a crime in front of the officer during the encounter“. Importantly, these „effects of race and gender persist even in the stronger methodological approach, systematic social observation“ („even when trained observers were systematically observing police-citizen encounters, or whether the study was a traffic stop study“).

The author of Gender-Specific Differences in Corporal Punishment and Children’s Perceptions of Their Mothers’ and Fathers’ Parenting (Mehlhausen-Hassoen, 2019) states:

This study also examined whether gender interactions influence the relationship between corporal punishment and respondents’ perceptions of their parents’ behavior, namely the perceived parenting the respondents received during childhood. Cross tabulations and repeated measures were used to analyze the data. Significantly fewer daughters (as compared with sons) experienced corporal punishment and significantly fewer daughters experienced corporal punishment from both parents. Corporal punishment had a significant negative impact on the perceived parent–child relationship. Violent parental behavior had a significantly stronger effect on the perception of the father–child relationship, as compared with the perception of the mother–child relationship, even when the mother was the violent parent. These findings point to the importance of gender interactions in research and psychosocial practice.

The study named Corporal punishment and physical maltreatment against children: A community study on Chinese parents in Hong Kong (Tang, 2006) „aimed to examine rates and associated factors of parent-to-child corporal punishment and physical maltreatment in Hong Kong Chinese families“. They found that „[m]others as compared to fathers reported higher rates and more frequent use of corporal punishment on their children, but this parental gender effect was insignificant among older parents and those with adolescent children“ and that „[b]oys as compared to girls were more likely to experience higher rates and more frequent parental corporal punishment, especially in middle childhood at aged 5-12“. Children’s young age, male gender, and externalizing behaviors as well as parents‘ young age, non-employment, and marital dissatisfaction were shown to be significant correlates of parental corporal punishment.

As cited in Perspectives in Male Psychology, Louise Liddon & John Barry, page 79:

An Israeli study of nearly 30,000 pupils in more than 300 schools examined data for three cohorts of Jewish secular high-school seniors in the years 2000-2002 (Lavy, 2004). Student matriculation exams were routinely graded in two ways: an external grade which is blind to name and sex of the pupil, and an internal grade which is non-blind. The pupil’s final grade is a mean of the internal and external grades. This study found that boys were given lower grades in the non-blind assessments across all nine subjects studied. The researcher, having ruled out the other possible explanations, concluded the discrepancy in scoring was a result of bias in the unblinded grading. A strength of this study is that it is a natural experiment.

The 2004 papers is freely available here. See also an updated version of the paper: Do gender stereotypes reduce girls‘ or boys‘ human capital outcomes? Evidence from a natural experiment (Lavy, 2008)

In PISA 2012 results: The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behaviour, Confidence (OECD, 2015) it was found that „teachers generally award girls higher marks than boys [for the same exact work]“ (page 159):

The report also shows that teachers generally award girls higher marks than boys [for the same exact work], given what would be expected after considering their performance in PISA. This practice is particularly apparent in language-of-instruction courses. Girls’ better marks may reflect the fact that they tend to be “better students” than boys: they tend to do what is required and expected of them, thanks to better self-regulation skills, and they are more driven to excel in school. In addition, girls appear to be stronger in displaying the knowledge they have acquired (i.e. solving an algebraic equation) than in problem solving, the latter of which is a central component of the PISA test. But this report reveals that the gender gap observed in both school marks and PISA scores is not the same in both language-of-instruction classes and mathematics. The fact that it is much wider in the language-of-instruction courses suggests that teachers may harbour conscious or unconscious stereotyped notions about girls’ and boys’ strengths and weaknesses in school subjects, and, through the marks they give, reinforce those notions among their students and their students’ families.

The previous results are also reported in Teachers ‚give higher marks to girls‘. British Broadcasting Corporations. (Coughlan, 2015).

See also this excellent video on the subject of gender grading bias: Do Schools Discriminate Against Boys? (channel: Tomorrow’s World Viewpoint).

