For the last decade, the OECD Development Centre’s Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) has supported countries in understanding the often invisible barriers to women and girls’ empowerment by measuring the levels of discrimination in social institutions. While the gender equality discourse has predominantly focused on discrimination against women and girls, it is increasingly clear that men and boys need to be engaged in achieving gender equality. The issue thus becomes: how can men and boys be included in advancing important goals such as promoting women’s participation in the labour market, equally redistributing domestic and care work among household members, ensuring women’s political representation and eradicating violence against women? This in turn requires challenging unequal gender power dynamics which are built on codified relations between men and women and on what it means to “be a ‘real’ man’’. In other words, we need to reassess and rethink the ways in which masculinities can be supportive of greater equality, in the context of the Agenda 2030 on sustainable development

Since 2009, the OECD Development Centre has used the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) to shed light on the often invisible barriers to women’s and girls’ empowerment in developing and developed countries. One of the SIGI’s unique aspects is its focus on measuring and analysing the social norms that promote discriminatory practices. This publication enriches this work in its focus on masculinities – social constructions of what it means to “be a ‘real’ man’’ – which can either hinder or promote women’s empowerment and gender equality. Despite a growing recognition that masculine norms need to be addressed, efforts to do so are hindered by a lack of comparable data.

Masculinities are social constructs that relate to perceived notions – shared by both men and women – about how men behave and how they are expected to behave in order to be considered “real” men. They are shaped by and are part of social institutions – formal and informal laws, social norms and practices. Diverse forms of masculinities coexist across cultures, geographical locations and time, and some of these masculinities directly hinder women’s empowerment and gender equality.

This chapter introduces and defines masculinities. It clarifies the choice of terminology used throughout this publication. The chapter also defines the scope of the report, emphasising that while masculinities can and do harm men and boys, the focus of this research is the ways in which some masculine norms negatively affect women’s empowerment. Finally, the chapter offers an overview of the report’s structure.

This chapter presents five norms of restrictive masculinities that directly affect women’s and girls’ empowerment and well-being in the economic and political spheres. The norms in these spheres dictate that a “real” man should: i) be the breadwinner, ii) be financially dominant, iii) work in “manly” jobs, iv) be the “ideal worker” and v) be a “manly” leader. As such, these norms emphasise men’s economic and leadership roles in society, which in turn promote the devaluation of women’s contribution to these spheres. Even so, in some places, the masculine norms that characterise the political and economic spheres are not fully restrictive, demonstrating a growing acceptance of gender-equitable masculinities.

This chapter presents five norms of restrictive masculinities that directly affect women’s and girls’ empowerment and well-being in the private sphere. These norms dictate that a “real” man should: i) not do unpaid care and domestic work, ii) have the final say in household decisions, iii) control household assets, iv) protect and exercise guardianship of women in the household, and v) dominate sexual and reproductive choices. Each of these norms reinforces the discriminatory social institutions that govern the private sphere, revealing one of the reasons why change in this area has been so slow. Nevertheless, gender-equitable masculinities are also emerging in the private sphere, evidence of which is highlighted in this chapter.

This chapter highlights the need for more data on masculinities to inform policy making. In order to facilitate the creation of an evidence base on the status of masculine norms, it proposes a list of indicators to measure each of the ten norms of restrictive masculinities presented in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Each list includes both currently available and ideal indicators that assess masculine norms based on laws, attitudes and social practices. The aim of this chapter is to guide future data collection efforts that can create a comparable and robust evidence base to support programmes and policies to promote gender-equitable masculine norms.