Research library

American Association of Orthodontists — Is mewing bad for you?

American Association of Orthodontists

The American Association of Orthodontists, the U.S. professional body for orthodontists, says there is no research showing that mewing benefits the jawline or oral health, and warns the practice can instead cause tooth misalignment, malocclusion and jaw-joint (TMJ) pain.

Anti-Defamation League — Incels (involuntary celibates) backgrounder

Anti-Defamation League

An Anti-Defamation League backgrounder on the incel subculture documents the community's so-called 80/20 rule — the belief that the top 80 per cent of women pursue only the top 20 per cent of men — and its definition of hypergamy as women seeking higher-status men and rejecting all others.

Anti-Defamation League — Sneako: five things to know

Anti-Defamation League

An Anti-Defamation League profile of the streamer Sneako (Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy) traces his shift from teenage gaming videos to right-wing political commentary, catalogues his bans from and reinstatement to major platforms, and documents his collaborations with white-supremacist figure Nick Fuentes and antisemitic statements attributed to him on stream.

AIBM — Degrees of Difference: male college enrollment and completion

American Institute for Boys and Men

The American Institute for Boys and Men reports that men received 42% of US bachelor's degrees in 2021 — the lowest male share on record — and that women outnumber men among undergraduates and complete degrees at higher rates.

AIBM — Male loneliness and isolation: what the data shows

American Institute for Boys and Men

A review of US survey data by the American Institute for Boys and Men found that men and women report broadly similar levels of loneliness, so loneliness is not a blanket crisis unique to men, though specific male deficits stand out — such as the share of men with no close friends rising from 3% in 1990 to 15% in 2021.

Antfolk 2017 — Age limits: men's and women's youngest and oldest considered and actual partners

Evolutionary Psychology · 2017

A population-based study of 2,655 adults found that women of all ages prefer slightly older sexual partners, while men prefer women in their 20s regardless of their own age — though men's actual sexual activity tracks their own age range rather than that stated preference.

American Psychological Association — Guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men

American Psychological Association · 2019

The American Psychological Association's 2019 Guidelines for Psychological Practice With Boys and Men, drawing on more than 40 years of research, note that men are 3.5 times more likely than women to die by suicide and make up 77 per cent of homicide victims, and advise psychologists to counter how traditional masculine norms of self-sufficiency discourage men from seeking mental health help.

Archer 2000 — Sex differences in aggression between heterosexual partners

Psychological Bulletin · 2000

A meta-analysis of studies of heterosexual partners that found women were slightly more likely than men to use physical aggression, while men were more likely to inflict injury — 62% of those injured by a partner were women.

Bellis et al. 2005 — Measuring paternal discrepancy and its public health consequences

Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health · 2005

A review of 17 studies found that paternal-discrepancy rates ranged from 0.8% to 30% with a median of about 3.7%, and that the high end came from samples of men selected for disputed paternity rather than from general populations.

2024 — A feminine advantage in the domain of harm: a review and path forward

Biology Letters · 2024

A 2024 review reports that harm to women is judged more severe and less acceptable than identical harm to men, producing more protective responses toward female victims and harsher judgements of male perpetrators.

2023 — Mainstreaming the blackpill: understanding the incel community on TikTok

European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research · 2023

A 2023 study of two incel-focused TikTok accounts (52 videos and 1,657 comments) found that incel ideology spreads on TikTok in covert forms, using emotional appeals and pseudo-science to circulate incelosphere tropes while evading moderation.

Blau & Kahn 2017 — The gender wage gap: extent, trends, and explanations

Journal of Economic Literature · 2017

A peer-reviewed review of U.S. wage data from 1980 to 2010 finding that by 2010 differences in education and experience explained little of the remaining gender wage gap, while occupation, industry, and possible discrimination continued to matter.

BLS — Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2024

In 2024 the U.S. Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries recorded 5,070 fatal work injuries, and men accounted for roughly 91.9 percent of those deaths while women made up 8.1 percent (413).

BLS — Women in the labor force, 2024

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2024

The BLS reports that in 2024 employed women were far less likely than men to work in physically hazardous fields, making up 1.1 percent of workers in natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations compared with 15.9 percent of employed men.

