I understand young men are angry, but demonising women is a spectacular own goal

International Women’s Day is becoming a daring affair. This year, companies that celebrate it risk incurring the wrath of the US president and those who surround him. With many claiming that women’s rights have gone too far, masculinity is being reasserted across the world – but the truth is, the work to make women equal to men is far from finished.

The revival of masculinity started as a political move. In 2021, Senator Josh Hawley dedicated his entire speech at the Republican Convention to the idea that values like honesty, courage, and nobility are masculine values – and that we should educate boys in them. Considering that these are also values held by many women, his argument came as a shock. But Hawley and other Trump supporters struck gold with their demonisation of the feminine. Quickly, this became part of their appeal to disaffected young men who had previously not voted for them or had not voted at all.

The idea of masculinity being under threat has now spread everywhere, fuelled by podcasts, social media, and the “bros” – not just the tech bros, but also their more extreme outriders in the financial and venture capital world. The promotion of masculine “qualities” has become endemic, but in truth, the bros and the young men who follow them often have little in common.

Sometimes, their interests are even diametrically opposed. For example, many of the technological advances that the tech bros are financing and pushing for, such as driverless cars, will result in even fewer jobs for working-class young men. Yet they are united in one important way: a sense of victimhood – the feeling that society has treated them unfairly and that they are not being valued enough.

It is difficult to understand how men who have everything could possibly feel such self-pity. However, it is easier to see why many young working-class men feel like victims. They are struggling in countries where basic manufacturing jobs are disappearing. They feel undervalued after a decade of so-called woke politics, which has too often pigeonholed them en masse as “perpetrators” and labelled them “people of privilege” – even when they have none.

The most frustrating aspect of this kind of rhetoric is that it has provoked a strong masculine counterreaction to a movement that did not truly help women in the first place. Because so much progressive “woke” politics became distracted by narratives and language – focusing on what we call things rather than how things actually are – women are paying a huge price for the appearance of progress rather than progress itself.

The numbers do not lie. Women still lack sufficient access to positions of power, whether in politics or business: look at the governments of most countries and the executive teams of major companies, and you will see mostly men.

Women continue to pay a career penalty for motherhood that men do not pay for fatherhood. Women are still underrepresented in many sectors – crucially in the high-paying fields of financial services and technology. Women persistently remain below 20 per cent in the top tiers of almost any profession.

Women continue to see their basic human rights violated in many countries, without the international community taking meaningful action. And in every single country in the world – from El Salvador to Norway – women still dedicate more time to children, the home, and other caring responsibilities than men. This inequality affects everything else. Yet, almost without exception, governments pretend that this problem has nothing to do with them or the productivity of their countries.

In an effort to help the next generation, 10 years ago I launched the charity Inspiring Girls. We have worked with girls and young women across the world. We now operate in 40 countries, and wherever we go, we continue to see girls losing their self-confidence during adolescence. They drop subjects and sports because they believe they are “not for girls”, and they struggle to envision a future where they can make choices freely, without the weight of gender stereotypes.

So, if young working-class boys and men are struggling too, let’s help them. Let’s push governments to create training programmes, mentoring schemes, and reshape education to focus on the skills needed for the future. And it is not only governments that should step in – men, particularly those with means, should mirror the work we are doing with girls to ensure that all boys have access to positive role models and support.

But helping these young men cannot justify reversing progress on equality for women and girls. Supporting young men should not come at the expense of the rights of women and girls – especially when so much remains to be achieved.

If you would like to be a role model for Inspiring Girls or hear more about the work they do, visit the website