Pearl Davis has been promoting a documentary called What’s In It For Men? for quite some time. It’s described as a divorce documentary, a marriage documentary, a family-court documentary, and more recently as part of a broader series about men’s issues. The official trailer makes clear that the scope is much wider than divorce alone.

As you would imagine, topics include marriage, custody, child support, fatherlessness, male suicide, homelessness, dating, feminism, family breakdown, military obligation, population decline, and the general claim that modern society undervalues men.

I hope the film is good. I hope it gets finished with major distribution. If people believe in what Pearl is trying to do, I have no problem encouraging them to support it financially. If she manages to make a strong documentary and put it in front of millions of people who don’t already follow men’s-content channels, that would be a real accomplishment.

But I also think the project faces a basic problem that has very little to do with Pearl personally: the information environment that made a documentary like this feel necessary fifteen years ago no longer exists.

For me, that’s the most interesting thing about the project.

The Funding Doesn’t Suggest Huge Demand

As of August 2026, Pearl’s GoFundMe had raised roughly $63,000 from about 725 donors. For a small independent filmmaker, $63,000 would be a meaningful amount of money. But Pearl isn’t an unknown filmmaker starting from zero. She built a very large audience around exactly these issues and has been promoting the project for a long time.

The trailer itself lays out the ambition, at the end of which she says that if the project raises $500,000, the documentary can be finished. If it raises $1 million, she says they can make it a ‘Netflix-level documentary.’ The GoFundMe eventually displayed a $1 million target, while her newer Audacity Network project page has shown a separate internal target of $300,000.

The numbers have moved around, but the underlying point hasn’t: this is being positioned as a serious, six-figure documentary project, and possibly the beginning of a series of documentaries produced through Pearl’s own media operation.

The fundraising result may be telling us something. People can agree with the message, watch the clips, leave comments, share the videos, and still feel no particular need to finance a feature-length version of information they’re already getting for free several times a week.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t care about men’s issues. It may mean they don’t see the documentary as something they need.

‘Netflix-Level’ Isn’t Netflix Distribution

The trailer’s use of the phrase ‘Netflix-level’ is important because production quality and distribution are two different things. A documentary can look like something that belongs on Netflix and still never get anywhere near Netflix.

That’s where I think the biggest strategic question sits. If the film is primarily for Pearl’s existing audience, why does that audience need it? If the film is for people outside Pearl’s audience, how is it going to reach them?

The second version is the best argument for making the documentary. A polished film can become a gateway product. Someone can send it to a brother, a friend, a son, a journalist, a policymaker, or a person who would never sit through hours of men’s-rights podcasts. A major streaming service could put these ideas in front of people who don’t know Pearl, don’t follow men’s-content channels, and would never search for the subject on their own.

If Pearl can pull that off, it would be a hell of a feat.

But that requires more than a professional camera package, good editing, and documentary-style graphics. It requires distribution. A theatrical release would be great, but a meaningful nationwide run for a niche independent documentary about men’s issues seems extremely unlikely. A major streaming service would make far more sense if the objective is broad exposure.

Independent filmmakers do not always secure distribution before production. Many make the film first and take it to festivals, sales agents, distributors, and streamers afterward. So I don’t think the absence of a distributor before filming automatically means the project is being handled incorrectly.

But in this particular case, distribution isn’t some secondary business detail. If the main justification for spending hundreds of thousands of dollars is that the film will carry these arguments beyond the existing online men’s audience, then distribution is the mechanism that makes the entire idea work.

You can spend a million dollars making something look like a streaming documentary and still release it to exactly the same people who already watch you on YouTube.

The Audacity Network Can Host It. That Doesn’t Mean It Can Distribute It.

Pearl’s own platform, The Audacity Network, is also part of the picture. Public materials identify JustPearlyThings LLC as the operating entity behind the network. Audacity functions as Pearl’s direct-to-consumer media and membership platform, with subscriptions, video, community features, donations, and project fundraising.

That gives Pearl something valuable: independence from YouTube and a place where she can release material directly to supporters. It also gives her a way to build a business around the audience she already owns rather than depending entirely on another platform.

But Audacity solves a platform problem. It doesn’t automatically solve a distribution problem.

If What’s In It For Men? ultimately lives mainly on Audacity, then the film may be reaching the people most likely to know Pearl already, agree with many of her arguments already, and hear the same subject matter from her regular content already. In other words, the safer the distribution route becomes, the less likely it is to solve the larger outreach problem.

The Audacity site has also listed a second proposed documentary, The Military Divorce Complex, with a $500,000 target. That suggests Pearl isn’t thinking about one unusual film. She appears to be building toward a model in which her audience helps finance repeated, expensive long-form documentaries.

That makes the first film more than a one-off creative project. It becomes a test of whether that business model works.

We’ve Seen This Before

There are several useful comparisons because men’s-issues and family-court documentaries aren’t new.

Divorce Corp., released in 2014, is probably the clearest cautionary example. It was a professionally packaged documentary about the divorce and family-court industry, had recognizable narration from Dr. Drew, received publicity, and had a limited theatrical launch. It was talked about heavily in the circles that cared about the subject. Then it largely disappeared from the broader culture.

The Red Pill, released in 2016, did better. Cassie Jaye’s Kickstarter raised roughly $211,000 from about 2,700 backers, substantially more than Pearl’s project had raised by August 2026. But The Red Pill had two major advantages.

First, the timing was different. It arrived before today’s massive ecosystem of men’s-content channels, podcasts, clips, livestreams, and research commentary. At that time, a documentary could still feel like the place where someone finally assembled material that was difficult to find elsewhere.

Second, Cassie Jaye herself gave the film a story. She entered the project with one set of assumptions, investigated the men’s-rights movement, encountered material that challenged her, and became part of the narrative. Even a viewer who thought men’s-rights activists were ridiculous had a reason to keep watching: what was the filmmaker going to discover, and where would she end up?

Pearl doesn’t have that same narrative engine. Everyone already knows what Pearl thinks. The official trailer spends substantial time on her identity, her controversies, her beliefs, and reactions to her. That may be deliberate. Pearl may be intended to serve as the central character who ties an extremely broad range of subjects together.

But if Pearl is the protagonist, what is she discovering that the audience doesn’t already know she believes?

Other films make the pattern clearer. A Fatherless America took a creator with an existing online audience and turned familiar themes about fatherlessness and family breakdown into a feature documentary. Erasing Family found a useful life as a family-court and parental-estrangement advocacy film. The Mask You Live In, approaching boys and masculinity from a very different ideological framework, secured Sundance exposure and Netflix distribution. Man Up in Australia was developed with institutional partners and an ABC broadcast destination already built into the project.

The lesson isn’t that documentaries about men can’t work. They can. The lesson is that subject matter alone isn’t enough. Story, institutional relationships, audience, timing, distribution, and the reason the film needs to exist all matter.

The Bigger Problem: The Information Isn’t Scarce Anymore

This is where I think the most important difference from fifteen years ago appears.

A man dealing with divorce, custody, family court, child support, false allegations, suicide, fatherlessness, dating, education, sentencing disparities, workplace issues, paternity, or any of the other topics that appear in this ecosystem no longer has to wait for somebody to spend two years making a documentary about it.

He can search for the exact issue he needs right now.

He can choose a five-minute explanation, a twenty-minute research breakdown, a three-hour podcast, an interview with a lawyer, a personal story from someone who went through it, a statistical review, or a debate. He can compare different creators. He can look for opposing arguments. He can go deeper on one specific issue instead of accepting the ninety minutes a filmmaker decided to include.

That’s a radically different information environment from the one Divorce Corp. and The Red Pill entered.

And Pearl herself contributes to that saturation. If someone follows Pearl, he doesn’t have to wait for What’s In It For Men? to hear her views on marriage, divorce, women, family court, fathers, male decline, or any of the surrounding subjects. She talks about them constantly. So do many of the people in the same online ecosystem.

The more successful creators become at delivering this information every day, the less informational value a feature-length documentary automatically provides to their core audience.

That means a documentary like this now has to do something ordinary creator content can’t easily do. It has to reach a genuinely new audience, produce genuinely new information, or tell an exceptional story that is worth watching even if the viewer already knows the arguments.

Otherwise, the obvious question remains: what are the extra hundreds of thousands of dollars buying besides better cinematography?

Can Pearl Raise the Evidentiary Standard?

There’s another issue I would want answered before treating the finished film as an authoritative documentary: research depth.

Much of Pearl’s regular content is reaction material or podcast-style conversation. She reacts to TikTok clips, talks with guests, makes broad claims, and often says things that sound reassuring to an audience that already shares her concerns. Some of those claims may be true. Some may be directionally true. But I rarely come away from the format with the sense that I’m watching someone who has mastered the underlying research, legal distinctions, datasets, limitations, and competing interpretations.

Her debate with Ana Kasparian is one reason I have that reservation. When claims are made in a format where someone knowledgeable can challenge them immediately, the standard changes. It’s no longer enough for a statement to sound right. The person making it has to know what the statistic measures, where it came from, what it doesn’t prove, and what the strongest counterargument is.

That doesn’t mean Pearl personally needs to be an academic expert on every issue in the documentary. Most documentary filmmakers aren’t. A professional production can surround the filmmaker with researchers, subject-matter experts, attorneys, fact-checkers, producers, and people whose job is to challenge weak claims before they make it into the final cut.

The question is whether The Audacity Network has built that kind of research infrastructure around the film.

The trailer makes some enormous claims. It moves from family court to male privilege, single motherhood, suicide, women’s economic preferences, population decline, and even civilizational collapse. A large-budget documentary should do more than make those claims sound dramatic. It should be able to defend them.

For me, that’s one of the fairest standards for judging the finished movie: does it materially raise the evidentiary standard above Pearl’s normal content?

If it does, that’s a reason for the documentary to exist.

If it doesn’t, then the audience may simply be funding Pearl’s regular arguments with cinematic production values.

I Hope It Works

None of this means I want the project to fail.

If Pearl finishes a strong film, gets it onto a major streaming service, and reaches millions of people who aren’t already consuming this material, I’ll give her full credit. That would be difficult, and it would accomplish something that ordinary daily content often cannot.

If viewers believe in the project and want to help fund it, support it. The fact that I’m skeptical of the model doesn’t mean I think people should root against an attempt to bring more attention to men’s issues.

I simply think the hurdles are substantial: money, scope, research rigor, story, distribution, audience redundancy, and the fact that the target audience already has nearly unlimited access to the subject matter.

Fortunately, that last problem is also the good news.

Fifteen years ago, if a documentary about family court disappeared after a limited theatrical run, the information could effectively disappear with it for many people. Today, if Pearl’s film never becomes a mainstream event, the conversation doesn’t disappear. Men don’t have to rely on one filmmaker, one documentary, one distributor, or one curated collection of interviews to learn about these issues.

They can get the information on demand, choose the subject they need, compare sources, and decide how deep they want to go.

That may actually be the most encouraging conclusion in all of this. We spend a lot of time talking about how little attention men’s issues receive from mainstream institutions. But in terms of public access to information, this may be one of the best periods men have ever had.

The documentary may struggle precisely because the information ecosystem for men has succeeded.