BLS — Highlights of women's earnings in 2023

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics · 2024

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2023 women working full time earned about 83% of what men earned — the raw, unadjusted pay gap measured before any controls for occupation, hours or experience.

Bruch & Newman 2018 — Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets

Science Advances · 2018

Analysing messaging data from a large US online dating site, the study found that both men and women tend to contact partners who are on average about 25% more desirable than themselves, producing a steep, market-wide hierarchy of desirability that applies to both sexes.

Buss 1989 — Sex differences in human mate preferences across 37 cultures

Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 1989

A survey of 10,047 people across 37 samples in 33 countries found that women, on average, rated a potential mate's resource-acquisition cues — such as earning capacity and financial prospects — more highly than men did.

Cancian et al. 2014 — Who gets custody now? Dramatic changes in children's living arrangements after divorce

Demography · 2014

Using Wisconsin court records spanning 1988 to 2008, Cancian and colleagues found that the share of mothers granted sole physical custody fell substantially while shared custody rose dramatically and father-sole custody remained relatively stable.

Center for Countering Digital Hate — Banned, but not gone: YouTube bans Andrew Tate

Center for Countering Digital Hate

A June 2025 Center for Countering Digital Hate analysis of the 100 most-viewed YouTube videos featuring Andrew Tate content, posted nearly three years after YouTube banned him, found they had gathered close to 54 million views, that nearly 60% were assessed as breaching YouTube's hate speech policies, and that all 100 remained viewable by accounts registered to 13-year-olds in the US and UK.

Center for Countering Digital Hate — The Incelosphere

Center for Countering Digital Hate

The Center for Countering Digital Hate's Incelosphere report analysed almost 1.2 million posts made over an 18-month period on the largest incel forum, finding rape mentioned on average every 29 minutes and 89 per cent of posters in relevant discussions supportive of sexual violence against women.

Center for Countering Digital Hate — Who is Andrew Tate?

Center for Countering Digital Hate

A Center for Countering Digital Hate profile of Andrew Tate compiles his documented misogynistic statements, his rebranded online course, and a June 2025 finding that nearly 60 percent of his 100 most-viewed YouTube videos violated YouTube's hate speech policy.

Commission for Countering Extremism — Predicting harm among incels

Commission for Countering Extremism (GOV.UK)

A UK government press release for what it called the world's largest study of incels reported that one in five respondents contemplated suicide every day over the previous two weeks, and concluded the incel phenomenon aligns more closely with mental-health support than with counter-terrorism intervention.

CDC — About Intimate Partner Violence

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

The CDC's national survey data show that intimate-partner and sexual violence fall far more heavily on women than men — for example, about 1 in 5 women (19.7%) have experienced contact sexual violence over their lifetimes, versus nearly 1 in 23 men (4.4%).

U.S. Census Bureau — Custodial Mothers and Fathers and Their Child Support

U.S. Census Bureau

U.S. Census Bureau data for 2009 (released December 2011) found that most custodial parents — 82.2 percent — were mothers, indicating custodial arrangements skew heavily toward mothers.

Cheng et al. 2013 — Two ways to the top: dominance and prestige as distinct routes to social rank

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · 2013

Studying how people gain rank in groups, this study found that social status is attained through two distinct routes — dominance (force and intimidation) and prestige (respect freely granted for valued expertise) — rather than a single hierarchy.

Cheng, Tracy & Henrich 2021 — Dominance is necessary to explain human status hierarchies

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021

A 2021 PNAS paper argued that dominance is a real and necessary component of how humans attain social status, and that status cannot be explained by prestige alone.

Child Mind Institute — Looksmaxxing and its impact on boys

Child Mind Institute

Clinicians cited by the Child Mind Institute report that looksmaxxing, an appearance-optimisation trend that originated in incel forums, can worsen self-esteem problems, depression, social anxiety and body-dysmorphic symptoms in teenage boys.

2013 — Coaching Boys into Men: a cluster-randomized controlled trial of a dating-violence prevention program

Journal of Adolescent Health · 2013

A cluster-randomized trial of the Coaching Boys Into Men program, in which athletic coaches delivered short lessons to teenage male athletes, found that participants reported more intention to intervene in abusive situations and more positive bystander behaviour than controls, while attitudes and self-reported dating-violence perpetration did not shift significantly at three-month follow-up.