In Boys lag behind: How teachers’ gender biases affect student achievement (Terrier, 2020), the author found that „[w]ithout teachers’ bias in favor of girls, the gender gap in choosing a science track would be 12.5% larger in favor of boys“. She also finds that „[g]ender-biased grading accounts for 21 percent of boys falling behind girls in math during middle school“ and again that „girls who benefit from gender bias in math are more likely to select a science track in high school“. In another paper A helping hand for girls? Gender bias in marks and its effect on student progress (Terrier, 2014) she states that „[g]irls’ better behaviour in class is not behind this nudge forwards“ unlike the OECD report speculated. This unconscious bias to give better marks to girls was confirmed in dozens of independent research papers confirming that these results hold in elementary school, middle school, high school and college, across multiple countries, in all subjects and have measurable effects on boys‘ university enrollment and grade repetition, but it would not be appropriate to list them all here.

The authors of The Boy Crisis: Experimental Evidence on the Acceptance of Males Falling Behind (Cappelen et al., 2019) find „strong evidence of a gender bias against low-performing males, particularly among female participants“ and state that their study „provides novel evidence on the nature of discrimination and on how males falling behind are perceived by society“ and that the reason behind this is statistical fairness discrimination, a phenomenon in which people use the victim’s gender to infer other traits that are relevant to their fairness judgements. They conclude:

The emergence of the ‘boy crisis’ prompts the question of whether people interpret gender inequalities differently depending on whether males or females are lagging behind. We study this question in a novel large-scale economic experiment conducted with a general population [involving more than 5,000 participants] from the United States. The participants act as spectators and distribute earnings between two workers in a controlled labor market environment. When initial earnings are based on merit, we find that the spectators are gender-biased against males. We show that this gender bias is driven by female spectators and we provide evidence suggesting that the underlying mechanism is statistical fairness discrimination, where spectators interpret a male loser as someone who has exerted less effort than a female loser. Our study provides new evidence on the nature of gender discrimination, by showing how the perception of females being disadvantaged may cause people to infer that low-performing males have exerted less effort than low-performing females. […]

According to Wikipedia — School corporal punishment in the United States, as of 2018 corporal punishment is still legal in private schools in every U.S. state except New Jersey and Iowa, legal in public schools in 19 states and practiced in 15 states. The authors of Corporal Punishment in U.S. Public Schools: Prevalence, Disparities in Use, and Status in State and Federal Policy (Gershoff & Font, 2016) showed that in most districts in the U.S. where corporal punishement is practiced, boys are 1.6 to greater than 5 times more likely than girls to face it, with the majority of districts showing gender disparities exceeding 3.0. On average, black boys were 1.8 as likely than white boys to face punishment.

The authors of Race and Gender Bias in the Administration of Corporal Punishment. (Shaw & Braden, 1990) „[e]xamined disciplinary actions taken by school building administrators after receiving discipline referral to identify evidence of race and gender bias in administration of corporal punishment (CP). Analysis of discipline files (n=6,244) demonstrated statistically significant relationships between race and CP and between gender and CP. Results indicated evidence of race and gender bias in administration of CP“, which means that boys and particularly black boys were punished more frequently for the same behavioral problems.

According to Do early educators‘ implicit biases regarding sex and race relate to behavior expectations and recommendations of preschool expulsions and suspensions? (Gilliam et al., 2016) boys receive closer surveillance for the same behavior, and in particular black boys which „may contribute to greater levels of identification of challenging behaviors with Black preschoolers and especially Black boys, which perhaps contributes to the documented sex and race disparities in preschool expulsions and suspensions“.

In Parsing Disciplinary Disproportionality: Contributions of Infraction, Student, and School Characteristics to Out-of-School Suspension and Expulsion (Skiba et al., 2014) the authors state that „[m]ales have been estimated as being disciplined at a rate between two (Raffaele Mendez & Knoff, 2003) and up to four times (Imich, 1994) higher than female students. It has been suggested that gender disproportionality could be accounted for by the fact that teachers may view boys as more defiant and disruptive than girls (Newcomb et al., 2002; Wentzel, 2002)“.