Sources

Official trailer - What’s In It For Men? (2025 Documentary) Official Trailer:

GoFundMe - JustPearlyThings Divorce Documentary: https://www.gofundme.com/f/justpearlythings-divorce-documentary

IMDb - What’s In It For Men?: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt37052531/

The Audacity Network:

https://www.theaudacitynetwork.com/

Audacity project page - What’s In It For Men?: https://www.theaudacitynetwork.com/project/what-s-in-it-for-men-documentary-in-progress

Audacity project page - The Military Divorce Complex: https://www.theaudacitynetwork.com/project/the-military-divorce-complex

Pearl production/funding discussion, Dec. 2025: https://manowhisper.signalnetwork.org/show/pearl/episode/candace-owens-shows-why-women-do-not-belong-in-politics

Pearl documentary discussion, Apr. 2026: https://fight.fudgie.org/search/show/pt/episode/20260401_Wed_rWCRB2dczfg

Terrance Popp documentary interview notice: https://www.alch372.com/2026/04/29/meet-greet-documentary-interview-army-veteran-terrance-popp-pearl-davis/

The Red Pill -crowdfunding summary: https://www.backerkit.com/projects/cassiejaye/the-red-pill-a-documentary-film

Divorce Corp. - launch publicity: https://www.prweb.com/releases/my_advocate_center_hosts_world_premiere_of_film_divorce_corp_narrated_by_dr_drew_pinsky_to_expose_50_billion_divorce_industry_and_need_for_family_court_reform/prweb11457680.htm

Divorce Corp. - Illinois State Bar review: https://www.isba.org/sections/familylaw/newsletter/2014/01/moviereviewdivorcecorp

A Fatherless America:

https://www.afatherlessamerica.com/

Erasing Family:

https://erasingfamily.org/

The Mask You Live In - Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jensiebelnewsom/the-mask-you-live-in

Fathers Wanted - Tucker Carlson Network: https://next-prod.tuckercarlson.com/fathers-wanted-film

All documents used for the full study and analysis are included below, including the methods and coding process, TV show selection and source links, detailed results for each sitcom, and the transcripts used in the analysis.

This post also serves as my own archive and reference, while giving s

upporters access to the extensive material behind the analysis. Supporters have permission to use these documents for their own research and analysis. I only ask that my original documents be credited when they are used.

Read more

The Setup

Read more

When we aggregate men and women together, most reasons they want marriage fall into four broad clusters that I’ll rank in order: bonding and intimacy, commitment and security, family and legacy, and resource stability.

The number one reason generalized for both men and women for wanting to get married is bonding and intimacy. At its heart, this is about connection. It’s not just physical or intellectual attraction, but sustained closeness over time. Companionship and emotional support live here as well. And marriage promises emotional availability, at least in theory.

As the second highest marriage motivation, people want commitment and security, such as reducing uncertainty. Security operates on both emotional and social levels by signaling importance and durability. It reduces the sense that the relationship is temporary.

The third reason is family and legacy. Again, men and women collectively—we’re talking about both of them. Many people marry to have children, to raise them within cultural or religious norms, and because of a desire to build something that extends beyond just themselves. It’s a shared lineage or environment for the next generation.

And the fourth main reason is resource stability. This includes economic and legal benefits that marriage provides, including inheritance and things like asset pooling. And because, let’s face it, marriage functions as an economic alliance. At its core, this cluster is about logistical, material, and structural stability.

Overall, what we notice is that across men and women combined, marriage is rarely just about love. It’s also about bonding, commitment, family building, and practical stability.

How the Priorities Change for Men

Now that we have an understanding of that structure, we can examine how the prioritization and their definitions differ among the genders and why that difference becomes more pronounced later in life.

Think in terms of which cluster is important for men and for women at a given stage in life, especially those reaching middle age, 40 or over. Because once we see the structure in more than abstract terms, the differences start to make a lot more sense.

So, here’s the structure: four priorities in order—bonding, commitment, family, and stability.

But what does all of this mean? How do we contextualize it? And where does it fit for men today?

Here’s my breakdown.

If you’re a man in your 20s or early 30s, all four priorities are usually still active. You’re looking to build with somebody. That could be a great marriage, a career, maybe a family legacy. You still want the intimacy and everything else. So at that age, the lower priorities are still in play, even if you don’t consciously think about it. That’s the age at which people are looking to pair with somebody for the stability, resources, and future family structures.

But 15 to 20 years later, things really start to shift.

What happens when family legacy and resource stability have already been built with that woman from your 20s or 30s—and then blown up?

Because once you move into your 40s, especially after divorce, a huge swing happens. And that’s where the real friction begins.

For many 40+ divorced men and those who built and blew up, two of those four clusters—family and stability—have been destabilized. For 80 to 90% of them, their children are no longer under their direct care and resource stability has taken a significant hit by way of child support, court costs, losing a home, and simply starting over. His entire identity may have been rewritten by the divorce itself.

So when they re-enter the dating market, 40-plus men are not thinking, “Let’s rebuild those bottom layers with somebody new.” What they’re thinking is, “I will never let that level of exposure happen again.”

As a result, their motivations for family and legacy are closed and no longer a priority. They’ve already been there, done it, and lost it. Likewise, practical and resource stability becomes self-serving. Stability is rebuilt independently and is no longer a reason to get married.

By their 40s and 50s, never-married guys have already achieved stability and the divorced ones have had it and lost it. So finances are controlled personally and any future risk is contained.

So, what’s left after family and stability are no longer on the table?

It leaves bonding and intimacy for guys.

Those two priorities do not disappear with divorce or after everything is taken from him. In fact, in many cases, they intensify for divorced middle-aged men. So, for many divorced men over 40, bonding and intimacy—already at the top of their motivations throughout their life—sometimes become the only two priorities or motivations.

Where the Mismatch Begins

And here’s where the friction really starts to play out for women, and it’s why they have such a hard time finding a relationship or a man that’s willing to give them what they demand.

Many divorced women over 40 have recalibrated differently. They still want the family legacy with their children from a previous man, and for you to help her continue that. She also wants the resources still—the stability that 40+ men in their dating pool are no longer willing to provide.

For women, commitment and security is still their main motivation to get married. That’s because it signals investment. But for the men that many of them meet, that’s the least of two remaining reasons to get married.

So now we have two people whose priorities are very different.

At 40-plus, many men have only two priorities left: intimacy first and commitment second. Women still have their original four priorities—commitment followed by intimacy, and then family and then stability. The last two, again, many divorced men will no longer risk.

They’ve got only two reasons left.

Divorced guys think, “Let’s see if we connect intimately first because I am not rushing into commitment, family, or other resource entanglements.” And he thinks that because the others feel risky and he was previously led to legal and financial exposure.

Meanwhile, the divorced woman may think, “Intimacy matters to me, but I need to know and have clarity about what his intentions are. I need commitment as proof of him being serious, and the family and the resource stability, all of it as well.”

Circling back to earlier stages, the common lower priorities of family legacy and resource stability are still somewhat in control because they still exist for both men and women and in the same order. But at 45 and after divorce, there may be no family or resources that he’s willing to share.

What Men Said About the Model

That’s my model. But what did actual men over 40 say when I discussed this about six months ago?

To look at that, I used a YouTube Comment Scraper and downloaded 365 comments and responses from the original video. Of those, 159 were top-level comments and 206 were responses. Another 55 replies were not included in the download for some reason, and those missing replies were spread across 13 main comment threads. I then used ChatGPT to analyze the audience top-level comments and identify the four main topics.

The largest category was “Marriage isn’t worth the risk,” with 54 comments. This was the biggest category by far. The dominant theme was that many men over 40—especially after divorce—no longer see marriage as a benefit, but as a legal, financial, and emotional gamble that offers too little upside and too much exposure.

One man summarized it this way: “Marriage used to signal that a man had his life together. Now it just signals that he likes to gamble.”

Another wrote, “I have rebuilt my financial security. I worked hard and took risks my entire life, just to hand over a big chunk twice. Never again. I will NEVER remarry.”

The second major category was “I still want intimacy and companionship, just not marriage,” with 41 comments. About one-quarter of the comments reflected this theme. These guys weren’t necessarily rejecting women or relationships; many still wanted companionship, intimacy, and connection, but no longer saw marriage, cohabitation, shared finances, or major legal commitment as necessary—or desirable—to get those things.

As one man wrote, “I’m actually over 60, though I’ve been divorced since my early 50s. Bonding and intimacy are the only reasons I would date and consider a relationship. And even those aren’t as important as they used to be.”

Another described what he would accept as “relationship lite,” writing, “Companionship. Possible intimacy. Commitment? Minor, at best.”

The third category was “Men and women want different things after 40,” with 29 comments. Nearly one in five comments explicitly reinforced the core mismatch in the model. Men described prioritizing intimacy, flexibility, and lower exposure, while women were perceived as placing more emphasis on commitment, security, and formal relationship structure.

One commenter described the standoff very clearly: “With women there has been a standoff—I would not offer commitment until I got the bonding and intimacy, they would not offer true intimacy until they got commitment.”

Another reduced the difference to this: “She wants to get married for babies and security. He wants to get married for sex. Both are disappointed.”

The fourth category was “Children are one of the remaining reasons marriage makes sense,” with 19 comments. About one in eight comments tied marriage directly to children, family formation, or legacy. The pattern was that men who felt finished having children saw much less reason to marry, while men who still wanted children were more likely to view marriage as useful or necessary.

One man wrote simply, “For me, the only reason for marriage is children.”

Another wrote, “I’m in my mid-50s. I’m still looking to marry because I want children. Unfortunately, this means I need to focus on women 35 and under.”

The Model in Practice

So midlife dating can feel harder for both because the lower-prioritized layers no longer exist for men.

He wants intimacy without structural vulnerability.

She wants commitment more than anything else.

Sources

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-facts-about-marriage-in-the-u-s/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/235538/americans-views-marriage-divorce.aspx
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/02/09/about-half-of-u-s-adults-say-they-want-to-be-married/
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/12/29/marriage-and-parenthood-among-young-adults/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265407512452989
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1047840X.2014.873723
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/595727
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1040260814000640
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v75n3/v75n3p29.html
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520251159/promises-i-can-keep
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-soc-070308-115954

There is a study you have probably heard about even if you have never read it.

In 2012, researchers gave science professors an application from a student who wanted a laboratory manager job. Half of the professors saw an applicant named John. The other half saw an applicant named Jennifer. Everything else was the same. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same application. Only the name and gender changed.

And the result made major headlines for years. Faculty rated John as more competent and more hirable. They were more willing to mentor him. And they offered him a higher starting salary. The message was simple and powerful: discrimination against women.

And this was not a study that disappeared into an academic journal. Yale promoted the findings under the headline, “Scientists not immune from gender bias, Yale study shows.” Wired covered the experiment as evidence that scientists were treating identically qualified women worse than men. TIME magazine later referred to it as a famous study illustrating the difficulty women faced in getting hired in STEM.

Years later, Wired was still explaining the experiment as part of what it called a broad body of evidence showing that women in science were evaluated less favorably than men. The public discussion became significant enough that another research team later analyzed 831 reader comments posted beneath three prominent press articles about the study. In other words, researchers eventually studied the public reaction to the media coverage of this experiment.

Academically, the paper became one of the best-known studies of gender bias ever published. It accumulated thousands of citations in other research papers and continued appearing in reviews, university resources, discussions of unconscious bias, and arguments about gender discrimination in STEM fields.

But what happens when somebody does it again - years later, and on a grander scale? Not by asking a vaguely similar question, but by going back to the same basic John-versus-Jennifer test, recruiting a much larger group of professors, and seeing whether the original result appears again.

Researchers recently did exactly that. And what they found creates a very different picture of gender bias in STEM today.

The 2012 Study

First, we need to fully understand the context of that 2012 study.

Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues recruited 127 biology, chemistry, and physics professors from research-intensive universities. Each professor evaluated what appeared to be an undergraduate applying for a lab manager position.

The application was intentionally good enough to be plausible, but not so spectacular that there was no room for debate. That level of application quality was important, because bias is easier to detect when evaluators have some discretion in hiring.

Sixty-three professors received the application with the name John. Sixty-four received the same application with the name Jennifer. The professors then rated:

• the applicant’s competence,

• hirability,

• how much mentoring they would provide,

• and what salary they would offer.

John’s average competence rating was about 4.0 on a seven-point scale. Jennifer’s was about 3.3. Hirability was about 3.8 for John and 2.9 for Jennifer. Faculty also reported being more willing to mentor John.

Remember: we’re still talking about the original 2012 study here.

And then there was salary. The average proposed starting salary for John was $30,238. For Jennifer, it was $26,508 - a difference of roughly $3,700 a year for two applicants whose resumes and qualifications were identical.

Male and female professors showed the same overall pattern of favoring John over Jennifer. The researchers therefore argued that this was not simply men favoring men. They interpreted it as evidence of a broader cultural bias from both men and women.