Copland 2020 — Reddit quarantined: can changing platform affordances reduce hateful materials online?

Internet Policy Review · 2020

Copland's analysis found that after Reddit quarantined the r/TheRedPill subreddit in September 2018, activity fell to about half of pre-quarantine levels, but the users who stayed did not change their language — the share of misogynistic material was essentially unchanged — while moderators steered subscribers toward less-moderated platforms elsewhere.

Costello et al. 2022 — Levels of well-being among men who are incel

Evolutionary Psychological Science · 2022

A study comparing 151 self-identified incels with 378 non-incel men that found incels reported higher depression, anxiety and loneliness, lower life satisfaction, and a greater tendency toward interpersonal victimhood; the authors describe incels as a newly identified at-risk group for mental-health intervention.

DCU Anti-Bullying Centre — Recommending toxicity: algorithmic recommender systems

DCU Anti-Bullying Centre

A 2024 DCU Anti-Bullying Centre report tracked what 10 experimental teen-boy accounts were recommended on TikTok and YouTube Shorts, finding every male-identified account was fed masculinist, anti-feminist or other extremist content within 23 minutes, with recommendations averaging 76 to 78 per cent toxic by the final round.

2019 — Digesting the red pill: masculinity and neoliberalism in the manosphere

Men and Masculinities · 2019

A content analysis of the roughly twenty-six documents r/TheRedPill required newcomers to read found the forum blends a coarse version of evolutionary psychology with neoclassical economics — casting women as "sellers" and men as "buyers of sex" — and argues this constructs women as exchangeable commodities.

Eagly & Wood 1999 — The origins of sex differences in human behavior: evolved dispositions versus social roles

American Psychologist · 1999

Eagly and Wood argued that men's and women's differing mate preferences can be explained by the social division of labour and gender roles rather than by evolved dispositions alone, and reanalysed Buss's 1989 data to support a social-structural account.

Elliptic — Andrew Tate's Hustler's University crypto-revenue analysis

Elliptic

Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic traced more than 2.5 million dollars in cryptocurrency payments to two deposit wallets linked to Andrew Tate's Hustler's University, including about 1.6 million dollars in bitcoin across more than 177 transactions.

2018 — Engaging men in psychological treatment: a scoping review

American Journal of Men's Health · 2018

A scoping review of 46 articles on engaging men in psychological treatment found that male-appropriate therapy asks clinicians to weigh how masculine socialisation affects both the client and themselves, and to adapt language and use collaborative, action-oriented and goal-focused approaches.

Equimundo — State of American Men 2023

Equimundo · 2023

Equimundo's State of American Men 2023 report found that two thirds of young men feel no one really knows them, and documented men retreating into underachievement, underemployment and online addiction under masculine norms of toughness, self-sufficiency, dominance and stoicism.

Equimundo — What is the manosphere?

Equimundo

Equimundo's 2024 explainer on the manosphere gathers recent evidence that boys and young men meet online misogyny early and often — citing findings that 69 per cent of boys aged 11 to 14 have encountered content promoting misogyny — while noting that many men are reticent about these spaces and want a different kind of internet.

EVAWI — False reports: percentage

End Violence Against Women International

End Violence Against Women International reports that methodologically rigorous studies put the share of false rape and sexual-assault reports at roughly 2-8%, and that looser police classification inflates the figure — in one analysis of 2,643 British cases, 8% were labelled false by police but only 2% met the official criteria for a false allegation.

Facing my own misogyny: a content analysis of personal essays on the subreddit r/IncelExit

RhetTech (James Madison University)

A content analysis of thirteen personal essays found members used five recurring practices — such as introspection and reflecting on how they had treated women — to move away from red-pill ideology, and concluded the subreddit works as an online support group helping members rehabilitate from misogynistic beliefs.

Gallup — Younger men in the U.S. among the loneliest in the West

Gallup

Gallup World Poll data from 2023-2024 found that 25% of US men aged 15 to 34 said they felt lonely a lot of the previous day, compared with 18% of young US women, and that no other OECD country had a wider loneliness gap between young men and the rest of its adult population than the United States.

