Man Enough? Measuring Masculine Norms to Promote Women’s Empowerment
Masculinities can either support or hinder women’s empowerment and greater gender equality. However, a lack of consistent and comparable data hinders efforts to understand and assess harmful, restrictive masculinities. This report identifies and describes ten norms of restrictive masculinities to be urgently addressed within the political, economic and private spheres. Alongside these norms the report highlights gender-equitable alternatives, which support women’s empowerment in practice. By mapping available and ideal indicators, the report provides a roadmap for efforts to measure changing norms of masculinities. In doing so, this report aims to support policies to transform masculinities by facilitating the creation of more and better data on masculine norms.
Foreword
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.
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