According to an article by U.S. News with the title Boys Bear the Brunt of School Discipline (Laura Camera, 2016) boys come to school having more behavioral problems on average but in addition to that, even same behavior problems were penalized a lot more in boys than girls, and this has been linked to worse school performance.

The author of Student victimization by teachers in Taiwan: Prevalence and associations (Chen, 2011) states:

International literature consistently reports that male students are more likely to be physically punished (Brown, 2009; Delfabbro et al., 2006; Youssef et al., 1998). Prior studies also indicate that boys are more likely to report being emotionally, physically, and sexually maltreated by staff members in schools (Benbenishty, Zeira, & Astor, 2002; Benbenishty, Zeira, Astor & Khoury-Kassabri, 2002; Khoury-Kassabri, 2006; Zeira et al., 2002). Thus, the present study hypothesizes that male students are more likely than female ones to experience emotional, physical, and sexual maltreatment by teachers in Taiwan.

[…]

Results: Overall, 26.9% of students reported having been maltreated by teachers at least 1 time in the previous semester. Hitting, beating, or slapping was the most common maltreatment, and the most vulnerable students were boys and senior students. Students who perceived that student–teacher relationships were poor, and those who were involved with at-risk peers, were more likely to report victimization.

According to Gender Differences in Corporal Punishment, Academic Self-Efficacy and Drop-Out in Secondary School Students (Rafique & Ahmed, 2019):

The objective of the present research was to find out gender differences in corporal punishment, academic self-efficacy and drop-out in secondary school students. […] The findings of the study revealed that corporal punishment showed a positive relationship with drop-out. Boys were found to expose more to corporal punishment and had higher drop-out than the girls. […]

This YouTube video with the title Trapped (channel: Jack Beament) excellently portrays the experience of a male intimate partner violence victim, and how hard it is to get help when no one is on your side and you can expect to be seen as the perpetrator even though you were actually the victim, just because you are the man and your victimizer is a woman. And this video named #ViolenceIsViolence: Domestic abuse advert Mankind (channel: The Mankind Initiative) is another example of how people rush to help female victims of male perpetrated domestic violence, but turn a blind eye or even laugh when a man is subjected to the same level of abuse by a woman.

In THE SOCIAL EXPERIMENT | The Rise Of Female Violence (BBC Three, 2015), two actors (one male, one female) were asked to take part in a social experiment where they enacted a scene in which one partner was seen being physically abusive to the other. Bystanders only intervened in the case where violence was directed from the man towards the woman. Not only did bystanders not intervene when the man was abused by the woman, one was even seen cheering on the woman as she beat her partner, assuming that he must have been unfaithful. Something similar can be found in What Happens When A Woman Abuses A Man In Public? (BBC Three, 2017).

News Stories of Intimate Partner Violence: An Experimental Examination of Participant Sex, Perpetrator Sex, and Violence Severity on Seriousness, Sympathy, and Punishment Preferences (Savage et al. 2016) showed that people’s „[r]atings of seriousness of IPV for stories with male perpetrators were significantly higher than ratings of seriousness for stories with female perpetrators“ and that overall, participants had significantly higher sympathy for female victims of domestic violence and „reported stronger punishment preferences for male perpetrators„.

The authors of Victim Gender, Rater Attitudes, and Rater Violence History Influence Perceptions of Intimate Partner Violence (Erickson et al., 2017) state:

Perceptions of intimate partner violence (IPV) have been proposed to play a role in the stigmatization and underreporting of violence by individuals who are victimized by intimate partners, especially in cases that are inconsistent with the male-to-female IPV paradigm. We examined the independent and combined influences of victim and perpetrator sex, attitudes toward gender roles, and history of IPV perpetration on perceptions of IPV among 240 college students. We employed a vignette methodology to manipulate perpetrator and victim sex in a fully crossed design. Results indicate that violence perpetrated against males is perceived as less serious and more justified, and male victims are perceived to be more blameworthy than female victims. Traditional gender role attitudes and histories of IPV perpetration are associated with greater blaming of victims and justification of perpetrators across contexts