Ging 2019 — Alphas, betas, and incels: masculinities of the manosphere

Men and Masculinities · 2019

Debbie Ging argues that a toxic strain of antifeminism has spread across online networks since Web 2.0, uniting diverse and often-feuding communities under Red Pill "philosophy" — a loose confederacy she calls the manosphere.

GNET — Learning from the leavers? The promise (and perils) of r/IncelExit

GNET (Global Network on Extremism and Technology) · 2023

A December 2023 GNET analysis by Allysa Czerwinsky traced Jack Peterson's public trajectory after his 2018 departure from the incel community, arguing that his later media appearances and apology video showed someone who had left the movement without any meaningful change in his rhetoric about women.

GNET — Monetising misogyny: engagement farming and incendiary tactics

GNET (Global Network on Extremism and Technology) · 2025

A December 2025 GNET analysis describes Hannah Pearl Davis as a high-reach anti-feminist influencer whose content frames women as morally degraded and responsible for social decline, and finds that although she avoids explicit extremist language, her narratives reinforce male-supremacist rhetoric that sits adjacent to far-right mobilisation.

GNET — 'Doing what God designed men to do': red-pilled Christians

GNET (Global Network on Extremism and Technology) · 2024

A 2024 GNET analysis of the Reddit community r/RPChristians found that its members merge red-pill ideology with Christianity, using literalist readings of scripture to cast husbands as leaders and wives as helpers and framing feminism as a corruption of authentic faith, with the author concluding that religion can act as a legitimising force for misogyny.

Harper & McLanahan 2004 — Father absence and youth incarceration

Journal of Research on Adolescence · 2004

A longitudinal study of adolescent males found that boys in father-absent homes faced higher incarceration risks, but that much of that gap could be attributed to confounding factors such as teen motherhood, low parental education, racial inequalities and poverty; the highest risks were among boys in stepparent families.

Home Office — Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme

Home Office

Home Office statistics for the year to 31 March 2025 recorded 8,778 Prevent counter-terrorism referrals, up 27 per cent on the previous year; referrals flagged as InCel Extremism accounted for 66 cases, about 1 per cent of the total, while referrals with no ideology identified were the single largest concern type.

HOPE not hate — Written evidence to UK Parliament (MIS0061)

HOPE not hate

HOPE not hate's written evidence to a UK parliamentary committee reported that in a January 2024 survey of 16-24-year-olds, 95% had heard of Andrew Tate and 1 in 4 of those who had held a favourable opinion, with liking Tate linked to more negative views of feminism — though the group cautions that liking him is not necessarily a direct sign of misogyny.

Institute for Family Studies — There's no huge gender gap in being single among young adults

Institute for Family Studies

Analyzing General Social Survey data, Nicholas Wolfinger found the young-adult gender gap in being single runs roughly 10 to 25 percentage points depending on survey year — not the 30-point gap implied by widely cited Pew figures — and shrinks further once women's slightly older partners are counted.

2022 — Involuntary celibacy: a review of incel ideology and experiences with dating

Current Psychiatry Reports · 2022

A 2022 review in Current Psychiatry Reports traces the term "incel" to a support website created in 1997 by a university student named Alana, and records that the community later splintered into male-only groups whose frustrations were often directed at women.

2023 — The mating psychology of incels: misfortunes, misperceptions, and misrepresentations

The Journal of Sex Research · 2023

A 2023 review in The Journal of Sex Research argues that incel communities misperceive and misrepresent the mating psychology found in evolutionary research, treating attraction as fixed and hopeless in a way the underlying science does not support.

Why isn't there more incel violence? (2023)

Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology · 2023

A peer-reviewed paper, co-authored with evolutionary psychologist David Buss, that argues actual violence by self-identified incels is statistically rare despite the misogynistic rhetoric common in incel communities, and frames incel distress partly as an evolutionary mismatch between ancestral and modern mating environments.

Internet Matters — Research into online misogyny and image-based abuse

Internet Matters

Internet Matters research found that vulnerable children are more likely to experience image-based abuse, that around half of teens had heard of someone experiencing it, that 46 per cent of 15 to 16-year-olds had a limited understanding of misogyny, and that most 13 to 16-year-olds regard sharing nudes as harmful.

