Jul 30, 2026 · 30 min · 10 segments
Australia's early settlements were radical experiments in almost exclusively male societies. Their impact is still felt today.
Pauline GrosjeanGuest
Victoria BaranovGuestPauline, what you are doing and what researchers elsewhere are now beginning to do is unusual.
Economists often examine female behavior, the things that make women different, but they rarely examine male behavior.
You know, I think implicitly there's this idea that the male behavior is the optimal, rational, you know, default thing to do.
Yeah, the normal thing, and that women just have to catch up to close gender gaps, right? And so most of the analysis has been focusing on women and trying to understand the roles that biological factors, the legal environment, the institutional environment, social norms may play in explaining why women essentially don't behave like men.
Victoria, other disciplines, anthropology, evolutionary biology, have done a good deal of work identifying particularly masculine characteristics.
So the other disciplines that have in particular focused on masculinity norms have actually been sociology and psychology, and a bit of anthropology as well.
And, um, according to these disciplines, uh, they have identified several core or sometimes they call it traditional masculinity norms, and these would include expectations that men would behave in ways that are self-reliant, assertive, competitive, dominant, sometimes violent when needed, um, seeking power and status.
So those would be the core masculinity norms that we sort of consider, uh, and study in our work.
What are the consequences of those norms for men and women, uh, I suppose, uh, beginning with health?
Before we talk about consequences, I think maybe we should start with associations or correlations because consequences are, are difficult to establish, right? That's cause and effect.
Just to start with associations, what we know, um, for many studies, including in psychology, sociology, and public health, is that men who adhere more strongly to these core masculinity norms, they have higher rates of depression, higher rates of suicidal ideation, and in our global work, we also document these types of associations or correlations that are consistently present across seventy countries where we've surveyed over a hundred thousand people.
And these are bad for men, although you said we can only say with certainty that they're association.
I think the deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide are three times more likely in men than women, and partly as a result, men don't live as long.
Is it that men are violent to each other? Is it that they're less likely to ask for help? Is it all of those things?
They have higher rates of mortality around the world and at basically at every single age group.
And those have been linked, but again, not causally, to these beliefs that men shouldn't ask for help, that they can be violent, and they should be violent, that they should take excessive risks, and so forth.
Pauline, what you are doing and what researchers elsewhere are now beginning to do is unusual.
Economists often examine female behavior, the things that make women different, but they rarely examine male behavior.
You know, I think implicitly there's this idea that the male behavior is the optimal, rational, you know, default thing to do.
Yeah, the normal thing, and that women just have to catch up to close gender gaps, right? And so most of the analysis has been focusing on women and trying to understand the roles that biological factors, the legal environment, the institutional environment, social norms may play in explaining why women essentially don't behave like men.
Victoria, other disciplines, anthropology, evolutionary biology, have done a good deal of work identifying particularly masculine characteristics.
So the other disciplines that have in particular focused on masculinity norms have actually been sociology and psychology, and a bit of anthropology as well.
And, um, according to these disciplines, uh, they have identified several core or sometimes they call it traditional masculinity norms, and these would include expectations that men would behave in ways that are self-reliant, assertive, competitive, dominant, sometimes violent when needed, um, seeking power and status.
So those would be the core masculinity norms that we sort of consider, uh, and study in our work.
What are the consequences of those norms for men and women, uh, I suppose, uh, beginning with health?
Before we talk about consequences, I think maybe we should start with associations or correlations because consequences are, are difficult to establish, right? That's cause and effect.
Just to start with associations, what we know, um, for many studies, including in psychology, sociology, and public health, is that men who adhere more strongly to these core masculinity norms, they have higher rates of depression, higher rates of suicidal ideation, and in our global work, we also document these types of associations or correlations that are consistently present across seventy countries where we've surveyed over a hundred thousand people.
And these are bad for men, although you said we can only say with certainty that they're association.
I think the deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide are three times more likely in men than women, and partly as a result, men don't live as long.
Is it that men are violent to each other? Is it that they're less likely to ask for help? Is it all of those things?
They have higher rates of mortality around the world and at basically at every single age group.
And those have been linked, but again, not causally, to these beliefs that men shouldn't ask for help, that they can be violent, and they should be violent, that they should take excessive risks, and so forth.
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