The authors of The Effect of Gender of Perpetrator and Victim on Perceptions of Psychological and Physical Intimate Partner Aggression (Hammock et al., 2017) state:

Two hundred and fifty one participants (166 females) read scenarios involving psychological or physical aggression between two males, two females, or a male and a female. Participants reported their perceptions of the encounter and the character and emotional reactions of the individual couple members. Physical aggression was evaluated more negatively than psychological aggression. Participants evaluated the encounter and the perpetrator and victim in a manner consistent with stereotypical gender roles, revealing more concern for female than male victims and greater denigration of male than female perpetrators. These results have implications for programs aimed at the reduction of intimate partner violence and the services and programs developed for perpetrators and victims.

The authors of When a man hits a woman: moral evaluations and reporting violence to the police (Felson & Feld, 2009) state:

[R]espondents are particularly likely to condemn men’s assaults on women, and to favor reporting them. The pattern appears to reflect both greater moral condemnation of men’s assaults on women and the belief that the victims of these assaults are in greater danger. In general, moral judgments and attitudes toward reporting do not depend on the gender, age, level of education, or political ideology of the respondent. Condemnation of men’s violence against women, and support for police intervention when it occurs, are apparently widespread across different segments of the population.

In Does violence involving women and intimate partners have a special etiology? (Felson & Lane 2010) the authors state:

We used data from a survey of inmates who have committed homicide or assault to examine whether men and women who have killed or assaulted their intimate partners are different from other violent offenders. A „gender perspective“ implies that intimate partner violence and violence between the sexes have different etiologies than other types of violence, whereas a “violence perspective” implies that they have similar etiologies. Our evidence supports a violence perspective. In general, offenders who attack their partners are similar to other offenders in terms of their prior records, alcohol and drug use, and experiences of abuse. We observed some differences between men who attack women (including their female partners) and other male offenders, but the differences were opposite those predicted by a gender perspective. For example, men who attacked their partners were particularly likely to have been abused by their partners. In addition, men who attacked women were particularly likely to have experienced sexual abuse during childhood and to have been intoxicated at the time of the incident. These results suggest that some well-known predictors of violence are particularly strong predictors of male violence against women and female partners.

Evaluations of sexual assault: Perceptions of guilt and legal elements for male and female aggressors using various coercive strategies. (Russel et al. 2011) found that „[p]eople attribute less guilt to a female on male sexual aggressor than a male on female one“.

In Perceptions of Harm, Criminality, and Law Enforcement Response: Comparing Violence by Men Against Women and Violence by Women Against Men – (Allen & Bradley 2017) the authors state:

Studies tend to support the idea that people rate violence against wives more negatively than wives’ violence against husbands. Violence by women against men tends to be minimized: violence is evaluated more harshly when perpetrated by male partners against female victims than vice versa (Dennison & Thompson, 2011; Feather, 1996; Hamby & Jackson, 2010; Hamel, Desmarais, & Nicholls, 2007; Harris & Cook, 1994; Simon et al., 2001; Sorenson & Taylor, 2005). In addition to the general public, studies find that psychologists are more likely to characterize violent acts as abusive when they were perpetrated by husbands against wives than in similar circumstances where wives committed acts against their husbands (Follingstad, DeHart, & Green, 2004).

[…]

Our findings suggest that real or perceived differences in injury or potential for injury provide some explanation behind differences in attitudes regarding domestic violence across perpetrator or victim gender, but it does not fully explain this difference. Rather, across all three measures, respondents evaluated violence by men against women more seriously than they did violence by women against men. We find that third parties (a) rated men’s violence as more injurious, (b) were more likely to label men’s violence as a crime even after controlling for injury rating, and (c) deemed men’s violence as more worthy of police contact, controlling for injury rating and criminal labeling.

They also find that „violence by men against women has over 9 times the odds of violence by women against men of being considered crime“ and that there is „no significant conditional effect of respondent gender on this relationship“.