There was one interesting exception. Professors actually liked Jennifer more than John. But that greater likeability did not translate into better hiring outcomes. John was still rated as more competent, more hirable, more deserving of mentoring, and worth more money.

That combination helps explain why the study became such a durable piece of the public discussion about women in STEM. Jennifer was more likable, but John was favored for the position.

Thirteen Years Later, Researchers Ran It Again

Now fast forward 13 years, to 2025.

The replication study was preregistered in 2020, received in-principle acceptance before data collection in 2021, and the completed results were released in late 2024 and accepted for publication in 2025. So if you go looking for this report and it shows a date of 2020, that’s why. The completed results came later, and the paper was accepted for publication in 2025.

Relative to the 2012 publication, these authors weren’t merely asking a similar question. They tried to fully replicate the original study.

They used the same basic application materials, with minor updates such as changing dates and converting GRE scores to the newer scoring system. Participants again saw only one applicant: John or Jennifer. The applications were otherwise identical.

The authors ran three close replications and then pooled the results in a combined analysis. Study One focused on science faculty, just like the original study. Study Two extended the sample into technology, engineering, and mathematics. Study Three again used those fields but changed whether participants were paid, which allowed the researchers to see whether compensation might affect the result.

Altogether, the pooled dataset contained 1,293 tenured or tenure-track STEM faculty members from 113 R1 (Research 1) universities - 79 public and 34 private institutions. There were 622 evaluations of John and 671 evaluations of Jennifer.

So the new dataset was roughly ten times the size of the original and covered a much broader slice of STEM. This newer replication study had extremely high statistical power to detect an effect as large as the one reported in 2012. If the original anti-female effect was still there at anything close to its original size, this design should have had little trouble finding it.

The Result: A Clean Reversal

Oddly enough, the new study didn’t replicate findings from the 2012 study. But that statement seriously understates what happened. The results did not simply move toward parity and equality. They reversed direction entirely.

Across the combined sample, professors rated Jennifer as more competent than John: 5.14 versus 4.81 on a seven-point scale. They rated Jennifer as more hirable: 4.84 versus 4.39. They offered Jennifer more mentoring: 5.23 versus 4.97. And they offered Jennifer a higher salary - about $35,550 compared with $34,150 for John.

The largest of those four core effects was hirability. The meta-analytic effect size was about .34 in favor of Jennifer over John.

Now, that’s not an enormous effect size. And the authors are clear that the modern pro-female differences were smaller than the pro-male differences reported in the original 2012 study. But it’s also not just random. In the pooled analysis, the female advantage was statistically significant for all four: competence, hireability, mentoring, and salary.

And here’s a fascinating detail. Remember the one finding from 2012 that favored Jennifer? Likeability. That finding did replicate.

In the replication study, Jennifer was more likable than John. In fact, it was the strongest gender difference in the new pooled data. Jennifer’s average likeability rating was 5.19. John’s was 4.50 on that seven-point scale.

So when we put the old and new studies side by side, here’s the pattern. In 2012, Jennifer was liked more - but John was judged more competent, more hireable, more deserving of mentoring, and worth a higher salary. In the replication, Jennifer was still liked more - but now she was also perceived to be more competent, more hireable, more deserving of mentoring, and worth a higher salary.

How’s that for a clean reversal.

And the evaluating professors’ own sex had no effect. In the new study, there was no significant interaction between faculty gender and applicant gender on any of the five outcomes. In plain English, the pro-female pattern was not influenced only by female professors. Male and female professors showed broadly similar applicant-gender effects.

That mirrors another important feature of the 2012 paper. Back then, male and female professors had also shown broadly similar applicant-gender effects - except the advantage favored John. So this is not a simple matter of male professors favoring men in 2012 and female evaluators favoring women later. The direction of favorability itself changed for both professor sexes.

Why Did It Change?

The obvious question is why. I’ll give some context, but leave your thoughts in the comments as well.

To be completely objective, this is where we have to separate what the experiment demonstrates from what it cannot demonstrate. The researchers offer several possibilities, but they explicitly describe them as speculation.

One possibility is that social attitudes changed. The original data came from a different era, and more than a decade of intense attention to gender bias may have changed how academics evaluate women and men.

A second possibility is that attempts to correct anti-female bias may now sometimes overcorrect. If evaluators have repeatedly been told to watch for bias against women, they may consciously or unconsciously give a female applicant an advantage when two candidates appear equally qualified.

A third possibility is less dramatic: the original study may simply have overestimated the true effect. That 2012 report had only 127 participants. Small studies can produce inflated effect sizes, and occasionally produce false positives. The replication, on the other hand, had more than 1,000 faculty members and much greater statistical power.

Those explanations are not mutually exclusive. That is, the original finding could have been real in 2012 and attitudes could have shifted. The original effect could also have been larger than the true effect because of sampling variation. Or both things could be true at once.

The replication cannot tell us which explanation is correct, so there is need for some speculation as to why the results did a 180.

A separate study published in Research Policy in 2025 examined evaluations of hypothetical assistant-professor candidates by 1,857 professors at German universities. It covered mathematics and physics, several social-science fields, and German studies.

Once again, female applicants received somewhat higher ratings than male applicants - both for perceived qualification and for the likelihood that they should be invited to interview.

The authors described the female advantage as small, and the German study is not directly comparable to the American lab-manager experiment. Different country. Different job. Different design.

But it makes the broader question harder to dismiss: are some institutions still operating with an old mental model of gender bias even as the direction of bias in certain selection situations has changed?

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Whatever Happened to the STEM-Bias Headlines?

And that brings us to what I think is the major takeaway here.

The 2012 study created a media storm. Its finding that science faculty favored an identical male applicant became a widely repeated example of discrimination against women in STEM. It was covered in the media, cited thousands of times, and shaped a much larger public conversation about barriers facing women in science. For years, findings like this helped shape what gender bias in STEM looks like.

But when researchers came back with much larger samples, preregistered methods, and results showing anti-male bias in STEM, the reaction was nothing like 2012.

Would you have known this if I hadn’t just brought it to your attention? Did you see headlines anywhere demanding answers and justice?

There’s no media storm this time around. No widespread discussion about what the reversal means.

Which raises an uncomfortable question: if these new studies had once again found discrimination against women, would you already have heard about them?

My guess is that we’d already be having a second storm of media waves if the results were replicated - but because it’s you that’s being discriminated against, we get nothing.

Left Behind

And that may be the most interesting part of this research.

The original experiment became a public cry of victimhood - one that newspapers, magazines, universities, researchers, and advocates could point to because the result was unfavorable toward women.

While this newer research collects dust.

Sources

• Original 2012 Moss-Racusin study
  https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1211286109
  Free full-text version: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3478626/
  This is the original John-versus-Jennifer experiment with 127 science faculty.

• 2025 replication Honeycutt et al., OSF/PsyArXiv
  https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/ezp6d_v2
  DOI version: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/ezp6d_v2
  This is the completed replication report showing the effects consistently shifted in the female-favoring direction.

• Replication project page on OSF
  https://osf.io/sefn8/overview
  Useful to see the broader project/preregistration record.

• Replication manuscript PDF with acceptance note
  https://sites.rutgers.edu/lee-jussim/wp-content/uploads/sites/135/2025/04/Gender-bias-by-STEM-faculty-Honeycutt-et-al.-pre-print-11-12-24-with-acceptance-note.pdf
  Detailed sample sizes, means, timeline, and acceptance information.

• Yale 2012 news coverage
  https://news.yale.edu/2012/09/24/scientists-not-immune-gender-bias-yale-study-shows
  Headline: Scientists not immune from gender bias, Yale study shows.

• Wired 2012 coverage
  https://www.wired.com/2012/09/physicist-yanks-sheets-off-sex-bias
  This was one of the prominent popular-media treatments of the original experiment.

• TIME’s later coverage citing the 2012 study
  https://time.com/2969814/women-male-scientists/
  TIME referred back to the Moss-Racusin experiment while discussing hiring bias against women in science.

• Wired again invoking evidence of gender bias
  https://www.wired.com/story/why-men-dont-believe-the-data-on-gender-bias-in-science
  Useful for showing that the original result continued to be part of the public discussion years later.

• 2015 study analyzing 831 public comments about media coverage of the original study
  https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0361684314565777
  Title: Can Evidence Impact Attitudes? Public Reactions to Evidence of Gender Bias in STEM Fields.

• Inside Higher Ed coverage of that 831-comment study
  https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/08/new-study-finds-men-more-likely-doubt-evidence-gender-bias-science-fields
  This is a non-paywalled explainer to avoid going through the journal page.

• 2025 German study
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733324002191
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2024.105170
  Title: Gender biases in assistant professor recruitment: Does discipline matter? It used 1,857 German professors and found female candidates received higher ratings for qualification and interview likelihood across the disciplines studied.

• Open bibliographic page for the German study
  https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/respol/v54y2025i3s0048733324002191.html
  Useful if the ScienceDirect page is paywalled.

I just finished a video titled "Dear Society: Men Have Voted No Confidence"

This discussion began with a question I examined last fall: Why haven’t men built the same kind of organized, well-funded, politically influential advocacy movement that women have?

Men still ask me that question. Some tell me men need to organize, enter politics, build institutions, and fight collectively. Others have suggested that I become a political activist myself and focus on changing the laws.

But after reading more than 1,300 comments and replies to the worldwide MGTOW video I released a few days ago, I think we may be overlooking the form of advocacy that many men have already chosen.

Men aren't marching or lobbying. They’re not waiting for institutions to acknowledge their concerns.

Instead, they're withholding their participation.

Again and again, men in my MGTOW video described evaluating the deals given to them through dating, marriage, family law, and the institutions surrounding them. And they’ve decided that the cost, risk, and disrespect no longer justify the return.

Many did not describe themselves as lonely, defeated, or unable to participate. They described themselves as unwilling. Some had been married. Some were divorced fathers. Some had dated for years. Others had quietly lived this way long before they ever heard the terms MGTOW or red pill.

And many described what came afterward not as deprivation, but as peace, freedom, financial stability, stronger friendships, travel, hobbies, and a life built on their own terms.

This video is not an opinion piece. It was built around a formal analysis of what the men themselves said…and the remarkably consistent message that emerged when their 1,300 comments were examined together.

Maybe men have not failed to advocate.

Maybe they have rejected the institutions through which advocacy is traditionally expected to occur.

Society keeps asking why men are walking away.

This video gives men’s answer from around the world.

The Setup

I recently spent several days comparing two official American Psychological Association practice guidelines: one for psychologists working with girls and women and another for psychologists working with boys and men. Rather than relying on headlines or internet debates, I placed the documents side by side and asked a simple question: do they begin from the same assumptions?

You can download the official APA guides from my Evidence Library.

The answer surprised even me. While both documents aim to improve psychological care, they repeatedly emphasize different starting points, different priorities, and different ways of understanding the client sitting in front of the therapist.

Ten Comparisons, Three Parts

To keep the discussion organized, I grouped ten comparisons into three broader sections. First, I examined how psychologists are encouraged to think before therapy even begins. Next, I looked at how those assumptions can influence assessment, diagnosis, treatment goals, trauma, and accountability inside the therapy room. Finally, I explored what those recommendations may imply for family life, institutional thinking, and men’s mental health beyond therapy.

The Differences

Some of the contrasts were subtle. Others were difficult to ignore. The women’s guideline repeatedly directs psychologists toward life experiences, oppression, strengths, resilience, context, and empowerment. The men’s guideline repeatedly directs psychologists toward masculinity, externalizing behavior, accountability, aggression, risk reduction, and the social consequences of male behavior.

That raises an important question: if psychologists are encouraged to begin from different assumptions, how might those assumptions shape the questions they ask, the explanations they consider, and the treatment they ultimately provide?

Why Original Sources Matter

One goal of my content is to move beyond commentary and back to original sources. It is easy to argue about therapy in the abstract. It is much harder to place two official documents beside each other and let readers inspect the language for themselves.

Throughout the video I show the original pages, highlight the relevant passages, and explain why I believe each comparison matters. Whether you ultimately agree with my interpretation is less important than seeing the documents firsthand.