Internet Matters — Favourable views towards Andrew Tate among teens and parents

Internet Matters

A September 2023 Internet Matters survey of over 2,000 parents and 1,000 children aged 9 to 16 found that 75 per cent of 15 to 16-year-olds were aware of Andrew Tate and that nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of boys that age held a favourable opinion of him.

Institute for Strategic Dialogue — Unprompted and unwarranted: YouTube's algorithm

Institute for Strategic Dialogue

A May 2022 Institute for Strategic Dialogue investigation set up ten YouTube accounts posing as young Australian men and teenage boys and found that engaging with Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro content led the algorithm to recommend a much wider range of anti-feminist, misogynistic and manosphere videos, surfacing Peterson's videos even though his name was never entered in any seed search.

2019 — The potential associations of pornography use with sexual dysfunctions: an integrative review

Journal of Clinical Medicine · 2019

A 2019 integrative review of observational studies found little or no evidence that pornography use causes erectile dysfunction, noting that the available data come mostly from cross-sectional studies and case reports so causality cannot yet be assessed.

Jhaver et al. 2021 — Evaluating the effectiveness of deplatforming as a moderation strategy

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021

A peer-reviewed CSCW 2021 study of more than 49 million tweets found that banning three high-profile figures — Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos and Owen Benjamin — from Twitter significantly reduced conversations about them, and that the activity and toxicity of their supporters declined after the bans.

Jiang et al. 2003 — Ejaculation and serum testosterone (later retracted)

Journal of Zhejiang University Science · 2003

A small study of 28 volunteers reported that serum testosterone peaked on the seventh day of sexual abstinence at 145.7% of baseline; the PubMed record for the paper now carries a retraction notice.

2025 — Marital status and the risk of cardiovascular, cancer and all-cause mortality (meta-analysis)

JRSM Cardiovascular Disease · 2025

A 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis found that unmarried status was significantly associated with a higher risk of all-cause, cardiovascular and cancer mortality, with all-cause mortality hazard ratios versus married people of 1.55 for single, 1.39 for divorced and 1.43 for widowed individuals.

Levine et al. 2017 — Temporal trends in sperm count

Human Reproduction Update · 2017

A meta-regression of 185 studies (42,935 men) that found a 52.4% decline in sperm concentration among Western men between 1973 and 2011; the 2022 global update extended the decline to all continents and through 2018.

2022 — Effectiveness of Man Therapy to reduce suicidal ideation and depression (RCT)

Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior · 2022

A randomized controlled trial of the Man Therapy online programme among 554 working-age men found that suicidal ideation and depression improved significantly over time in both the intervention and control groups, with no difference between them, and concluded that online screening might help reduce these outcomes among men.

2024 — Mainstreaming the manosphere's misogyny through affective homosocial currencies

Social Media + Society · 2024

A 2024 peer-reviewed study combined analysis of Andrew Tate's videos with a focus group of boys aged 13-14 in London and found that his content mainstreams misogynistic manosphere ideologies, playing on boys' economic anxieties while circulating misogyny as a shared social currency among boys.

Manzoli et al. 2007 — Marital status and mortality in the elderly: a systematic review and meta-analysis

Social Science & Medicine · 2007

A 2007 systematic review and meta-analysis pooling 53 comparisons of more than 250,000 elderly subjects found that married people died at lower rates than non-married people (relative risk 0.88), an estimate the authors say did not vary by gender.

McLanahan, Tach & Schneider 2013 — The causal effects of father absence

Annual Review of Sociology · 2013

A review of studies using rigorous designs (fixed-effects models, natural experiments and propensity-score matching) concluded that father absence continues to show negative effects on children's well-being even after accounting for selection, though the effects are smaller than cross-sectional studies suggest; the evidence was strongest for high school graduation, social-emotional adjustment and adult mental health.

Mech 1999 — Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs

Canadian Journal of Zoology · 1999

Studying wolves in the wild, Mech finds that a natural wolf pack is usually a family led by a breeding pair and their offspring, and that the popular "alpha" framing — drawn from captive animals — misrepresents how packs are actually structured in nature.