The authors of Discourses Around Male IPV Related Systemic Biases on Reddit (Sivagurunathan et al., 2021) found:

A widely used social networking site (http://www.reddit.com/) was scraped for submissions relating to male IPV. Search was carried out using three keywords resulting in 917 submissions, out of which 82 met inclusion criteria. Submissions were included in final analysis if they consisted of more than half a page of data pertaining to male IPV. Thematic content analysis was utilized to analyze the data.

Responses reflect common experiences with participants identifying multiple sources of perceived systemic biases: (1) social norms, (2) legal system, (3) social services, (4) media, and (5) government.

The sources of potential support for male IPV survivors exhibit substantial pervasive biases against males as victims of IPV. Findings from current study can inform policies across multiple systems.

The Duluth model which has its roots in feminist patriarchy theory and which sprung out of the false believe that men are always perpetrators and women always victims is an example of systemic gender bias against men. This becomes even clearer when one looks at the facts and notes that women exceed men both in frequency and prevalence of commiting domestic violence (see e.g. References Examining Assaults by Women on Their Spouses or Male Partners: An Updated Annotated Bibliography, Fiebert, 2014).

According to Ethnic and Gender Discrimination in the Rental Housing Market: Evidence from a Meta-Analysis of Correspondence Tests, 2006-2017 (Flage, 2018) which covered 15 OECD countries and totals over 110,000 letters :

[I]ndividuals belonging to the majority are more than twice as likely to be chosen as Arab/Muslim applicants. Female applicants are almost 30% more likely to be chosen than male applicants. However, this result differs depending on the group of applicants: women belonging to an ethnic minority are 34% more likely to be selected by an agent than men belonging to the same minority. This result is even higher when we compare Arab/Muslim women with Arab/Muslim men: women are 50% more likely than men to be favored. Finally, a woman belonging to the majority has “only” 20% more chance of being chosen than a man belonging to the majority. Therefore, ethnic and gender discrimination interact: gender discrimination is greater for minority-sounding names than for majority-sounding names. Thus, female majority- sounding names are the most favored, while male minority names are the most disadvantaged (especially Arab/Muslim males).

Fear extinction is a process whereby a person is exposed to a fear and that exposure alone reduces the fear. In Fear Extinction to an Out-Group Face: The Role of Target Gender (Navarrete et al., 2009) the authors find a fear-extinction bias towards outgroup males (e.g. males of other races), but not towards outgroup females. They also state that „[c]onditioning studies on humans and other primates show that fear responses acquired toward danger-relevant stimuli, such as snakes, resist extinction, whereas responses toward danger-irrelevant stimuli, such as birds, are more readily extinguished“ and that „similar evolved biases may extend to human groups“. They also state that „social outgroup targets served as prepared stimuli, but only when the exemplar was male“, where preparedness is „the biological predisposition to quickly learn associations between stimuli, responses, and reinforcers that can be explained by their fit with genetic traits that evolved to enhance the chances of a species‘ survival“ (APA). To summarize, conditioned fear towards outgroups has a strongly gendered component, with specifically outgroup males resisting fear extinction.

The authors of Prejudice at the nexus of race and gender: An outgroup male target hypothesis. (Navarrete et al., 2010) state:

Using several measures of bias, across four studies we found that race bias is targeted primarily toward male targets and that such bias is generated by distinct individual difference variables between men and women. In two studies, we found results consistent with the notions that the fear of sexual coercion motivates bias against outgroup male targets among women and that aggression and social dominance motivates bias against outgroup male targets among men. These notions are consistent with current perspectives that conceptualize aggression as a means to an end of broader social goals (e.g., Cottrell & Neuberg, 2005) and that this goal can include domination of the racial outgroup. These results underscore the importance of studying the psychology of race bias as both an intergroup phenomenon and a gendered phenomenon—and in terms of both the targets of bias and its agents.