The Bigger Question

The broader issue is not whether every psychologist follows these guidelines word for word. They are not mandatory scripts. The more important question is how influential organizations shape professional judgment over time through education, supervision, continuing education, and clinical culture.

If those underlying assumptions differ by sex, that deserves careful discussion rather than dismissal.

Closing

If you’ve ever wondered whether men and women enter therapy from the same starting point, I encourage you to read the documents yourself and watch the complete comparison. My hope is not to tell you what to think, but to give you the evidence to make a more informed decision.

Watch the full video breakdown HERE.

The Setup

In my recent video on AI and relationship conflict, I covered two related research developments. The first was about developing ConflictLens, an AI prototype designed to evaluate romantic conflict patterns, simulate arguments, and coach users through different responses. The second was a 2024 paper titled Gender Bias in Decision-Making with Large Language Models: A Study of Relationship Conflicts. (Both reference provided below.)

That research tested whether large language models made different decisions about ordinary relationship disputes depending on gender. Across the models examined, the authors reported a consistent direction of bias: women were favored first, people with gender-neutral names next, and men last.

Rather than leave the question at the abstract level, I asked viewers to run a simple public experiment. They copied the same relationship-conflict prompt into a major LLM - ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, or another model - and posted the responses in the comments. Some used the gender-neutral version. Others changed only the roles to male friend/girlfriend or female friend/boyfriend.

The AI / LLM Prompt

Viewer Submissions

The comments produced nine unique outputs across four model families: ChatGPT 5.5, Copilot, Gemini, and Grok. The sample was not evenly distributed across every possible model-and-gender combination, but it did include two gender-neutral responses, four male-friend responses, and three female-friend responses.

That was enough to look for a few patterns.

1. What did the models say regardless of gender?

2. Did the advice change when the same conduct was assigned to a man versus a woman

3. Did any particular model handle the gender swap differently from the others?

Model Commonalities

The biggest point of agreement was that the privacy request itself was generally reasonable. The models did not automatically classify “please do not share the details of our arguments with your friends” as controlling, whether the request came from a man, woman, or gender-neutral partner.

They also tended to place more responsibility on the partner who kept sharing private details after the issue had been discussed several times. The repeated action - not simply the disagreement about outside support - was treated as the core problem.

Most responses made the same distinction: a person can seek emotional support or advice from trusted people, but that does not automatically justify repeatedly exposing private relationship material after their partner has clearly objected. Several responses described that behavior as a boundary violation, a trust problem, or a failure to respect the relationship’s privacy.

The recommended next step was also remarkably consistent. Have one more calm conversation, make the boundary clear, see whether there is actual behavioral change, and then consider distance or leaving if the pattern continues. A few models mentioned counseling, but none treated counseling as a substitute for basic respect for the boundary.

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What Changed with Gender Swap

The answer is: not very much. In the male-friend versions, the girlfriend who repeatedly shared private conflicts was usually described as more responsible. In the female-friend versions, the boyfriend who repeatedly shared private conflicts was usually described as more responsible. In the gender-neutral versions, the same logic held: the partner continuing the behavior after repeated discussion carried more of the responsibility.

The models also did not appear to downgrade the man’s privacy concern when he was the one making it. They repeatedly called his request reasonable, healthy, or not inherently controlling. At the same time, the female-friend versions received the same basic validation when she was the person asking for privacy.

And the “leave or create distance” option was available to both. In this batch of answers, there was no clear pattern where a woman was encouraged to leave while a man was told only to communicate more carefully, or where a man’s concern was reframed as an attempt to isolate his partner.

The Model-by-Gender Interaction

The clearest cross-check came from Copilot and ChatGPT, because viewers submitted gender-neutral, male, and female versions. Both models produced responses that were close to mirrors of one another: switch who violates the privacy boundary, and the judgment of responsibility switches with that person.

Grok and Gemini were represented only with male-friend responses, so they cannot tell us as much about the gender swap itself. But both arrived at the same underlying conclusion as the other models: repeatedly violating an agreed privacy boundary was the larger problem, and the man was not automatically characterized as controlling simply because he objected.

The differences between models were more about tone than direction. Some used stronger terms such as “red flag,” “fundamental lack of respect,” or “seriously consider leaving.” Others were more conciliatory and emphasized compromise, emotional support, or counseling. But the core judgment was stable.

The Bottom Line

This was not a controlled replication of the 2024 study. It was a small, viewer-submitted test of one very specific conflict scenario. The models, versions, timing, and exact wording may all matter. But the result is still useful because the experiment asked a clean question: when the conduct in the prompt stays the same and the gender roles change, does the advice visibly change with it?

Based on the responses posted here, the early answer is no. In this scenario, the models were more responsive to the repeated conduct described in the prompt than to whether the person committing that conduct was male or female.

The Larger Point

AI is increasingly being positioned as a tool for interpreting conflict, assigning responsibility, flagging supposedly unhealthy behavior, and helping people decide whether to stay in a relationship. That makes it worth testing. The more people rely on these systems for judgment, the more important it is to know whether the guidance is consistent when only the gender label changes.

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Sources

This investigation kept bothering me because the research initially seemed to confirm something everyone has heard forever: in Hollywood stories, women are commonly written as victims of violence and men as perpetrators.

Then I found two studies by the same research group, showing that researchers can use screenplay language itself to detect violence and identify the roles characters play in it. The method is interesting…the story is what it leaves out.

The Studies

A 2019 study showed that machine learning could analyze 732 Hollywood scripts and reasonably predict whether the completed film would receive a low, medium, or high violence rating.

The researchers examined dialogue, sentiment, abusive language, genre, and other script features. Their point was not simply that fight scenes are visible on the page. Screenplay language can also reveal threat, fear, control, credibility, and sympathy before a movie is produced.

A follow-up paper analyzed 912 Hollywood scripts across 23 genres. It used a computational model to distinguish characters who gave violence, received it, or narrated violence involving someone else.

The result was predictable: female characters were more often written as victims in violent exchanges, while male characters were more o

ften written as perpetrators. Men and women were about equally likely to be narrators of violence.

The Missing Piece

Men are stronger on average and commit most serious physical violence. That is not the point of this article. The point is that physical violence has become the primary template through which researchers and audiences recognize abuse.

Once a model can scan hundreds of scripts and identify male characters as physical perpetrators, the mirror-image question should be obvious: where is the broad analysis of female characters abusing men through the tactics that do not leave a visible bruise?

I looked for a comparable study of coercive control, public humiliation, emotional manipulation, false allegations, financial destruction, isolation, parental alienation, and the use of social or institutional credibility against men in film or television. I could not find one.

Investigating Women’s Abuse

This was not a formal systematic review of every academic database. It was a targeted search through scholarly indexes, publisher records, repositories, and citation trails using combinations of terms related to female perpetrators, male victims, coercion, psychological abuse, film, television, narrative, and content analysis.

There is research on real male victims and female perpetrators. There are individual-film studies, audience-perception studies, research on male sexual victimization on screen, and news-media studies about how female perpetrators are framed.

But I could not locate the large-scale counterpart to the Hollywood-script studies: a systematic analysis asking how female characters are written as nonphysical abusers of men across film or television. Not a single example. Not a one-film case study. A broad analysis of the pattern.

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What We Choose to Call Abuse

A man doesn’t have to be punched in the face to be harmed. Coercive control, reputational attacks, financial depletion, alienation from children, and strategic use of institutions can take away the things that give a man stability, identity, and a reason to keep going.

That harm is harder to show in a two-minute scene. It may play out over months, through family systems, friend groups, allegations, money, and the gradual loss of credibility. It is also harder to photograph, count, and package into the public image of a victim.

But harder to see is not the same as less real. And a research culture that only measures the most visible form of abuse will keep producing a narrow picture of who is harmed and how.

The Gap Is the Real Story

Researchers have built tools to scan hundreds of scripts for physical violence and classify men as perpetrators and women as victims. The complementary question - how female characters are portrayed abusing men through nonphysical means - remains largely unasked.

That omission matters because movies and television do not simply reflect the culture. They shape what people believe a victim looks like, what abuse is supposed to look like, and which stories receive sympathy.

Until research is willing to examine both kinds of harm, it will keep telling the public only the part of the story that is easiest to observe.

Give us your comments and experience.

Have you seen this kind of harm portrayed honestly in film or television? Or have you lived through something that caused real damage but did not fit the public picture of abuse? Keep it respectful and non-graphic, but drop your experience or a word of encouragement.

Leave a comment

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Sources Referenced

Martinez, V. R., et al. (2019). “Violence Rating Prediction from Movie Scripts.” Proceedings of AAAI-19.

Martinez, V. R., et al. (2020). “Victim or Perpetrator? Analysis of Violent Character Portrayals from Movie Scripts.” arXiv:2008.08225.

Olasinde, O. B., et al. (2022). “Audience Perception of Television Portrayal of Domestic Violence against Men in Nigeria.” American Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research.

Male Rape Victimisation on Screen. (2024). Emerald Publishing. Relevant to portrayals of male sexual victimization, but not a broad analysis of women’s nonphysical abuse of men.

The Setup

A 2024 study titled Bias and Discrimination Against Women and Parents in Semi-Automated Hiring Systems is another one of those studies where the tile buries the lead. We constantly hear that women are punished in the workforce for taking time away from their careers to raise children.

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And this study did in fact find that career gaps for raising kids are punished….with a twist. These authors conducted a counterfactual hiring experiment, meaning they created otherwise identical resumes and changed only a few relevant details.

They sent applications to 211 mid-career job openings in the San Francisco area across three fields software engineering, real estate brokerage, and elementary education.

For every job, they used four versions of the same highly qualified resume: man or woman with or without uninterrupted employment for parental leave. Everything else was the same except for the gendered name and whether the resume showed a long childcare-related employment gap. The applications went through a major online recruitment platform that ranked candidates algorithmically before employers made final decisions about whom to contact.

As outcomes, they tracked three things….callbacks, positive follow-up emails,and unsolicited invitations to apply for other jobs, which they called cold emails.

Results

Here is how the four applicant types performed.

For call-backs, even on the most direct measure - who gets called back after applying - the father with the caregiving break came in last.

For the positive emails, we get the biggest gap in the study.

The father with the caregiving gap did not just receive fewer positive responses than the man with uninterrupted employment. He received fewer than one-tenth as many. Six compared with seventy-five.

Then there were the cold emails. Keep in mind that these were messages from recruiters or employers using the platform to find candidates and invite them to apply for other positions.

So men with uninterrupted employment were being actively contacted about far more outside job opportunities than everyone else. And again, the father with the explicitly stated caregiving gap was at the bottom.

The most advantaged profile was generally the man with uninterrupted employment. Then came the woman with uninterrupted employment, then the mother with the stated parental-leave gap. And at the bottom was the father with that same kind of caregiving gap.

The Fatherhood “Bonus” Is Conditional

For years, we have heard about the so-called fatherhood bonus. The idea is that men are often viewed as more stable, responsible, and committed to their financial provision. And there is research showing that fathers can receive advantages when employers see them as dependable breadwinners.

But this study shows the condition attached to that supposed advantage. A father is rewarded only when he behaves like the traditional breadwinner. But the minute he takes on the active caregiver role that society claims it wants more of, the reward disappears.

A woman takes time away from work to raise children, and people get up in arms because she’s punished by a system that they say is built around male breadwinners.

A man takes the same kind of visible caregiving break, and his penalty is worse. But that part rarely makes it into the larger conversation.

The study authors explain this through what they call the ideal worker and ideal father norms.

The ideal worker is someone with no serious interruption from family responsibilities. And the traditional ideal father is someone who provides financially rather than stepping back from work to become the primary caregiver.

As they indicate, a mother with a long caregiving break violates the ideal worker standard. A father with the same break violates the ideal worker stereotype and the traditional breadwinner expectation at the same time.

That is why, in this study, he was punished most severely.

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What the “Motherhood Penalty” Narrative Leaves Out

Women are allowed to portray the career penalty as evidence that they are oppressed by an unfair system. But when the exact same caregiving choice produces an even worse result for men, we never hear about it. That is an advantage in the female-empathy society we live in.