Media Matters — Beyond Andrew Tate: the misogynistic manosphere influencers

Media Matters for America

A March 2023 Media Matters report profiles streamer Adin Ross, describing him as an admirer of Andrew Tate who has produced extensive Tate-related content and, after a permanent Twitch ban, streams on Kick.

Media Matters — Manosphere influencers promote sexual assault and downplay rape

Media Matters for America

A March 2024 Media Matters for America analysis documented the podcast Fresh & Fit and its co-host Myron Gaines promoting sexual assault and downplaying rape, including a post reframing coercion as not really rape and Gaines saying rape culture is a myth.

Movember Institute — Young Men's Health in a Digital World

Movember Institute of Men's Health

Movember Institute research surveying over 3,000 young men aged 16-25 in the UK, US and Australia found that 63% watch men and masculinity influencers, and that while many watchers found the content motivating, they were more likely to report worse mental-health outcomes and higher rates of risk-taking.

NCES — Undergraduate graduation rates (Fast Facts)

National Center for Education Statistics

U.S. federal data show a 64 percent six-year graduation rate for students who began a four-year bachelor's degree in fall 2014 — 60 percent for men and 67 percent for women.

NCES — Reading Performance (Condition of Education)

National Center for Education Statistics

U.S. federal testing data show that female students score higher than male students in reading at every grade level assessed, with girls ahead of boys in grades 4, 8, and 12.

NCES — Undergraduate Enrollment (Condition of Education)

National Center for Education Statistics

U.S. federal enrollment data show that in fall 2021 women made up 58 percent of the country's 15.4 million undergraduates and men 42 percent, and that total undergraduate enrollment fell 15 percent between 2010 and 2021, with the male decline (17 percent) steeper than the female decline (13 percent).

NIMH — Suicide statistics

National Institute of Mental Health

National Institute of Mental Health statistics, drawing on CDC mortality data, report that in 2023 the U.S. suicide rate among males was nearly four times higher than among females (22.8 versus 5.9 per 100,000), and that suicide claimed over 49,300 lives in the United States that year.

Ofcom — The Manosphere unmasked

Ofcom

Ofcom-commissioned qualitative research published in June 2025, based on interviews with 38 men and one woman, found that most people who engaged with the manosphere were first drawn in by its perceived humour and open debate and valued self-improvement content, while more socially isolated participants engaged more deeply and may be at greater risk of adopting harmful views.

Ofsted — Review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges

Ofsted · 2021

Ofsted's 2021 review found that sexual harassment among school-age children — including sexist name-calling and unwanted explicit images — is so common it has become normalised, and that many children do not report it.

Understanding the influence of online misogyny in schools from the perspective of teachers

PLOS ONE

A PLOS ONE study of teachers found that male pupils increasingly voice online misogyny in schools, often echoing influencers such as Andrew Tate, and that most secondary and primary teachers want dedicated teaching materials to address it.

Park et al. 2016 — Is internet pornography causing sexual dysfunctions? A review with clinical reports

Behavioral Sciences · 2016

A 2016 review that proposed internet pornography as a possible explanation for a rise in sexual difficulties among men under 40, but presented only clinical reports and framed the idea as a hypothesis for future research rather than established causation.

Pew Research Center — A record-high share of 40-year-olds have never been married

Pew Research Center · 2023

A Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. census data found that 25 per cent of 40-year-olds had never been married as of 2021, up from 20 per cent in 2010 and 6 per cent in 1980, with a higher share of men than women never married.

Pew Research Center — The enduring grip of the gender pay gap

Pew Research Center · 2023

A Pew Research Center report finding that women remain underrepresented in construction, repair, production and transportation jobs, and that this occupational segregation reflects a mix of family needs, gender stereotypes and discrimination rather than personal choice alone.

Pew Research Center — Men, Women and Social Connections

Pew Research Center · 2025

A Pew Research Center survey of 6,204 US adults found that about one-in-six Americans (16%) feel lonely or isolated all or most of the time, in roughly equal shares among men and women, and that men and women were about equally likely to have at least one close friend.

Pew Research Center — Key findings about online dating in the U.S.