The author of The Gendered Nature of Discriminatory Experiences by Race, Class, and Sexuality: A Comparison of Intersectionality Theory and the Subordinate Male Target Hypothesis (Veenstra, 2012) writes:

Three competing theoretical approaches to social inequalities by gender, race, class, and sexuality are examined. The additive approach assumes that people possessing multiple subordinate-group identities experience the oppressions associated with them as distinct phenomena. The intersectionality-inspired approach suggests that subordinate-group identities such as non-White, lower class, and non-heterosexual interact with gender in a synergistic way, occasioning inordinately pernicious experiences of discrimination for women possessing one or more additional subordinate-group identities. The subordinate male target hypothesis (SMTH) claims that the discrimination experienced by the men of subordinate groups—primarily at the hands of men of dominant groups—is greater than that experienced by the women of the same subordinate groups. In 2009, telephone survey data was collected from 414 women and 208 men in Toronto, Canada and 521 women and 245 men in Vancouver, Canada. Negative binomial regression techniques are applied to these data to determine whether and how gender (male or female), race (White or non-White), educational attainment, household income, and sexual orientation (heterosexual or non-heterosexual), as well as two-way interactions between gender and the other variables, predict scale measures of self-reported major experiences of discrimination and self-reported chronic, routine discriminatory experiences. High levels of both kinds of discrimination reported by men in general are at odds with the additive and intersectionality-inspired perspectives which accord women the gender identity most vulnerable to discrimination. Inordinately high levels of routine discrimination reported by men with a high school diploma or less are consistent with the SMTH-inspired perspective.

In the Pew Research article For black Americans, experiences of racial discrimination vary by education level, gender (Anderson, 2019), it is shown that black men are far more likely than black women to say they’ve been unfairly stopped by the police (around twice as much), to say people have acted as if they were suspicious of them, to say that they’ve been subjected to slurs or jokes, and to say that someone assumed they were racist or prejudiced because of their racial background.

From The Coalitional Value Theory of Antigay Bias (Winegard et al., 2016):

Research indicates that antigay bias follows a specific pattern (and probably has throughout written history, at least in the West): (a) men evince more antigay bias than women; (b) men who belong to traditionally male coalitions evince more antigay bias than those who do not; antigay bias is targeted more at gay men than at lesbians; and (d) antigay bias is targeted more at effeminate gay men than at masculine gay men. We propose the coalitional value theory (CVT) of antigay bias to explain this pattern. The CVT argues that men evolved psychological systems to facilitate coalitional formation and regulation and that these systems may lead to antigay bias because men perceive gay men as possessing lower coalitional value for traditionally male coalitions. We tested the CVT in 4 studies. In Study 1, gay men were perceived as less masculine than straight men and as less competent at traditionally masculine activities. In Studies 2 and 3, masculine gay men were rated as more competent than and chosen over feminine straight men in traditionally masculine activities. In Study 4, actual coalitional contribution predicted men’s perceptions of other men’s derogation more than did sexual orientation. We also found that men’s preferences for masculinity diminished in nontraditionally masculine tasks such as poetry, suggesting that men’s assessments are contingent upon the nature of the task. This offers a possible palliative for antigay bias: coalitional pluralism, which we discuss.

In An Alternative Account of Anti-Effeminacy Bias: Reputation Concerns and Lack of Coalitional Value Explain Honor-Oriented Men’s Reluctance to Befriend Feminine Men (Gul & Uskul, 2020) the authors state:

Anti-effeminacy bias follows a specific pattern with men showing stronger anti-effeminacy bias against male targets than women. Previous explanations focused on men’s higher tendency to stigmatize feminine men as homosexual and motives to maintain a dominant group status. Here, we suggest that certain expressions of anti-effeminacy bias may rather be a manifestation of men’s reputation management motives for coalition formation, and be amplified among high (vs. low) masculine honor-oriented men. In three studies with samples from the United Kingdom and Turkey, we showed that men perceived feminine (vs. masculine) male targets as lower on coalitional value and were more reluctant to befriend them, yet this applied only to high (not low) honor-oriented men. Honor-oriented men’s friendship reluctance was mediated by concern with losing reputation by association with targets lacking coalitional value. These findings extend understanding of anti-effeminacy bias by drawing attention to men’s reputation concerns for coalitional reasons and individual differences.