Women’s employment losses are treated as evidence of a systemic social problem.

Meanwhile, men’s employment losses are not even acknowledged. I mean…how can there be any room for that conversation in public discourse when people can’t stop talking about how bad women have it. The implication is ugly….seriously. No less ugly than what women complain about regarding their experiences when they re-enter the workforce.

Men are encouraged to be more involved fathers. As it is, women shit on them for “not doing enough unpaid labor” But when they do take on that role, they’re still castigated in the workforce. They are told that equal parenting and shared caregiving are family and social commodities.

Then, when a father actually sacrifices his career to do that caregiving, he’s the one most likely to be punished for having done it.

I hope you’ll share that part of the conversation the next time someone tries to tell you how bad women have it when they step away from their careers for a few years.

Tell them that the workplace doesn’t always reward men simply because they are men. It rewards people who never stop providing or take a break from their careers.

Give us your comments and experience.

Have you ever stepped away from work for any reason, whether family reasons or not? And how was it trying to get back into a job or career?

Njoto, Sheilla; Cheong, Marc; Frermann, Lea; and Ruppanner, Leah. 2024. “Bias and Discrimination Against Women and Parents in Semi-Automated Hiring Systems.” New Technology, Work and Employment. https://doi.org/10.1111/ntwe.12321

The Setup

Researchers are building AI tools to interpret relationship conflict, evaluate behavior patterns, and coach users through simulated romantic arguments.

If men are going to be told to use AI for relationship advice, conflict resolution, or something resembling therapy, then they need to know what assumptions these models are carrying into the conversation. Because once AI starts evaluating relationship conflict, it starts deciding who is hostile, avoidant, validating, controlling, insecure, reasonable, or unhealthy.

Which raises the bigger question: what assumptions are built into the model?

Read more

The Setup

I almost passed on this research article because, at first glance, it did not seem like a major finding.

Men like younger women. Women say they prefer older men. Couples usually have an older man and a younger woman. None of that sounds especially surprising.

But the more I thought about the study, the more interesting it became. Because this article does not simply disclose what men and women say they want. The authors report on what people reported after actual blind dates.

The article is titled No Gender Differences in Attraction to Young Partners: A Study of 4,500 Blind Dates, by Paul Eastwick and colleagues from UC Davis and Northwestern University.

They examined more than 6,000 adults who used a matchmaking service while looking for a long-term romantic partner. In total, the data came from more than 4,500 blind dates and more than 9,000 post-date reports. After each date, participants rated their romantic attraction, their overall experience, and whether they wanted a second date.

The question was simple: Are people more attracted to older or younger partners after actually meeting them in person?

Review

One of the most common assumptions in dating is that men prefer younger women while women prefer older men.

That assumption is not baseless….cross countries, men do tend to be older than women at first marriage. In the United States, couples in which the man is at least two years older than the woman are much more common than couples in which the woman is at least two years older tha

n the man.

So the typical expectation is familiar: men want younger women, women want older men. That’s also where moral accusations often enter the conversation.

When men prefer younger women, they are often called shallow, immature, insecure, controlling, manipulative, or even predatory. The preference itself is treated as evidence of men’s desire to control and manipulate young women.

But this study complicates that story.

The authors argue that much of the existing discussion relies on stated preferences, online dating behavior, and app search filters. In those instances, men indicate that they prefer younger women.

But stated preferences and search behavior are not the same as attraction after meeting someone face to face. That’s the key distinction.

Anyone familiar with psychological principles knows that people often say one thing when asked in the abstract, but respond differently when sitting across from another person. And with the topic at hand, some gender differences appear much larger in online or abstract settings than they do in real-life interaction.

That is why this study is useful. It didn’t rely only on what people say they want. It examined what people reported after actual blind dates.

Furthermore, these were not college students casually filling out a survey for course credit. The sample was mostly middle-aged adults using a matchmaking service while looking for long-term partners. The average participant was about 47 years old, and the sample included many single, divorced, widowed, and separated adults.

In other words, this was closer to the adult dating market than a typical undergraduate attraction study.

Main Finding

The main finding would likely surprise manypeople: Both men and women were slightly more attracted to younger partners.

The effect was small, so it should not be exaggerated. But the pattern was there. Men were slightly more attracted to younger partners. Women were also slightly more attracted to younger partners. And the preference for youth did not meaningfully differ by gender.

That was true when the authors looked at romantic attraction, overall date rating, and the decision about whether the person wanted a second date.

So the finding does not fit the usual story very well. That’s the story that says men are uniquely youth-oriented, while women are drawn to age, maturity, status, and stability. But after actual blind dates, both men and women showed a slight preference for younger partners.

Another interesting part of the study involved people’s stated upper age limits.

Before the blind dates, participants reported the maximum age they were seeking in a match. Men reported younger upper age limits than women, which fits the traditional pattern. Men said they wanted younger partners. Women were more willing, at least on paper, to consider older partners.

But those stated age limits didn’t matter much after the date. Overall, participants were not meaningfully less attracted to someone simply because that person exceeded their stated maximum age. Quite simply, people’s stated age boundaries did not operate like hard rules after meeting.

That may be one of the most useful parts of the article. A lot of dating commentary treats preferences as absolute. A woman says she likes older men, so people assume older men with stability and maturity are what women are most attracted to. A man says he prefers younger women, so people turn that into a theory about men bein shallow and controlling.

Commentary

Here’s where this gets interesting. The cultural narrative around age and attraction is not neutral. Men are routinely criticized for being attracted to younger women. Entire conversations about dating, power, and male psychology are built around the assumption that men’s attraction to youth says something uniquely negative about men.

But if this study is right, that criticism becomes much harder to maintain. Because women showed the same slight pattern.

If both men and women show a slight preference for youth after actual blind dates, then the issue is not “men are shallow and women are mature.” The issue is that youth may carry some appeal in initial attraction for both sexes.

If men are shallow for responding to youth, then what are women when they show the same pattern? That is the uncomfortable question.

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This article lays out the full method behind my John Delony content analysis, including how the research questions were developed from viewer comments rather than selected in advance. It also explains how the eight infidelity calls were selected, categorized, and analyzed so viewers can audit the process behind the video’s conclusions.

Research Question Development

The research-question development process began after I collected viewer comments from two of my prior John Delony breakdown videos. My purpose was not to begin with research questions that I personally selected, and it was not to cherry-pick issues that would implicate Delony. Instead, I wanted the research questions to emerge from viewer concerns, especially concerns about how men experience Delony’s relationship advice.

I first gathered comments from two videos on my channel. The first was “Simp and Grifter” comments regarding John Delony’s Advice. My extracted comment set from that video contained an estimated 399 unique comment entries, or 398 unique viewer comments after excluding my own pinned/commented post. YouTube Studio showed 745 total comments for that video, but that number appears to include replies and responses. The second video was “Analyzing ‘Christian’ John Delony’s Marriage Advice (Round Two).” My extracted comment set from that video contained an estimated 405 unique comment entries, or 401 unique viewer comments after excluding my own comments. YouTube Studio showed 767 total comments for that video, which again likely includes replies and responses.

After gathering the comments, I asked ChatGPT to organize the viewer comments into the top recurring comment types or topics. I did not ask ChatGPT to confirm any personal interpretation. I asked for the leading patterns by video and then across both videos collectively. ChatGPT returned a first-pass thematic organization showing that the most common concerns involved unsafe or harmful advice to men and marriages, Christian or biblical framing, Ramsey/business/audience incentives, perceived anti-male double standards, and one-sided or low-context call-in advice.

For the first video, ChatGPT identified the strongest viewer-comment themes as unsafe or harmful advice to men and marriages, Christian/church/biblical concern, Ramsey/business/audience-grift concern, male-bias/double-standard concern, and one-sided/low-context call-in format concern. For the second video, ChatGPT identified the strongest themes as Ramsey/business/audience-grift concern, Christian/church/biblical concern, male-bias/double-standard concern, one-sided/low-context call-in format concern, and unsafe or harmful advice to men and marriages. When both videos were considered together, ChatGPT identified the top combined themes as Christian/church/biblical concern, Ramsey/business/audience-grift concern, unsafe or harmful advice to men and marriages, male-bias/double-standard concern, and one-sided/low-context call-in format concern.

After that first-pass organization, I clarified that my focus was not simply on general viewer dislike of Delony. I told ChatGPT that I wanted to focus specifically on what appeared to be men’s concerns about relationships and Delony’s advice. I also stated that the purpose was to develop research questions from those concerns rather than coming up with them on my own. In other words, the guiding question was not simply what do I think Delony does wrong, but what are viewers, especially men, saying about Delony’s relationship advice, and does Delony’s content support or contradict those concerns?

With that understanding, I then asked ChatGPT to provide the most relevant and efficient number of men’s concerns that could be turned into research questions. I did not ask for every possible issue, and I did not ask for the broadest possible list. I asked for the most efficient set that would be strong enough to reflect the viewer-comment patterns while still being manageable for a content analysis. ChatGPT recommended five concern areas and explained that five was likely the most efficient number because it captured the strongest viewer-comment patterns without fragmenting the study into too many overlapping or weak questions.

The five research-question areas recommended by ChatGPT were:

• Perceived anti-male double standard: Does Delony respond differently when the cheating partner is male versus female?

• Female accountability avoidance: When women cheat or violate trust, does Delony directly address their agency and accountability, or does he shift attention toward the man’s response, healing, leadership, or responsibility?

• Male self-sacrifice as the default solution: Does Delony advise betrayed men to prioritize self-protection, exit, and boundaries, or does he primarily encourage repair, endurance, and renewed pursuit?

• One-sided call-in advice and missing context: How often does Delony acknowledge the limits of one-sided information, ask for missing context, or qualify his advice based on uncertainty?

• Religious/moral authority blended with entertainment advice: Does Delony frame his advice as moral, therapeutic, practical, entertaining, or some combination of those, and does that framing differ by caller sex or cheating-partner sex?

This means the research questions were not developed by me alone. My role was to define the purpose of the project, provide the viewer-comment material, clarify the focus on men’s concerns, and decide whether ChatGPT’s recommended research-question framework was appropriate. ChatGPT’s role was to assess the comment patterns, consolidate recurring concerns, and recommend the final set of research-question areas.

At this stage, the five research-question areas were treated as questions, not conclusions. The purpose of the next phase of analysis was to examine whether Delony’s own infidelity-related video advice support, complicate, or contradict the concerns raised by viewers.

Support my Independent Research

Transcript/Video Selection

Using Chat GPT, the content analysis used a purposive, reverse-chronological sampling procedure to identify recent John Delony YouTube radio-format videos involving sexual infidelity. The sampling consisted of publicly visible video thumbnails and titles from The Dr. John Delony Show YouTube channel uploads page. Videos were reviewed in reverse chronological order, beginning with the most recent uploads available at the time of screening.

The initial screening was conducted in two sequential batches. Each batch consisted of four screenshots from the channel’s video upload grid. Each screenshot contained 20 visible thumbnails and titles, arranged in a 4 × 5 grid, yielding 80 thumbnails per batch. Across the two batches, a total of 160 thumbnails were reviewed. Titles and thumbnails were examined as the basis for initial eligibility determinations.

The unit of screening was the individual YouTube video thumbnail/title combination. A video was considered potentially eligible if the title and/or thumbnail explicitly indicated sexual infidelity involving penetrative sex. General relational betrayal, secrecy, “double life” language, ambiguous references to betrayal, or nonsexual forms of deception were not treated as sufficient for inclusion. This operational definition was intentionally narrow in order to avoid classifying videos as “cheating” based on inference alone.

Videos were further limited to calls or discussions involving infidelity within the romantic or marriage dyad. Videos were excluded when the infidelity was discussed by a third party outside the romantic dyad, such as a friend, child, or other family member, unless the title/thumbnail clearly indicated that the call centered on the romantic partners themselves. For example, videos involving a friend’s boyfriend paying for sex or a child discussing a parent’s affair were excluded because the caller was outside the primary romantic dyad. Similarly, videos with titles such as “My Father Was Living a Double Life,” “Should I Go Behind My Husband’s Back?,” or “Betray My Husband?” were excluded because they did not explicitly meet the sexual-infidelity criterion.

