Byline: A study has outlined eight indicators of toxic masculinity in heterosexual men — and finds that ‘manliness’ is not necessarily a problematic aspect of masculinity.

How rife is the problem of ‘toxic masculinity’ in Western societies? A research study run in New Zealand has found that only a small percentage of men surveyed fell into the worst category of hostile toxicity — and that a desire to feel ‘manly’ wasn’t necessarily indicative that a person held socially damaging views.

In 2024, Sanders and his colleagues published a ‘toxic masculinity scale’, identifying 28 questions that assessed the degree of toxicity expressed by white male university students in the United States. Psychology doctoral candidate Deborah Hill Cone at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and her colleagues have now added to this with a more all-encompassing view of toxicity and a larger, broader sample of men in a study published in Psychology of Men & Masculinities.

The team dug into the results of the 2018–19 New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study, a broad survey with responses from nearly 50,000 people. More than 15,000 of the participants identified as heterosexual males and had answered relevant questions such as “being a woman/man is an important part of how I see myself” and “inferior groups should stay in their place”.

In a statistical analysis, the respondents fell into five groups. The good news is that only the smallest group (3.2% of the men) was characterized by the researchers as ‘hostile toxic’, whereas the largest group was ‘atoxic’ (35.4%)… Hill Cone and her colleagues found two moderate groups split between those who were more- or less-tolerant of people from sexual and gender minorities (LGBTQ+) , and a ‘benevolent toxic’ group, whose members got relatively high scores in measures of sexism but not in hostility… The odds of men in the sample having the hostile toxic profile were higher for those who were older, single, unemployed, religious or an ethnic minority, as well as those high on scales of political conservatism, economic deprivation or emotional dysregulation, or who had a low level of education… “The entitled rich tech bro or frat boy didn’t really appear” in the hostile toxic group, says Hill Cone. Instead, the hostile toxic group was made up mainly of marginalized, disadvantaged men… Importantly, how central ‘being a man’ was to someone’s sense of self wasn’t particularly predictive of which group they landed in. Although the men in the hostile toxic group did tend to report that their gender was important to them, so did many men in the other categories.

Of course as pointed out: this is a well-executed study but is only in New Zealand. Results may vary depending on location. Results are overall not surprising.

The two featured key studies are both open access:

• The toxic masculinity scale developed by Sanders et al.
• The featured study by Hill Cone et al. itself