As stated in Gendered Anti-Bisexual Bias: Heterosexual, Bisexual, and Gay/Lesbian People’s Willingness to Date Sexual Orientation Ingroup and Outgroup Members (Ess et al., 2022):

Bisexual people may appear to have more potential romantic partners than people only attracted to one gender (e.g., heterosexual, gay, lesbian people). However, bisexual people’s dating choices are limited by non-bisexual people’s reluctance to date bisexual people. Studies have indicated that some heterosexual, gay, and lesbian people are reluctant to date bisexual people, particularly bisexual men. We extend current understandings of gendered anti-bisexual bias through investigating heterosexual, bisexual, gay, and lesbian people’s reported willingness to date within and outside of their sexual orientation groups. Participants (n = 1823) varying in sexual orientation completed measures regarding their willingness to engage in a romantic relationship with heterosexual, bisexual, gay, and lesbian individuals. Heterosexual and gay/lesbian people were less willing to date bisexual people than bisexual people were to date them, consistent with anti-bisexual bias rather than mere in-group preference. Preferences against dating bisexual men appeared particularly strong, even among bisexual women.

The authors of Loving and leaving: Sex differences in romantic attachments (Rubin eta al., 1981) found:

(1) Men tend to fall in love more readily than women; (2) women tend to fall out of love more readily than men. Evidence in support of these generalizations is derived from a longitudinal study of 231 college student dating couples. The data suggest that women are more cautious than men about entering into romantic relationships, more likely to compare these relationships to alternatives, more likely to end a relationship that seems ill fated, and better able to cope with rejection. […] In the wake of the breakup, men tended to report that they felt more depressed, more lonely, less happy, and less free than did their former girlfriends.

In Female Choice and Male Stoicism (Brown et al., 2018) it is shown that females prefer stoic males for long-term mates.

From Testing the Kundera Hypothesis: Does Every Woman (But Not Every Man) Prefer Her Child to Her Mate? (Blasi & Mondéjar, 2018):

Although the majority of men and women made the decision to save their offspring instead of their mate [from a life-or-death scenario], about 18% of men on average (unlike the 5% of women) consistently decided to save their mate across the four dilemmas in the two life-or-death situations.

These results were replicated in Whose Life Do You Save? Factors Associated With Gender Differences in Altruism Toward Romantic Partners Versus Genetic Relatives (Blasi, 2022):

In all three dilemmas, the proportion of women who saved their genetic relative over their romantic partner was significantly higher than the proportion of men, with the age of both romantic partners and relatives playing a role.

The authors of Implicit attitudes about gender and emotion are associated with mothers’ but not fathers’ emotion socialization.(Thomassin & Seddon, 2019) found that mothers, but not fathers, have less favorable attitudes toward boys‘ but not girls‘ expressions of sadness and anger. Fathers exhibited no gender bias. According to ‚Boys don’t cry‘: Study suggests mothers, not fathers, show gender bias towards sons. CTV News (Nicole Bogart, 2019), the „researchers went into the study with their own gender biases, assuming that dads would be more biased towards boys showing emotions and encourage them to “toughen up” during moments of sadness“. They even reran the study with a different sample but came to the same results.

In an article written for the Institute for FamilyStudies called The Ideal Husband? A Man in Possession of a Good Income (Hopcroft, 2021), the author presents the findings of her study which demonstrate clearly that a man’s income has a very substantial influence on whether he gets and stays married. Particularly figure 1 and figure 2 illustrate this nicely.

In both the U.S. and Canada, most hate crimes are directed towards men. In the U.S. in 2012, anti-male homosexual hate crimes were around 4 1/2 times as likely as anti-female homosexual hate crimes. In Canada in 2012, incidents motivated by sexual orientation were 80% male, that’s around 4 times as high as the number of hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation towards women. Overall in Canada, 72% of hate crimes were directed at men, which yields a factor of around 2 1/2.