Eligible videos were categorized by the apparent gender of the cheating partner, as indicated by the title and/or thumbnail. Videos were assigned to the “cheating woman” category when the title/thumbnail indicated that a wife, girlfriend, fiancée, or female partner had engaged in sexual infidelity. Videos were assigned to the “cheating man” category when the title/thumbnail indicated that a husband, boyfriend, fiancé, or male partner had engaged in sexual infidelity. The goal of the sampling process was to identify the four most recent qualifying videos in each category.

In the first batch of 80 thumbnails, two qualifying videos were identified in the cheating-woman category: “My Wife Had an Affair While I Was in Recovery” and “I Can’t Let Go of My Wife’s Affair.” Two qualifying videos were identified in the cheating-man category: “I Cheated on My Wife Multiple Times” and “I’ve Become My Boyfriend’s Side Chick.” Several initially noted videos were subsequently excluded after applying the dyadic-call and explicit-infidelity criteria.

A second batch of 80 thumbnails was then reviewed to continue the reverse-chronological search. In this batch, two additional videos were retained for the cheating-woman category: “My Wife Confessed to Cheating on Me (More Than Once?)” and “I Cheated on My Husband (It Ruined Everything).” For the cheating-man category, “Our Daughter Caught My Husband Cheating” was not retained because the title indicated discovery by a third party rather than disclosure or discussion within the romantic dyad.

Screening ended once four qualifying videos had been identified in each man/woman cheating category. The final sample consisted of eight videos total, with four videos involving a cheating woman and four videos involving a cheating man. These videos were selected solely on the basis of thumbnail/title screening and required manual review of the full calls to confirm final eligibility before formal coding.

Here are the videos included for analysis.

Women-cheater videos

Men-cheater videos

Analytic Procedure for Research Question Findings

After the eight qualifying John Delony infidelity videos were selected and summarized, I asked ChatGPT to evaluate the video transcripts against the five research-question areas that had been developed from viewer-comment concerns. The purpose of this stage was to assess whether Delony’s own responses supported, complicated, or contradicted those viewer concerns. I did not ask ChatGPT to prove that Delony was biased, anti-male, pro-female, or harmful. Instead, I asked ChatGPT to examine Delony’s tone, questioning, advice, empathy, accountability framing, responsibility assignment, and overall response pattern across the qualifying videos.

The analysis was conducted in three stages. First, I asked ChatGPT to answer the five research questions using only the four videos in which the cheating partner was a woman. Second, I asked ChatGPT to repeat the same process using only the four videos in which the cheating partner was a man. Third, I asked ChatGPT to aggregate the findings across all eight qualifying videos. This sequence was intentional because it allowed the woman-cheater and man-cheater subsets to be considered separately before drawing any combined conclusions.

The article is titled “Romantic Relationships Matter More to Men than to Women,” by Wahring and colleagues.

The Setup

The article is a scholarly synthesis and argument article. The authors pull together decades of relationship research to challenge a common cultural assumption: that women are the more relationship-oriented sex, while men are more detached, commitment-resistant, or emotionally independent.

Their argument is almost the reverse.

The authors propose that romantic relationships may matter more to men than to women across several major domains. They argue that men tend to seek romantic relationships more strongly, benefit more from having a romantic partner, initiate breakups less often, and suffer more when relationships end.

One of the key explanations is social support. Women often have broader emotional and social networks outside of romantic relationships. Men, by contrast, are more likely to depend heavily on a romantic partner as their main source of intimacy, emotional support, companionship, and even psychological stability.

That matters because when a relationship ends, the loss may not be equal.

For women, the relationship may be one part of a larger support system. For men, the relationship may be much closer to the center of the support system itself.

The research also connects to the broader pattern of relationship dissolution. Women are more likely to initiate both breakups and divorces, and the commonly cited figure is that women initiate roughly 70% of divorces. This article does not reduce that pattern to one simple cause, but it does provide a framework for understanding why men and women may experience the costs and benefits of relationships differently.

In simple terms: if men gain more from being in romantic relationships, depend more on romantic partners for emotional support, and suffer more when those relationships end, then men may also be more likely to hold on. Women, having more support outside the relationship and less dependence on the relationship as their primary emotional lifeline, may be more willing to leave when the relationship no longer works for them.

Commentary

Here’s where this gets interesting.

The usual story is that women are the romantic ones and men are the emotionally avoidant ones. Women want commitment. Men resist it. Women want connection. Men want freedom. Women want marriage. Men have to be dragged into it.

But this research completely reverses all of it. As the authors conclude, men may not be the emotionally detached sex. Men may be t more dependent on romantic relationships, more protected by them, and more damaged when they end.

That has major implications for how we talk about dating, marriage, divorce, loneliness, and male mental health.

It also challenges the lazy explanation that women initiate most divorces simply because men are bad husbands. If women initiate the majority of divorces, and if women are also more likely to initiate relationship dissolution more broadly, then the pattern likely starts before marriage. It may reflect deeper differences in how men and women experience romantic attachment, emotional support, social networks, and the cost of leaving.

It means the threshold for leaving may be different because the cost structure is different. For many men, losing the relationship may mean losing the person, the home, the daily intimacy, the social anchor, the emotional support system, and sometimes the main source of meaning and stability.

For many women, the relationship may be important, but it may not be the entire emotional infrastructure.

That distinction has large implications, because if the relationship is his lifeline but only one part of her network, then leaving is not experienced the same way on both sides.

This is also why the divorce discussion often feels dishonest. We talk about female-initiated divorce as if it can only be explained by male failure. But the research suggests another possibility: romantic relationships may simply function differently for men and women.

Men may need relationships more than we admit. Women may be better positioned to leave than we acknowledge. And the result is a relationship pattern that shows up in dating, breakups, marriage, and divorce.

What do you think? Are women more likely to leave because men fail them, or because men and women are operating with very different support systems, incentives, and emotional costs?

Download the article from its original source:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/romantic-relationships-matter-more-to-men-than-to-women/52E626D3CD7DB14CD946F9A2FBDA739C

Below is a copy-and-paste email you can send to TX Rep. Moran asking the question politicians rarely answer: what are you willing to repeal?

Rep. Nathaniel Moran has introduced the White House Council on Fathers and Sons Act, which claims to address the problems facing fathers, sons, boys, and young men. But men do not need another federal council studying, managing, or producing reports about them.

They need lawmakers to remove the laws, policies, and incentives that helped create the problem.

Feel free to CC or BCC me at todd@roepress.com when you send it. If his office responds, I’d like to see what they say. As a thank-you for taking action, I’ll send you a complimentary RoE book chapter and corresponding Field Guide.

nathaniel.moran@mail.house.gov

Subject: Fathers and sons need rights restored, not another council

Congressman Moran,

I am writing about H.R. 7800, the White House Council on Fathers and Sons Act of 2026, which you introduced with WI Congressman Derrick Van Orden.

I appreciate that the bill acknowledges real problems facing fathers, sons, boys, and young men. Your announcement says the council would coordinate federal agencies, promote father involvement, address male mental-health challenges, and support programs for young men.

But the solutions you propose raise serious concerns for men and fathers.

Fathers and sons do not need another federal council. They need lawmakers to identify and remove the laws, policies, and incentives that helped create the problems you speak of.

In many ways, the federal child-support system has had some of the most profound negative effects on fathers’ involvement. What began as a federal effort to address family instability became a vast enforcement structure that often treats fathers primarily as financial obligors rather than parents.

Title IV-D began in 1975, and Reagan-era laws in the 1980s hardened enforcement through expanded collection laws, wage withholding, mandatory guidelines, and limits on retroactive modification of arrears. Those policies may have been sold as “deadbeat dad” enforcement, but they also helped build a system that treats fathers primarily as financial obligors instead of parents.

Any serious fathers-and-sons agenda should also address custody policy directly, including rebuttable presumptions for equal shared parenting, limits on using child-support revenue as an incentive to remove fathers, and federal pressure on states to stop treating fathers as visitors in their own children’s lives.

If father absence is a problem as you mention, why is your answer another council instead of reforming or removing laws and policies that keep fathers out?

If boys and young men are falling behind, why is the answer more federal coordination instead of removing the school, university, and agency rules that punish or exclude them?

I also noticed that public promotion of this bill appears limited. From what I can find, you have made only two launch-day social media posts when introduced, plus a later newsletter mention. If this is a serious priority, I would expect a sustained public campaign naming the specific laws, regulations, and funding incentives that are harming fathers and sons.

You have argued for reining in reckless federal spending, restoring fiscal responsibility, and reducing federal overreach. You have also supported giving small businesses tools to challenge burdensome regulations. That same principle should apply to fathers and sons: if government-created incentives, enforcement systems, or agency rules are harming them, the answer should be repeal, restriction, and rollback — not another federal council.

So my question is simple:

What specific federal laws, regulations, agency guidance, funding incentives, or institutional rules are you willing to repeal, restrict, or defund to restore the rights and social position of fathers, sons, boys, and men?

Please do not let this become another symbolic committee that produces meetings, reports, and press releases while the actual problems remain untouched.

Respectfully,

The Setup

In this article, I report on recently published (2025-226) Tinder and dating-app research and what the literature says. Across the sample of 56 articles, research heavily emphasized female risk, harm, safety, and vulnerability, while male experiences and outcomes receive very little direct attention.

Read more

This piece uses two established change models to explain why society remains so unwilling to address men’s outcomes. The Stages of Change model helps frame whether women, collectively, are even ready to recognize men’s experiences as legitimate, while the Community Readiness Model helps show whether society is prepared to act on men’s outcomes at a larger institutional level.

The uncomfortable answer is that women, as a group, appear to be below the first stage of meaningful change, while society appears stuck in denial. There is enough public awareness to admit that boys and men are falling behind in education, work, relationships, health, fatherhood, and social connection, but not enough willingness to build policies, programs, research, or support systems that actually help men.

That gap explains why men keep disengaging. When society only recognizes men’s problems long enough to blame men for having them, men eventually look elsewhere for direction, including spaces that institutions later condemn. The issue is not that men are impossible to reach. The issue is that the people criticizing men have rarely built anything serious for them to reach toward.

Opening Statement

I recently put a poll up on YouTube asking how ready society is to address men’s outcomes. After 598 votes as of the time of this article’s posting, 71% of respondents said that society is not ready and that there is no awareness to address men’s issues. Twenty-eight said that there is awareness, but nothing is being done about it. One percent said society is talking and planning, and one percent said that society is taking real action, making implementation efforts, and offering support to men to address their issues.

Here’s some background about that poll and our topic for today. When I was in grad school, one of my favorite concepts to learn was community readiness. It’s a research framework used to determine whether a community is ready to act and correct an issue, or whether it is still stuck in denial that the issue actually exists.

I’ve never formally applied the model in my professional work, but it has stayed with me over the years. Lately, it has been coming back to me as I think about how change models used in clinical and research settings apply to men’s experiences and society’s response to them.

So, today we’re going to answer two questions:

• How ready are women to understand and address men’s experiences?

• And how ready is society at large to do the same?

We’ll do that by walking through two well-established models of change because I want to give some perspective using trusted and validated research models on what’s being done to help guys with anything.

This will be another theory-based article, and I think the payoff will be worth it. As I continue, I want you to ask yourself throughout: at what stage of change are women and society regarding the models that we’ll look at?

I’ll start with the Stages of Change model, which is used to assess individual people’s readiness to make changes in their lives, and then we’ll look at the broader Community Readiness Model, which assesses a community’s readiness to make changes within that community.

Now, I am taking a little bit of liberty here because I’ll be using the first model to assess women collectively rather than an individual person, and the latter to assess society as a whole rather than a confined community. But I think you’ll get the point as we move on. So, settle in with your coffee, your tea, or your margarita because this has been one of my favorite breakdowns to do in a while, and I hope I do it justice.