Pew Research Center · 2023

Pew Research Center's 2023 findings on online dating in the U.S. reported a gendered split in frustrations: 64 percent of men who had used dating sites or apps in the past year felt insecure over receiving too few messages, while 54 percent of women felt overwhelmed by the number they received, and men were more likely than women to have paid for these services.

Pew Research Center — A profile of single Americans

Pew Research Center · 2020

A Pew Research Center survey reported in August 2020 found that 51% of US men ages 18 to 29 were single compared with 32% of women that age — a 19-point gap — while about 31% of all US adults were single.

Pew Research Center — For Valentine's Day, 5 facts about single Americans

Pew Research Center · 2023

A Pew Research Center survey of 6,034 U.S. adults found that 63% of men under 30 described themselves as single, compared with 34% of women the same age, and that younger men were far more likely to be single than older men — a pattern not seen among women.

Pew Research Center — U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion

Pew Research Center · 2024

Pew Research Center reports that U.S. women are outpacing men in college completion: among adults ages 25 to 34, 47% of women hold a bachelor's degree, compared with 37% of men.

Plan International UK — What are incels?

Plan International UK

Plan International UK traces the term "involuntary celibate" to a 1993 online project started by a Canadian woman named Alana as a welcoming space for people struggling with relationships, and notes that by the 2000s incel discussion had migrated to platforms like Reddit and 4chan and turned increasingly misogynistic, with Reddit banning the r/incels subreddit in 2017 for violent content.

Public Safety Canada — Terrorism charges laid in an ideologically motivated homicide

Public Safety Canada

Public Safety Canada records that in May 2020 Canadian prosecutors laid two terrorism offences against a youth suspect over a fatal February 2020 Toronto attack, the first time an incel-related (IMVE) suspect had been charged with terrorism offences in Canada.

Reed et al. 2021 — Neither soy nor isoflavone intake affects male reproductive hormones: a meta-analysis

Reproductive Toxicology · 2021

Pooling dozens of clinical studies, this updated meta-analysis found that neither soy foods nor isoflavone supplements changed men's reproductive hormones, including testosterone.

Ribeiro et al. 2021 — The evolution of the manosphere across the web

ICWSM 2021 · 2021

A network study of 28.8 million posts across 6 forums and 51 subreddits found the manosphere shifting from milder, older communities like pickup artists and men's rights activists toward more extreme ones such as incels and Men Going Their Own Way, with active users migrating in bulk and the newer groups proving more toxic and misogynistic than the older ones.

Ribeiro et al. 2021 — Do platform migrations compromise content moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2021

A peer-reviewed study of two banned Reddit communities — r/The_Donald and r/Incels — that migrated to standalone sites found moderation sharply reduced posts, active users and newcomers on the new platforms, but that r/The_Donald's remaining users showed rising signals of toxicity and radicalisation.

Rosenfeld 2018 — Who wants the breakup? Gender and breakup in heterosexual couples

Social Networks and the Life Course (Springer) · 2018

Analysing a nationally representative U.S. panel of 2,262 adults, Rosenfeld found that women initiated about 69% of divorces, while non-marital breakups showed no statistically significant gender difference in who ended them.

Samaritans — Latest suicide data

Samaritans

Samaritans' latest UK data show men dying by suicide at roughly three times the female rate — 17.1 versus 5.6 per 100,000 in England in 2024 — and the charity runs a research and policy programme focused on supporting less well-off, middle-aged men.

Schmitt 2012 — When the difference is in the details: a critique of Zentner and Mitura

Evolutionary Psychology · 2012

Schmitt's critique argues that the link between gender equality and smaller sex differences in mate preferences is not uniform: some preferences, such as long-term preferences for physical attractiveness, are unrelated to a nation's gender parity or are actually larger in more gender-equal nations.

2025 — 'Your seed is your life force': masculinities of spirituality and entrepreneurialism

The Journal of Men's Studies · 2025

A 2025 peer-reviewed study analyses the NoFap movement as it is turned into commercial content by YouTube micro-celebrity influencers, organised around themes of energy, transformation, resistance and productivity, and draws on videos by the influencer Hamza among its source material.