To end this, we recommend you to watch the excellent YouTube video titled Rick Bradford (channel: Oxford International Men’s Day), in which Rick Bradford (whose pseudonym is William Collins, author of The Empathy Gap: Male Disadvantages and the Mechanisms of Their Neglect) tries to answer the question of what a man is. He explains that there must be a powerful evolutionary advantage to dimorphic reproduction to offset this twofold reduction in birthrate and argues that the enhanced genetic variety resulting from this sexual dimorphism is not an explanation that stands up to scrutiny; rather, the success of dimorphic sexual reproduction lies in three things:

1. sexual reproduction acts to filter out deleterious mutations,
2. the burden on this mutational cleansing falls disproportionately on males,
3. sexual dimorphism permits mate selection of males by females; genetic quality of males is made apparent in multiple ways, such as anatomical or behavioral displays as well as the male hierarchies.

The combination of these three features, he explains, comprises the male genetic filter mechanism. Precisely this mechanism, he argues, offsets the cost of dimorphic sexual reproduction. The purpose of the male, he explains, is to be disposable. The male genetic filter function is the „ground zero“ of male disposability, and all specific manifestations of male disposability, he claims, are consequences of it. And even though this is a rather bold claim, given that in the case of humans many of these manifestations are highly culture specific, there is plenty of evidence for male disposability, i.e. the greater selection pressure on males, which he goes on to list. For example, the fact that since ancient times, 80% of women bore children but only 40% of men (smaller still during the agricultural revolution), that mammals express more genetic variance from the father than the mother such that it is more important to get good genes from the father than the mother, because genes from the father are more likely to be expressed and hence deleterious. He also points out the tendency for males to be more vulnerable to disease than females, thus culling less strong males, evidenced by the staggeringly large sex difference in death rates of all ages from 0 to age 80. The male sex hormone, testosterone, he explains, is an immunosuppressant. The male fetus is at greater risk than the female from virtually all medical complications and developmental disorders. Social attitudes about the resilience of boys compound the biological deficits. He explains that both these biological deficits and the socially and culturally instantiated deficits are manifestations of male disposability. Those males who are filtered out by this mechanism are evolutionary dross, and nature wastes no compassion upon them; they are disposed of. Males are obliged to play a high risk game. To decline to play is to lose. The empathy gap, he explains, is a psychological disposition in both sexes, which facilitates male disposability by rendering it less apparent. Our ability to ignore, reinterpret or distort empirical evidence when it fails to align with what we need to believe is quite remarkable.

Here are some of the consequences:

1. we are more comfortable exposing men to risks (thus all dirty or laborious or dangerous jobs are done by men, and wars are fought by men),
2. violence perpetrated against men is perceived as less significant than that perpetrated against men (the entirety of the violence against women and girls policies are testament to that, the 2014 Chibok schoolgirl kidnapping of 276 was perceived as more heinous than the burning alive of thousands of boys, Hillary Clinton’s remark that women have always been the primary victims of war is symptomatic of that mindset,
3. criminal sanctions are far more severe for the same crime because one sex is regarded as precious and the other as disposable,
4. in the case of contested child contact it’s overwhelmingly the father who is estranged from his children which society tacitly condones whereas a single instance of a mother being sent home from a maternity ward with the wrong baby is headline news,
5. the strikingly distinct public perceptions of male and female genital mutilation.

Most people do not perceive these as examples of male disposability, regarding them instead as acceptable, as simply right and proper, just how things are. Male disposability, he remarks, is itself perceived as acceptable, provided one does not draw attention to the fact that it is actually prejudice. But prejudice is not seen as such, provided that the prejudice is sufficiently thorough. Both sexes are genetically predisposed to be prejudiced in precisely this manner. The mantras of male privilege and male toxicity, he states, are increasingly desperate attempts to keep male disposability from being apprehended because we have a visceral need to maintain male disposability which requires that it remains covert.