Stages of Change

Let’s start with the Stages of Change, which was first published by Prochaska and DiClemente in 1983 and is still widely used in therapy after more than 40 years. You can download a copy of that article HERE. This model identifies five core stages of an individual’s readiness to modify behaviors. Those could be anything from breaking addictions to forming better lifestyle habits.

It’s a fluid but nonlinear process that may involve relapse, where individuals move from having no intention to change to sustaining new behaviors over time.

Here are the five core stages of change:

• Precontemplation: There is no intention to take action and often a lack of awareness at all.

• Contemplation: Someone might recognize that there is a problem and start evaluating the pros and cons of making change, but they may feel ambivalent or stuck.

• Preparation: People start to take action or small steps. Maybe they have already started.

• Action: Individuals make modifications in their lifestyles that could last up to six months.

• Maintenance: Individuals have sustained change and are continuing to work to prevent relapse.

• Some models expand this to include Relapse.

Readiness within this model is typically measured by a readiness-to-change ruler that uses a response scale of 1-10.

I don’t want to make this article any longer than it has to be by going through examples of each stage and where women collectively appear to be when it comes to men’s experiences. But take a moment to consider these stages and ask yourself, based on what we hear from women collectively, what stage are women at regarding understanding and addressing men’s experiences, such as health, education, parenting, fatherhood, career opportunities, relationships, or any other issue?

Community Readiness

Now, let’s move from that more micro-level Stages of Change model to the larger social model of community readiness. You can download a copy of it HERE. I’m going to spend a couple of extra minutes on this one because I want to give the full context.

The Community Readiness Model was developed by the Tri-Ethnic Center for Prevention Research in the early 1990s, and it was provided for public use in 2006 after high demand. It’s a framework used to assess how prepared a community is to address community issues. After more than 30 years, it’s still widely and actively used by communities such as the Vermont Department of Health, Native American services in Oklahoma, and even international grassroots efforts in dozens of countries.

This change model includes a measurable instrument with a 70-page manual that is used to tailor interventions to a community’s current readiness to address a social issue. That could range from having no awareness of an issue at all to community ownership of an issue.

The original 2006 guide was offered publicly for researchers, policymakers, and organizational leaders to use. It includes step-by-step instructions and interview protocols, along with intervention strategies, structured interview questions, and a formal scoring system across six dimensions. I’ll mention those here in just a moment.

As I mentioned, it’s still widely used across areas of social interest, everything from drunk driving to domestic violence and proper self-care. So, it’s not an issue-specific instrument. It’s a general-purpose framework for several different social readiness assessments. Over the decades, there have been many academic papers validating this model. There have been training materials and workshops offered. It has been adapted and expanded. So, it’s a pretty big deal, to be sure.

Levels of Readiness

Now, let’s have a look at the nine stages of the Community Readiness Model. As I briefly review them, I want you to ask yourself where society at large is regarding readiness to address and improve men’s outcomes.

At the first stage, we have no awareness. There is no recognition that there is an issue. Then we have denial. There might be some acknowledgement, but it is not considered a problem. Then we move on to vague awareness. A problem exists, but there is no motivation to address it.

Then we have pre-planning, which means recognizing a problem and the need to do something about it. Then there is preparation, where we might see active planning and information-gathering stages. Then we have initiation, which is the early implementation of interventions.

After that, we move on to institutionalization or stabilization. Here, programs are running, supported, and accepted. Stage number eight is confirmation or expansion. This is where programs are evaluated and expanded, or maybe refined. Then we have nine, professionalization. This is a high level of community ownership of the issue. Here, we would see detailed knowledge of the issue, along with effective and sustainable programs.

Measuring Readiness

To determine what level of readiness a community is at, the model formally measures six things. One is community efforts, which means existing programs or policies that address the issue. It also measures effort awareness, such as how aware people are of those efforts.

It measures leadership, which would be support from and investment by local leaders. Also measured is community climate, meaning the community’s attitude toward the issue. The model also measures knowledge about the issue, for example, how well the issue is understood by the community in general, and resources, such as people, time, and money available to put into it.

After measuring these six things, the community is placed along the continuum of stages, which can increase or decrease as circumstances change. They can go back and forth throughout these stages.

Men’s Outcomes

Now, with that understanding, let’s dive into several of men’s current experiences. I want you to keep thinking about those stages and where society is regarding men’s outcomes.

Let’s start with research as a whole. Most research is still one-directional and female-focused. Across institutional and academic work, gender inclusion is overwhelmingly defined as improving outcomes for women, not men.

In my own published dissertation research, I showed that between 1900 and 2010, there were only, I believe, 10 research articles published in which the outcome focus was divorced fathers’ well-being. Ten articles in 110 years.

Research consistently frames gender inequality as women’s underrepresentation, not men’s outcomes, which shapes how problems are even recognized. In one of my own recent videos, I showed that dating app research excludes men’s experiences. When men are discussed, it’s about women’s safety and men’s violence. This means the baseline assumption in research is very often that men are already included despite evidence otherwise, and that more gender parity is essential.

Essentially, major data sets, even those like Pew Research Center, tend to track things like pay gaps, representation gaps, and leadership disparities. They almost never discuss or report on male experiences regarding family, employment, health, education, therapy, or other aspects of men’s lives.

Moving on to the next area, the only consistent male-focused efforts are getting men to support women. When we do see men mentioned in social science research, it is often not about helping men. Instead, what we overwhelmingly find is determining how to get men involved in efforts for gender equality.

Here are some examples. In a 2022 article on male allies at work, the argument was that male allies reduce women’s isolation and increase perceived support and respect. In an Australian doctoral dissertation from 2016, the author wrote about identifying barriers to women’s engagement in collective action, including facilitating men’s participation in feminist collective action. In a 2014 article, the focus included men confronting sexism and supporting women. I intentionally showed a couple of papers from 10 or more years ago to show that this is not a new phenomenon.

The key takeaway, at least for me, is that men are only used as props to improve women’s outcomes, not as a group to include in research to improve their own lives.

Let’s talk a little bit about men being excluded and why that experience is valid. Some research has acknowledged this friction. For example, Johns Hopkins noted that men are underrepresented in cancer research, but corrective policies are not helpful because of restrictions and expense. So, they’re acknowledging that it’s an issue, but then suggesting that we can’t do anything about it.

From the American Institute for Boys and Men, the increasingly lopsided gender representation is not being directly addressed by policymakers or professional organizations. So, this is being addressed in some places, but not broadly or seriously enough.

Let’s talk a little bit about social programs and men. To be clear, there are social programs that purport to include men. But many of them are framed as toolkits like this one from UN Women, which asks how men and boys can push for gender equality. Most of you have probably heard of the HeForShe Alliance. Their male allyship toolkit is described as a resource for building inclusive workplaces.

What they actually do is train men to admit bias, mentor women, and advocate for gender parity. What they do not do is increase male outcomes or promote men or their outcomes at all. Not one bit. Even where men are recognized in social programs, they are recognized in terms of helping women.

Now, let’s move on from how society is portraying men’s experiences to how men have responded to cultural shifts in the past few decades. Let’s talk a little bit about men’s general disengagement.

I’m not going to cite all of these here, and I’ll go through them pretty quickly because this information is easy enough to find and confirm. Let’s talk about education disengagement. There are about one million fewer young men in college compared to 2011. Men are now 44% of college students, down from 47%. Only 39% of male high school graduates enroll in college, down from 47%. Women declined slightly, but still remain much higher.

Among people aged 25 to 34, 47% of women have a bachelor’s degree compared to 37% of men. Even among teens, more girls than boys plan to attend college.

Let’s move from education to workforce. Women now make up over 50% of the college-educated workforce. Men and women without degrees cluster into completely different jobs by gender. A little bit more about education here: 34% of men say they opted out of getting a degree because they did not see the value in it. Men are more likely to say they didn’t need college or that it wasn’t necessary for whatever path they have for themselves.

Regarding relationships and social disengagement, men’s trajectory shows that 39% of men said they are doing worse in getting well-paying jobs compared to far less than that, 21% of women in dating and relationships. Forty-four percent of Americans say men are doing worse at finding a partner.

Even in my own content, I’ve reported that there are no hospitals dedicated to men. School administrators are often only about 20% men. Men receive less Social Security retirement than they pay in. Men also experience worse therapy outcomes when a therapist is a woman. And yet, surveys like this one from Pew show that men are perceived as doing far better in each of these life categories compared to 20 years ago, and women’s increases are even higher than men’s.

As you can imagine, I could go on for hours and days about this.

Commentary

With all of that context, let me offer some commentary. What frustrates me is the entire fallout and the subsequent public response to men’s outcomes. Despite so many clear indicators of male disengagement across education, work, healthcare, relationships, and fatherhood, the dominant cultural response has not been to ask what’s driving any of it or how to fix it. Instead, women, politicians, businesses, educational institutions, all of them choose to blame and shame men.

It’s tasing and curb stomping men when they don’t even want to participate and they just want to be left alone.

When men navigate toward spaces like the red pill or figures like Andrew Tate, Fresh and Fit, Jordan Peterson, Kevin Samuels, Myron Gaines, people’s reactions are to ridicule and offer moral condemnation of men.

The fact that women and society can’t understand this is extremely telling when we put it in perspective with the models that we’ve looked at. Women as a group are not even at stage one in the change model, and society is in denial at stage two of the readiness model. The headline is that something is wrong with men themselves, rather than asking what unmet needs or unanswered questions are driving men’s outcomes in the first place.

Hell, we don’t even have to ask what men’s needs are. We already know. It’s in the news and in the headlines every day. All of this tells us a lot about where we are in the Stages of Change model at the individual level.

If women as individuals are still in precontemplation (and I wouldn’t even say that they’re at that stage) then they don’t even recognize that there are men’s issues or that men have legitimate difficulties. So men are described as flaws, and that’s when shaming and dismissing become default reactions because the underlying issue hasn’t even been acknowledged or stated as worthy of attention.

From that stage, the idea that men might need support or guidance doesn’t even register as a possibility. To women collectively, it’s just bad choices made by stupid boys.

Zooming out to the Community Readiness Model is where we really see the pattern at scale. If our society were even at the pre-planning or preparation stage, I would expect to see programs, policies, institutional efforts, and much more designed to engage men constructively and get them back into careers, into education, and to stop checking out.

But instead, what we have is denial and resistance at stage two. While there may be recognition that things are off, there is no response and no recognition for concern. It’s just people continuing to say that boys and men are falling behind, and that’s all we ever hear. No one’s fixing it. That’s it. That’s as far as it goes.

At the same time, our cultural climate still has a tone of dismissal and skepticism toward men’s experiences, which is exactly what we would expect at stage two of community readiness. So, the rhetorical question becomes unavoidable.

If men are pulling back from education, if they’re opting out of certain career paths, if they’re struggling more in their relationships and health outcomes, and if there is no recognition, no acknowledgement, no planning, then what exactly are men supposed to do? Where are they supposed to go?

When the only public response is either silence or criticism, is it really surprising that so many men turn to whatever spaces are available? Seriously, either help men or shut the fuck up. In many cases, the red pill, the manosphere, or whatever you want to call it, those are the only places offering any kind of direction.

This is where both models of change converge. At the individual level, women in general have not moved far enough along to even engage with the issue seriously. They are below stage one. At the macro societal level, the willingness to respond does not exist.

As a result, men are checking out more and more every year, and it’s got to be obvious to everybody at this point. As a final thought for those of you who stuck around to the end, let me ask you this. What’s worse? Not knowing that there is a problem, or knowing that there is a problem but not caring enough to do anything about it?

So, let me know what you think. As I mentioned, this has always been a huge interest of mine, this Community Readiness Model. I want to hear what everybody thinks about my approach in explaining it in this matter. Thanks for being here. This one took a bit of work.

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The Setup

This piece breaks down a viral claim that women are happier after divorce, then follows the claim back to the actual research behind it. The argument is not that divorce never brings relief. The argument is that the popular social-media version strips away the timing, measures, baseline comparisons, and long-term pattern.