Speckhard et al. 2021 — Involuntary celibates' grievance over sexual exclusion

Journal of Strategic Security · 2021

A survey of more than 250 self-identified incels active on an online forum found that while most are non-violent and disapprove of violence, a subset who identify as staunch misogynists were likelier to endorse a desire to commit violence and to grow more misogynistic through forum participation.

Southern Poverty Law Center — From Screens to Schools: male supremacy's impact and prevention

Southern Poverty Law Center · 2024

A 2024 Southern Poverty Law Center report on male supremacy describes Hannah Pearl Davis as perhaps the most influential woman in the male supremacist movement, noting that as of December 2024 she had nearly 2 million YouTube subscribers.

Stulp et al. 2013 — Are mating preferences for height reflected in actual pairings?

PLOS ONE · 2013

Analysing real UK couples, this study found that while women do tend to pair with taller men, height preferences translate into actual pairings only modestly (assortative mating r = .18), with couples where the man was shorter than the woman, or more than 25 cm taller, occurring less often than chance.

2016 — Sunk costs, psychological symptomology, and help seeking

SpringerPlus · 2016

A 2016 SpringerPlus study of the sunk cost effect found that people prone to the fallacy persisted longer in unpleasant situations, and in particular waited significantly longer before seeking help.

Teachman 2003 — Premarital sex, premarital cohabitation, and the risk of subsequent marital dissolution

Journal of Marriage and Family · 2003

Using nationally representative U.S. survey data, Teachman found that premarital sex or cohabitation limited to a woman's future husband was not linked to a higher risk of divorce, while having more than one premarital intimate partner was associated with an increased risk.

Travison et al. 2007 — A population-level decline in serum testosterone in American men

Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism · 2007

Analysing the Massachusetts Male Aging Study across three survey waves from 1987 to 2004, the authors found an age-independent decline in average testosterone levels among American men that could not be explained by measured changes in the men's health or lifestyle.

Tyson et al. 2016 — A first look at user activity on Tinder

arXiv / IEEE-ACM ASONAM · 2016

A study using curated stock profiles on Tinder found a stark gender asymmetry in matching: male profiles matched with only 0.6% of the users they liked, while female profiles matched with 10.5%, with almost all matches coming from male users.

USSC — 2023 Demographic Differences in Federal Sentencing

U.S. Sentencing Commission · 2023

A U.S. Sentencing Commission analysis of more than 300,000 people sentenced in federal courts from 2017 to 2021 found that women received sentences about 29 percent shorter than men, were more likely to receive probation, and served shorter terms even when incarcerated.

WHO — Female genital mutilation (fact sheet)

World Health Organization

The World Health Organization's fact sheet states that female genital mutilation has no health benefits, harms girls and women in many ways, and is a violation of their human rights.

WHO — Social connection linked to improved health and reduced risk of early death

World Health Organization · 2025

A 2025 report from the WHO Commission on Social Connection estimated that 1 in 6 people worldwide is affected by loneliness, linked it to more than 871,000 deaths a year, and reported that 17% to 21% of people aged 13-29 feel lonely, with higher rates in low-income countries.

WHO / National Academies — Voluntary Medical Male Circumcision as an HIV-prevention intervention

World Health Organization / National Academies

A WHO/National Academies consensus report on voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) found, from three randomized controlled trials, an estimated 60% lower rate of heterosexually acquired HIV among circumcised men, and issued a strong recommendation, graded high-quality evidence, that VMMC continue to be promoted as an efficacious HIV-prevention option for men in high-prevalence settings.

Women's Aid — Influencers and attitudes report

Women's Aid

Women's Aid's 2023 Influencers and Attitudes research found that children exposed to misogynistic social media content like Andrew Tate were almost five times more likely to view physical harm as acceptable if apologised for afterwards, though most young people could still tell healthy from unhealthy relationships.

Zentner & Mitura 2012 — Nations' gender gap predicts sex differences in mate preferences

Psychological Science · 2012

Across 10 nations (3,177 people) and a reanalysis of 31 nations (8,953 people), the study found that sex differences in mate preferences — including women's greater emphasis on a partner's resources — shrink as a country becomes more gender-equal.