Work with Men and Boys for Gender Equality: A Review of Field Formation, the Evidence Base and Future Directions

It is time for a critical assessment of the “men for gender equality” field and for a reorientation of its practices and approaches. This report takes stock of this work and proposes new directions for programming and policy on men and boys. Work with men and boys remains too focused on individual men’s identities, attitudes and behaviors, rather than a more transformative attention to the structures and systems that sustain gender inequalities. It has relied on taken-for-granted understandings of the category “men”, social psychological accounts of gender norms, and organisational forms that have limited its ability to contribute to intersectional feminist mobilizations. Work with men and boys must focus on the gendered operations of power and injustice, press for political and policy change, focus more on anti-patriarchal social action, and reorient evidence-based practice toward social change