The Kingston University study often cited in these claims does show a temporary rise in women’s life satisfaction after divorce, but the stronger 12-item well-being measure tells a more complicated story. Men also recover, and in some parts of the data, men recover faster and show stronger post-divorce well-being.

The broader problem is how research gets turned into a grift. A press-release headline, a partially understood study, and a woman selling support services can become cultural proof that divorce is a reliable path to happiness, even when the data suggest a temporary recovery pattern rather than a permanent transformation.

Download the research article from its original source: https://docs.iza.org/dp6426.pdf

Opening Statement

How many times have we heard women make statements in videos like these that I recently saw?

· She said, “What’s your secret? You look amazing.” And I said, “I got divorced and I found my happy.” And she just laughed and said, “Congratulations.”

· Every single divorced woman that I know is happier now than when she was married. Doesn’t matter if she’s 60, if she’s 20, if she has kids, if she had to go back to school, if she had to go back to work. Every single one of them looks better, feels better, acts better, and appears to be thriving. On the flip side, the majority of their husbands are not doing well.

But what we don’t know is how long after divorce this was, or the level of increased happiness that they supposedly experience, or even how long that supposed happiness lasts post-divorce.

And then we have women on TikTok saying things like this.

Just read an article about why women are happier after divorce, and I wanted to share.

I’ll explain a bit more of her video here in just a moment for more context. She did not expect anyone to look into that study or to report what she’s actually talking about. But I did, because that’s what I do. I call out BS research and how people misuse studies to grift.

So, let’s have a look at what research article that woman is referring to, and then dissect the real study and its results. Then expose men’s and women’s reported life satisfaction before and after marriage and divorce.

And then I want to talk about why we can’t generalize the study’s results to these women’s viewers. So let’s set this up with a bit more of what the woman said in her video about the research article…

Just read an article about why women are happier after divorce, and I wanted to share. This was based on a study by Kingston University. They surveyed 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 60. Participants were asked to rate their happiness before and after divorce.

They found that women were happier and more satisfied with their lives after divorce. So why is this? It said women are more likely than men to seek help for the emotional trauma caused by divorce. Not reaching out for support prolongs your suffering.

It also mentions that women are more likely than men to surround themselves with a positive support system. PS. If you’re a woman who needs a support system, come join my private support group. Make sure you’re getting support, prioritizing your needs, surrounding yourself with a good support system, and doing things to fulfill yourself.

Hopefully, you noticed that she’s talking about a single study. She did not source that study, and she’s using it to grift post-marriage support. In fact, what she’s referring to does not even discuss women’s support during or after divorce. It doesn’t measure or analyze any of that.

In fact, the authors of what we’re about to review report that it’s not even possible to distinguish mechanisms like that with the data they collected.

So, the viral claim this woman tries to make is that women report higher happiness after divorce.

The Lie

This is where she got it. What she’s referring to comes from ScienceDaily online, with a headline that divorce can spell big boost to women’s happiness, UK research shows. And this is from July 2013…13 years ago.

What that link shows is not a research article. It’s a press release about upcoming research or research that had recently been published. They use the tag line, “Your source for the latest research news”.

And I’m sure you can imagine that heading is a very big claim and absolutely overstating the actual findings from the study.

The Research

Linked here is the actual study from it’s official source. And it took me a little while to find it because at first all I could find was the ScienceDaily press release.

If you view the article, you’ll see an actual publication date of March 2012. So that press release that I mentioned was written a year after the actual article was published.

So this study did, in fact, come from Kingston University as the woman said. It was written by Andrew Clark and Yannis Georgellis, in the research journal Economica. It’s a British study. The data come from the British Household Panel Survey, and they did in fact sample about 10,000 people, as this woman had said in her video, with an age range of 16 to 60 years old. And data were collected over a 20-year period.

So, it was a longitudinal tracking study. That’s important because it’s not just a one-time study. It does give some credibility to it and its methodology.

The Measures

In the Kingston study, participants were repeatedly asked over time to rate a couple of things: their life satisfaction and their quality of life, two separate things.

The authors collected results and reported those life satisfaction and quality-of-life scores before and after major life events such as marriage and divorce, both of which we’ll have a look at in a moment. They also include other things like employment, widowhood, and having a child. So if you’re interested in those parts of the study, go ahead and download a copy from its original source.

They did all of this so that they could track within-person changes over time and not just group averages or group comparisons. It’s a very detailed long-term study.

But what we want to focus on is that the study uses two different ways to measure well-being, and they capture different things.

First, there’s a single life satisfaction question. It’s just one question where people rated how satisfied they were with their lives overall on a scale of 1 to 7. And they would be asked this question many times over a several-year, up to two-decade period.

Now that’s more of a broad reflective judgment that includes how people interpret their situations at that given time and the story that they tell themselves about their lives.

And the second item, I think is even more important. Much more important, in fact. The second item is the General Health Questionnaire 12. It’s a 12-item measure that’s been validated psychometrically, and it’s made up of multiple questions about things like stress, anxiety, mood, and daily functioning.

That one is far less about how life appears or is interpreted on paper and more about how people are actually feeling and coping day to day. So those are the two measures of interest.

Before I discuss the study findings, let me just say that what we’re talking about is baseline results over time. Think of baseline as essentially people’s normal level of well-being. And the results that I’ll discuss indicate how much better or worse people feel compared to their usual or normal selves at different points in time.

Pre/Post Marriage

The first results topic is women reporting on that one-item question about life satisfaction before, during, and after marriage.

As shown in the article, women typically start a little bit above their baseline on life satisfaction. Then, the three, two, one, zero years leading up to their marriage, their life satisfaction increases and then immediately starts to decrease after years one, two, three, four, and five.

So from that one item, women’s life satisfaction is decreasing after marriage. I know a lot of you, especially your women, are going to say, “I knew it!” But stick with me.

Next is women responding to the 12-item measure and how it relates to marriage over time. What the authors report is that it is somewhat similar to the single-item measure, although this one shows a bit of a dip the three years prior to marriage, increasing up to the year of marriage, and then again decreasing for years one, two, three, and four, then stable to year five.

Similarly, next is men’s response to that one life satisfaction question leading up to, during, and after marriage. What the authors report follows a similar pattern with women, and that it slowly increases up to and including year zero, the year of their marriage, and then decreases slightly including years one, two, three, four, and five.

As for men and their responses to that 12-item measure, results are similar, in that it steadily increases up to and including the year of marriage, decreases, but then for some reason increases a little bit at year four. And then it continues to decrease again.

So far all of this shows that for both men and women leading up to their marriage year on both the well-being and life satisfaction measures, both are increasing a little bit until the year of marriage and then decreasing.

One of the main takeaways for me here is that overall marriage appears to provide a short-term boost for both men and women, with women showing a slightly stronger effect, but neither men nor women showing a lasting or long-term gain in well-being.

Pre/Post Divorce

Next is divorce results regarding those two measures, starting with women’s reports on life satisfaction. Remember, this is the one-item measure here. This is where most of the women are going to want to take their information from and report it as definitive, end-all, be-all.

What the authors report is that during the four years leading up to divorce, women’s scores are below their baseline. When the divorce happens, they are very near their baseline, and then it continues to increase their life satisfaction for years one, two, three, and four, and then flattens out at about year five.

So regarding just the one-item measure, that’s probably where the information about women being happier after divorce in that press release is coming from.

However, the authors report with the larger 12-item well-being measure, something almost entirely different. Early on, women still show scores below baseline for the four or so years leading up to divorce, and then at the year of divorce, increasing for years one, two, and three, and then after year three it declines.

In fact, what’s reported is that even at year three is when they finally get over their baseline and their well-being is better than normal, it takes women three years to get there. And when they do, it decreases substantially.

Now here’s the same thing for men. Men’s responses to the single-item life satisfaction item regarding divorce show that men’s scores on the single-item measure were below their baseline before their normal or typical life satisfaction for the four or so years leading up to the divorce. Then it increases. They reach baseline at about year two, it decreases a little bit after that, and then goes back up.

Regarding men’s responses to the 12-item measure for well-being, this one is very interesting. Here again, men were below baseline well-being for the several years leading up to divorce, and then immediately in years one, two, and three after divorce, they were above baseline.

So men’s quality of life and well-being increased substantially to well over baseline during year one, remained relatively steady for years two and three, then somehow dips below baseline a little bit for year four, and then right back up over baseline again for year five.

The Grift

I think this is really interesting and very telling because, in the women’s comments that I put at the beginning here, those women said that they were happy. It’s the best thing they’d ever done.

They’re not telling other women is that you may live with that euphoria or experience that high for a couple of years post-divorce, but many of you are going right back down to baseline and feel just like you did any other time.

It’s a short-lived two- or three-year period in which they will experience what they perceive to be a better life.

So I hope that my explanation and breakdown did well enough for you. This study often gets presented as divorce making women happier. And that’s exactly what we saw in that press release and what the women on TikTok promote.

As for the woman who mentioned the Kingston study, she also had this to say in her TikTok video…

They found that women were happier and more satisfied with their lives after divorce. So why is this? It said women are more likely than men to seek help for the emotional trauma caused by divorce. Not reaching out for support prolongs your suffering. It also mentions that women are more likely than men to surround themselves with a positive support system. PS. If you’re a woman who needs a support system, come join my private support group.

So, she obviously did not read the study. And then she wants to sell her post-divorce services based on this study that she didn’t read, even saying that support helps women to get past those issues…… when no, this study doesn’t say that at all.

What the authors reported is much more nuanced. It’s relative to people’s own averages. We’re talking about those baselines over a full 20-year window, which includes averages and declines leading to divorce. Think of the baseline again as averages across an entire 20-year data set, including leading up to and immediately after other events.

We don’t even have any context for how other things are affecting this as well. As I mentioned, having children and unemployment may be a factor.

So overall, it doesn’t necessarily mean higher than early-marriage happiness. In fact, it’s all temporary, as reported. Maybe up to five years, but more likely a two-, three-, or four-year increase in women’s life satisfaction or well-being, and then things come back down to baseline or below baseline.

This study is often cited because it’s one of the few that actually shows a temporary post-divorce increase above people’s baseline. They’re not comparing it to their life satisfaction or their well-being from five years ago or 10 years ago. But just like this study, many others have reported that yes, there is that decline, then the recovery, then a return to baseline, without actually getting above baseline.

So the clean takeaway is that the Kingston University study did not just find that women recover after divorce. It found that, on average, women report a temporary increase in life satisfaction above their usual level for a few years after divorce. But that increase is relative to a long-term average that includes the decline leading up to divorce, and it tends to fade over time rather than representing a permanent improvement. Things always come back to baseline.

Commentary

So, what those women in the videos said really lines up much more with short-term emotional framing than with what the research actually shows.

In the Kingston study, both men and women experienced a drop in well-being leading up to divorce and their recovery afterward. In fact, I think the most meaningful result is men recovering from divorce much more quickly and with much better results. But eventually they both come back down to their baseline.

When information in TikTok videos like those women I quoted gets circulated, it becomes an appealing narrative for women. And that narrative is that divorce is a clear path to having a better life.

And then if we add in personal testimonies from women who are right at that early post-divorce stage, when relief and optimism are highest and they’re getting validation and support from everybody around them, it creates a powerful but incomplete picture that feels like evidence, even though it’s really just a snapshot in time. It doesn’t last long.

When those messages are repeated across videos and multiple platforms, and even support communities and services that are being marketed to women, it functions far less like information and more like cultural reinforcement.

Collectively, that combination of oversimplified study claims, emotionally charged personal stories, and group validation can make divorce seem like a broadly beneficial move rather than a complex, high-risk life transition with very mixed outcomes.

And all of this shapes expectations and decision-making; especially for women who are already dissatisfied and expect things to be better for the rest of their lives. But the data just don’t support it. They don’t bear that out.

So the result is not just individual choices. It’s a broader narrative, as I mentioned, that can normalize women leaving marriages based on partial evidence and short-term experiences, while at the same time downplaying the longer-term realities that the research actually shows.

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· Support / bonus content: Patreon

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